The Secretary of State for Business and Trade (Jonathan Reynolds)
Today I have laid a report regarding the Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Act 2023 before Parliament and published it on gov.uk. This report updates the House in line with the obligations under section 17 of the REUL Act, which requires a report to be published and laid before Parliament every six months detailing all revocations and reforms of assimilated law.
This is the second report to be laid before the House. While it is very early in my tenure as Secretary of State for Business and Trade, and this report outlines the activities of the previous Government, it is right that this obligation is fulfilled and this update is given to the House.
The report today summarises the data on the assimilated law dashboard, providing the public with information about the amount of assimilated law there is and where it sits across the various Departments. The dashboard reflects the position as of 23 June, showing that a total of 6,735 instruments of REUL/assimilated law concentrated over approximately 400 unique policy areas have been identified.
The amount of REUL/assimilated law has decreased slightly since the last Government’s update to the dashboard in January 2024. This is due to Departments undertaking further analysis on the REUL/assimilated law they own between January and June and identifying some errors and duplications.
Since the previous update to the dashboard the previous Government revoked or reformed 132 assimilated law instruments. As such, the previous Government revoked or reformed 2,361 instruments of REUL and assimilated law in total.
The report gives details of a further 24 statutory instruments using powers under the REUL Act and other domestic legislation which the previous Government laid since the previous report, including on rail, aviation, health, product safety, merchant shipping, and weights and measures.
The timing of this report only gives me the opportunity to set out this Government’s high-level intentions for the future reform of assimilated law. This Government are committed to creating a pro-business environment with a regulatory framework that supports innovation, investment and high-quality jobs. This will be key to realising our national mission to deliver economic growth, on which so much depends. We will ensure regulation supports the building of new roads, railways, reservoirs and other nationally significant infrastructure. We will also make changes to national planning policy to make it easier to build laboratories, digital infrastructure and gigafactories, while also simplifying the procurement process to support innovation and reduce micro-management.
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