Product Safety and Metrology etc. (Amendment etc.) (EU Exit) Regulations 2019

Debate between Baroness Burt of Solihull and Earl of Lindsay

Monday 4th March 2019 Grand Committee

[The Earl of Lindsay (Con)]

My Lords, like the noble Baroness, Lady Crawley, I am a vice-president of the Chartered Trading Standards Institute. The other interest I declare—as it is pertinent to the remarks I want to make—is my chairmanship of the government-appointed national accreditation body, the United Kingdom Accreditation Service, or UKAS. In that role, I welcome the work that has gone into this statutory instrument in respect to the transposition of the EU regulation on accreditation. I also welcome the consultative approach taken by BEIS and the Office for Product Safety and Standards with UKAS and other relevant stakeholders and the engagement surrounding that consultation. Like the noble Baroness, Lady Donaghy, I thank the Minister and his officials for the briefing we were offered on this statutory instrument.

I recognise that transposing EU regulations to make them operable under UK law necessitates some changes. None the less, the reassurance that there has been no change to government policy is important. Therefore, UKAS is generally supportive of the way that the accreditation regulations have been transposed. We are reassured by the Government’s continuing commitment to maintaining the United Kingdom’s regulatory standards for product safety and the conformity assessment activities required for demonstrating compliance. We welcome the fact that UKAS’s position as the sole national accreditation body has been retained.

However, there are one or two potentially negative impacts from the amendments to EU Regulation 765/2008, the accreditation and market surveillance regulation amendment. My one question today relates to what measures are in place to prevent a competitive and possibly profit-driven rather than a not-for-profit accreditation market developing for United Kingdom-based conformity assessment bodies. Have the Government considered what else they might do to safeguard UKAS’s position as a not-for-profit national accreditation body and to prevent other accreditation bodies offering accreditation in the United Kingdom?

[Baroness Burt of Solihull (LD)]

My Lords, I add my thanks to the Minister for conducting a consultation on this “minor” piece of legislation last week and for his explanatory letter to the noble Lord, Lord Fox, which has been passed on to me. However, after the meeting last week I have rather more questions now than I had in the first place.

In the event of a no-deal Brexit, this SI creates a new independent regime for checking product conformity, initially mirroring EU product-safety standards. The Government have combined 38 measures into one, creating a piece of legislation over 600 pages long. The concerns that I outlined at the meeting—which were subsequently outlined by the noble Baroness, Lady Crawley, as well—regarding the breadth of industries and the number of sectors covered by this instrument remain. It makes it difficult for Parliament to read and scrutinise let alone those organisations to which it actually applies. Any company, small or otherwise, looking at this piece of legislation would be daunted, and I do not accept the argument that the repetition over all the different sectors covered will be reassuring and ensure consistency of treatment between different areas, as was mentioned at the meeting last week.

I also do not think that the 241,000 businesses which will be covered by this instrument will thank the Government for making them wade through so much paperwork to find what they need. Surely one of the fundamental principles of a democratic society is that people should be able to know what the law is and easily understand how it applies to them. Today’s SI has the potential to undermine that principle.

We know that there is a premium on time before 29 March, and we certainly have plenty of SIs to get through, but the Government could have laid each of the measures separately and then grouped them together in smaller debates. Companies, and consumers, will not thank them for this tombstone of an SI.

At the meeting last week, I also raised the costs of implementation, which have been calculated at a total of £25 million. The analysis and evidence summary talks of a corporate manager or director taking an average of three hours to familiarise themselves with the new legislation. The £25 million is supposed to cover an estimated £54 billion-worth of GVA and £63 billion-worth of goods from our exporters to other EU countries, with about £104 billion imported from EU countries.

The impact assessment does not include the wider impact caused by the separation of the UK and EU product safety regimes. It is surely here where the biggest costs to businesses of a damaging no-deal Brexit would lie. No assessment that I can see is made of the cost of relabelling products—removing the old CE marker and substituting the new UKCA one. The manufacturers’ organisation Make UK told the BBC that,

“thousands of companies are going to have to spend millions of pounds collectively on changing all their markings to comply with the new mark”.

It does not include the cost to British exporters of having to seek approval from two notifying bodies: one based in the UK and one based on the EU.

My first question is: what assessment have the Government made of those costs to UK businesses and what knock-on effect will they have on consumer prices? Is this not another reason why the UK would be foolish to leave on 29 March without a deal? That is a rhetorical question: the Minister and I both know the answer to it.

My second question, to which I would appreciate an answer, regards the impact of a no-deal Brexit on our 176 notified bodies operating in the UK which provide more than 4,000 jobs between them. If the EU does not allow UKCA-marked products to be sold in the EU, there will be no incentive for foreign manufacturers to have their products certified in the UK. They will go to an EU-notified body to receive the CE mark and then import the products into the UK. Does the Minister agree with that assessment? In the light of it, are the Government seeking assurances from the European Commission that it would accept UKCA products in a no-deal scenario?

On the subject of the CE mark, I should like to ask a question on behalf of the charity Electrical Safety First. It is concerned that although the UK Government have created their own mark, it will not be a consumer mark widely recognised by the public. What plans do the Government have to raise awareness of the new mark among consumers? What are the timings and what transition plans are there? Electrical Safety First would like the Government to work with it and industry to raise awareness of the UKCA. That sounds like a fair offer to me. How does the Minister respond?

Next, I should appreciate some clarification on the expiry of the CE mark. The Government have decided that they will continue to allow products imported from the EU that bear the CE mark to be sold on the UK market and that this will happen unilaterally, regardless of whether the EU agrees to allow UKCA-marked products to be sold to the EU. At the meeting with the Minister, he referred to a transition period of 18 months using the existing marks for importers, and to one of 90 days for cosmetic product imports. We discussed that earlier today. But there appears to be no sunset clause on the SI. I presume the Government will have to change the law to ban CE marked-products from being sold in the UK should they ever wish to do so. Can the Minister clarify whether that is correct?

Finally, I will mention market surveillance. The UK will lose access to RAPEX—the EU’s rapid alert system—and ICSMS, the Information and Communication System on Market Surveillance, which we will replace with our own databases for market surveillance and public protection to help remove unsafe or non-compliant products from the UK market. The charity Electrical Safety First is unsurprisingly exercised about counterfeit goods as well, particularly those sold online. What plans are there to prevent more counterfeit and substandard electrical goods from being sold, particularly online, after Brexit?

I am sorry for the length of my remarks and promise to make it up to the Minister in the next SI, but this is, as I have mentioned, an inordinately long one. I appreciate that I have asked a lot of questions, so will the Minister undertake to write to me on any he may not manage to answer today?