Scotland's Vision for Trade: annual report - October 2024

Areas for collaborative working with the UK Government

Building a constructive relationship between the UK Government and the devolved nations will bring added benefits and inform cohesive trade policy making, thereby representing the interests of all the nations of the United Kingdom. The Scottish Government is committed to working collaboratively with the newly-elected UK Government on a wide range of trade policy aspects of importance to Scotland. In particular, we would welcome closer collaboration in the following areas:

Trade Strategy

We welcome the UK Government’s commitment to publish a UK trade strategy which aligns with their industrial strategy, and offer our support and input into its development. We believe that the strategy should go beyond the negotiation of FTAs, and consider a range of levers to improve the trading environment within the context of a clear economic strategy. This could also adopt a values-based approach to guide the navigation of competing priorities, such as balancing short-term market access gains against longer term economic, social and environmental goals. To inform this, we have an open offer to the UK Government to share our experience of developing and implementing a trade strategy, Scotland’s Vision for Trade.

Trade Negotiations

Following the UK Government’s statement in the House of Commons on 29 July 2024 about resuming FTA negotiations with the Gulf Cooperation Council, India, Israel, Republic of Korea, Switzerland and Türkiye, we would welcome ongoing discussions between the UK Government and the devolved nations about FTA negotiations and the role of devolved Parliaments and stakeholders in this process.^[1]

The Scottish Government is supportive of the UK Government undertaking full and comprehensive sustainability impact assessments of all ongoing and future FTA negotiations. These impact assessments should include consideration of a broad range of issues and groups, including impacts on women, ethnic minorities and other protected characteristic groups, greater data disaggregation for Scotland and other UK nations and consideration or modelling of transitional and short-term impacts of the agreement.

WTO

We support a positive UK stance towards the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the rules-based multilateral system and would welcome opportunities to increase the involvement of devolved administrations in the development of UK positions.

Winners and losers from trade

The benefits of international trade are not equally distributed throughout society. The Scottish Government is undertaking work to better identify and address any distributional impacts of trade. We would welcome working collaboratively on this. This could include the UK Government providing access to disaggregated data on the impacts of trade in Scotland. It could also include working collaboratively to address any differential impacts of trade, such as measures to address the gender export gap.

Trade, climate and human rights

The Scottish Government’s position is that trade should be used as a lever to increase progress towards climate ambitions. Our position is also that human rights should be a central consideration in trade policy. For this reason, we strongly support the inclusion of human rights and climate by the UK Government as key considerations in all trade negotiations. In particular, we look forward to working together on measures to support our green economy.

EU relationship and the Trade and Cooperation Agreement

We also look forward to working collaboratively to support the newly-elected government’s resolve to build a better relationship with the European Union. This includes its ambition to seek a UK-EU Veterinary and Sanitary & Phytosanitary Agreement, improvements to the mutual recognition of professional qualifications and improvements for touring artists. As part of this, the UK Government could also consider seeking a mutual recognition agreement for conformity assessment bodies.

Border Target Operating Model

We support urgent progress on co-designing the regime of import controls for goods from Ireland and Northern Ireland entering into the west coast and will willingly work with the UK Government on this issue.