Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill

Lord Frost Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 6th February 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Frost (Con)]

My Lords, I am delighted to have the chance at last to speak again on one of my favourite subjects: getting rid of retained EU law from our statute book and supporting the Bill. It is also a pleasure to speak straight after the noble Baroness, Lady Chapman; I very much enjoyed our discussions across the Dispatch Box in 2021, but I am also glad that her undoubted eloquence, of which we have just heard another sample, and her untiring efforts have not yet succeeded in slowing the progress towards getting rid of the effect of EU law in this country.

I make that point because the immediate origins of the Bill lie in decisions I took as a Minister in 2021. But the real origins obviously go much further back: they are part of the logic of delivering a meaningful Brexit in which we have extricated ourselves properly and fully from the EU legal framework, and of the vision on which this party won an election in 2019.

We know the situation: we have on our statute book virtually all the laws we took on in the period of EU membership, thanks to the 2018 withdrawal Act. This came with all the related interpretative concepts: the supremacy of EU law, ECJ jurisprudence and so on. We even upgraded those laws to the status of primary legislation and prevented British courts from reinterpreting EU law doctrines. The effect has been to create a defined body of law, with its own concepts and rules, within the UK statute book. Obviously, such an arrangement can only be provisional; it can only ever be a “short-term bridging measure”, as I described it in a Statement in December 2021.

When it passes, the Bill will bring that situation to an end. It is the product of the work that began in 2021, when I announced that the Government would conduct a review that would start the process of removing the special status of retained EU and reviewing its content comprehensively. That review is complete, and the corpus of law is known. The Bill gives Ministers the necessary powers not only to deal with law on the statute book but to remove interpretive principles, such as those in Clause 4 of the 2018 Act. It is worth dwelling on that point: it is not even clear what law was retained by that clause, as has been noted. It simply enables lawyers to say, “Whatever the law was before, it now is afterwards”—and we cannot live with that sort of uncertainty on our statute book.

Getting this right is necessary to make Brexit work properly. It may be that some noble Lords in this Chamber opposed Brexit and do not want it to work—

[Noble Lords]

Oh!

[Lord Frost (Con)]

I know it is hard to believe. I would understand their opposition to the Bill. But noble Lords who profess to accept Brexit surely must accept the logic of the Bill. It makes no sense for this whole body of rules with special status to remain in place on our statute book for a prolonged period. Practically, our lawyers, judges and civil servants cannot deal with two separate statute books, with completely different interpretive principles and case law. We must find a way of changing this and assimilating these laws into our legal system, adjusting and redrafting as necessary.

I recognise that some critics of the Bill will say, “We accept that, but the pace and the process are the problem”. Responding to that, I point to the nature of the powers that will be granted, the criticism of which has been absurdly exaggerated. They are targeted at a specific set of laws, and they exclude any powers to deal with the fundamentals of primary legislation; they are about secondary legislation changing secondary legislation. I cannot see the difficulty with this. It is relevant that this legislation was passed by a body outside this country, often against the opposition of this Government.

To finish, these inherited EU laws have little real legitimacy now that we have left the system that created them. We cannot leave them there for decades while we get around to passing endless primary legislation to replace laws that never came in in that way in the first place.

[Baroness Bloomfield of Hinton Waldrist (Con)]

The noble Lord really must draw his comments to a close.

[Lord Frost (Con)]

I will do. We lived for 47 years under a system in which we did not control our own laws. The Bill is not only necessary and essential; it is unavoidable and part of the logic of Brexit. I look forward to supporting it now and in Committee.