Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill

Debate between Lord Whitty and Lord Hamilton of Epsom

Committee stage
Thursday 2nd March 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hamilton of Epsom (Con)]

My Lords, I support my noble friend in her amendment. I take the view, as the Committee well knows, that if you give the bureaucracy longer to implement all of this, it will use the time. Therefore, the shorter the time we can make it, the better.

I ask my noble friend the Minister whether he considers the fact that the sunset clause is operating at the end of this year as almost the sole reason we now know roughly how many bit of retained EU legislation there are. If the sunset clause had not been in there, I do not believe that the bureaucracy of this country—pace the noble Lord, Lord Wilson—would have come up with the answer at all.

[Lord Whitty (Lab)]

My Lords, I have Amendment 56A in this group. Noble Lords have probably gathered by now that I profoundly hope that the Bill never reaches the statute book. However, if it does, we need to know what the heck we are talking about. My Amendment 56A requires the Government, within three months of the passage of the Bill into law, to ensure that all of us here and those whom they are going to consult out there—the businesses, consumers, workers and everyone else whom the Bill may affect—know what we are talking about; namely, by providing a definitive dashboard at that point, preferably with an indication of how the Government intend to deal with different bits of the dashboard. But, in any case, it requires that they provide a “definitive list”. If we do not have that, no one will know how we will behave, whatever the deadline.

I support the deadline proposed by the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh, which is reasonable, given that we are talking about 4,000 pieces of legislation, at the last count. I do not agree with the deadline in the Bill or with extending it by only one year, as the noble Baroness, Lady Lawlor, suggested. The key point of my amendment is that the world needs to know what the Bill means, what it is about and, preferably, how the Government will deal with it. I do not think that the word “dashboard” has appeared in many pieces of legislation, but we need something based on the dashboard as it is currently. Noble Lords who have tried to use it will have found it rather difficult and certainly not yet definitive. So we are giving the civil servants—I can go along with the noble Lord, Lord Hamilton, on this to some extent—three months from the passage of the Bill to produce a definitive list of what we are talking about, and we need that.

European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

Debate between Lord Whitty and Lord Hamilton of Epsom

Committee: 6th sitting (Hansard - continued): House of Lords
Monday 12th March 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Whitty (Lab)]

My Lords, I shall make a brief broader point. For all the reasons we heard from the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, and the noble Lord, Lord Bilimoria, I strongly support the objectives of these amendments. So, apparently, does the Prime Minister, judging from her speech last week. Is the reality not that it is also in the interests of all the airlines, the aerospace industry and the airfreight industry across the whole of Europe to retain the present situation? Was that not obvious from day one of Brexit discussions? Why did the Government’s negotiating strategy not recognise that this was one deal which we could have done very quickly and very clearly which would not have interfered with any of the rest of the negotiations and one which almost the rest of Europe would have greatly welcomed? There would have been no cries of “kein Rosinenpickerei”—“no cherry-picking” —from Europe on this one. A bit of common sense at the beginning of these negotiations would have parked aviation. We would have agreed aviation.

[Lord Hamilton of Epsom (Con)]

Was it not the EU that said that nothing was agreed until everything was agreed?

[Lord Whitty]

It was both the EU and Mr Davis and they were both wrong because in all negotiations whenever you enter negotiations you agree some things and you then park them. We could have agreed this. It is ridiculous that airlines are now faced with selling tickets in three weeks’ time not knowing whether they can deliver on them. I just make that more general point because the Minister keeps saying it is all down to the negotiations, but the negotiations went wrong from day one, and this is one example where we could have delivered something, albeit it would need to be part of a total package at the end of the day.