European Union Bill

Debate between Lord Blackwell and Lord Brittan of Spennithorne

Tuesday 3rd May 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Brittan of Spennithorne]

I am not making any statement about whether or not any particular provision was codification. I am talking about the correct interpretation of this provision in this Bill with regard to the future, which determines whether or not a referendum is called on the question. The test is an objective one: whether what occurs in future amounts to a codification, however it has been achieved, or goes beyond a codification and involves a change in the law. It is as simple as that.

[Lord Blackwell]

This is the one amendment this evening with which I confess that I have some sympathy. My interpretation of Clause 4(4)(a) is that it talks about the codification of practice under an existing competence. It does not talk about the codification of an existing competence but the codification of practice. As my noble friend Lord Waddington said, the EU has a history of stretching the practice of exercises of competence to take on ways of applying it that may not have originally been envisaged by those who agreed to the competence in the treaty. The example burnt in my mind is the notorious use of the health and safety provision to legislate from the EU on UK employment law a decade or so ago.

[Lord Brittan of Spennithorne]

I assure my noble friend that whether or not that is a good thing or a bad thing—I have a lot of sympathy with the view that excesses happened there—by no wild stretch of the imagination could that be described in English law, and we are in the process of creating a British statute, as codification. It might be wonderful; it might be disastrous; it might be neither; but it is not codification and therefore the provision would not apply.

[Lord Blackwell]

I said that I had some sympathy with the amendment, and I very much hope that the Minister will be able to reassure me. To my mind, that was an example of a practice coming into effect which could then be claimed was an existing practice that simply needed to be codified. I am not a lawyer, but if something can be done under an existing competence, why does it need to be codified? The EU already has the power to do what it needs. If something is then codified, the danger is that it creates a new base, or ratchets up the base, from which we can then have further ingenious development in practices. I am therefore very nervous about allowing codification of this sort to take place when, if the EU is already doing it, codification does not seem to be needed. I would very much welcome the Minister explaining and perhaps thinking again about whether that exemption is required in the Bill.