Detergents (Amendment) (EU Exit) Regulations 2019

Debate between Baroness McIntosh of Pickering and Lord Addington

Wednesday 13th March 2019 Grand Committee

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, I sympathise with Ministers who have to deal with so many similar- sounding regulations; when you pick them up and look at them you are not quite sure which one you are looking at—in this case there is a variation of one word between the two of them. When I came to look at them, I thought they sound reasonably sensible overall, but one or two things came out. The Minister has touched on them already, but I will ask her to expand a little.

The Minister said that this would be a minimal expansion for the Health and Safety Executive. What exactly does that mean in this context? Is it a large expansion or just occasional greater activity? We need to know whether the executive has that capacity and whether it can do this when it happens. The last sentence of the report of the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee Sub-Committee B asks what will happen when it loses the EU’s reporting capacity and information exchange. The Government responded, “This happens only occasionally, so don’t worry”. You would expect, if the system is at all sensible, that anything to do with safeguarding will happen only very occasionally. If the system was so flawed that you needed to use it frequently, one would hope that you would change the entire system. We need to hear something about how we are going to do this. You are not regulating something that is happening all the time—this happens when something goes wrong. A very minor variation is coming in here. Ingredients which are normally used are normally safe; in this case something has gone wrong, or some threat happens. That is a genuine concern, because you are not dealing with the everyday.

I would like a little more information about how that is to work, and on why, for instance, the 90-day period was chosen as the length of time within which it is appropriate to take action. Can we have some more information on that just to put our minds at rest? It is nothing to do with the mechanical process, but about something that has gone wrong: therefore it has to be able to respond, and quickly, and only very occasionally—a gap of decades is quite possible here. Can we find out how that will work, and make sure that that capacity is there? At the moment, the statement, “It hasn’t happened very often so let’s not worry about it”, is worrying. It could be read in that way; perhaps that is too blunt a way of interpreting it, but I hope that we can have something to reassure us that this capacity is available. If it is never needed, that is great, but it should be there.

[Baroness McIntosh of Pickering (Con)]

My Lords, I welcome the regulations and congratulate my noble friend on moving them. I echo the concern that was raised in the 18th report of the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee Sub-Committee B: these echo my earlier remarks to the Minister, my noble friend Lord Henley, when he was talking about a similar statutory instrument a week or two ago, and I thank him for his letter. My noble friend Lord Gardiner was also kind enough to refer to comments about RASSF relating to food safety. I associate myself with comments from the Liberal Democrat Benches as well.