Product Regulation and Metrology Bill [HL]

Viscount Trenchard Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 8th October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Trenchard (Con)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow my noble friend Lady Lawlor, with whose speech I find myself in full agreement. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Leong, for introducing the Bill today and congratulate him on his appointment. I much enjoyed the interesting and entertaining maiden speech by the noble Baroness, Lady Winterton of Doncaster. Your Lordships’ House will gain much from her well-informed contributions.

I was initially rather confused about the Bill’s Title and kept trying to read “metrology” as “meteorology”. As I now understand it, the Bill’s Explanatory Notes claim two distinct purposes: to ensure that the product safety and metrology regime established after we left the EU is better able to adapt to AI and better reflects the shift in what consumers buy and how they buy it. Your Lordships’ House last debated this subject when it approved the product safety and metrology regulations in May. The effect of those was to extend indefinitely the grace period given for businesses to conform to the new UKCA markings in place of the EU markings, and to permit the use of UKCA markings in cases where products have conformed with EU assessment procedures.

This Bill is completely different from the regulations that were debated at that time. It is sure to have a large impact across the UK consumer market. Products in scope of the Bill are used by every person in the country, covering nearly all manufactured products. The Government’s own estimates suggest that there are 220,000 UK businesses currently affected by product safety legislation, with an estimated market turnover of just under £280 billion. The “Policy background” section of the Explanatory Notes states:

“The Bill is intended to enable the UK to maintain high product standards … by allowing the UK Parliament the power to update relevant laws”.


I cannot see how the Bill achieves that. It is easy to see that it gives very considerable powers to the Secretary of State to do that, but that is not the same thing.

Nevertheless, I welcome the fact that the Bill addresses the growing problem of unsafe products being marketed online. Noble Lords will have noted the briefings produced by Which? and the London Fire Brigade, and good points are made in both. In particular, the dangers of fires from lithium-ion batteries in consumer products, in e-bikes and, although outside the scope of this Bill, in grid-scale projects such as the controversial Sunnica solar farm at Newmarket need to be properly regulated. I support the London Fire Brigade’s wish for the word “safety” to be included in Clause 1(1)(b). I strongly agree with my noble friend Lord Lucas in asking that the draft regulations be made available to your Lordships as soon as possible.

I am as concerned about what is excluded from the Bill as about what is included. Can the Minister explain why the Bill excludes food and SPS-related products? I can understand why it excludes aircraft, military equipment, and medicines and medical devices, but the exclusion of such a wide range of products would appear to tie the Secretary of State’s hand. How could the Government negotiate the SPS changes necessary to enter into trade agreements? Can the Minister tell the House how this would affect the USTR’s negotiating mandate for a trade agreement with the UK?

The Government have set out clearly their intention to negotiate a veterinary and SPS agreement with the EU. Can the Minister explain whether the reason that food products are specifically excluded from the Bill is that the type of agreement that the Government intend to strike with Brussels is one that requires dynamic alignment with EU regulation? As the Minister knows, there are only two types of agreement that the EU will countenance, given that returning to the customs union or the single market have both been ruled out repeatedly since the Government took office. Those two types of agreement are exemplified by the agreements that the EU has with Switzerland and New Zealand. Of these two types, does the Minister agree that our only option is a New Zealand-style agreement, providing for mutual recognition of different regulatory regimes and equivalence of outcomes? Could we not negotiate a similar agreement to that applied to medicines and medical devices, where our regulator, the MHRA, unilaterally recognises approvals given by the EU, the US, the Japanese and certain other counterparts?

Does the Minister acknowledge that to enter into dynamic alignment with the EU on SPS and food products would provide very limited benefits in return for a considerable surrender of authority and sovereignty over our SPS regime? We would not be able to do anything differently from the EU, even where it is in our national interests to do so. However, food importers would still have to deal with the extensive bureaucratic form-filling.

Can the Minister also explain how the Bill will affect existing trade agreements, since after the passage of the Bill the Government will no longer be able to control the UK’s rules? Furthermore, if the EU changes its rules in a more restrictive direction, would the law of unintended consequences apply, in that the Secretary of State would have no powers to follow suit and make similar changes to the UK’s rules?

The Minister will be aware that the UK’s accession to the CPTPP will become effective before the end of the year. My noble friends Lord Frost and Lord Lansley already referred to that. The CPTPP agreement contains good chapters on SPS and on regulatory coherence. Regulatory practice should be based on sound science. This agreement assumes that all partners to the agreement can exercise sovereign powers over their own regimes. Article 2 of Chapter 24 states that the parties affirm the importance of

“each Party’s sovereign right to identify its regulatory priorities and establish and implement regulatory measures to address these priorities”.

If, under the Government’s plans, we are to lose authority over our own rules, does the Minister not agree that we would be open to sanctions brought against us by other CPTPP members and would be required to negotiate under the partnership’s dispute settlement process? Surely we would be at risk of losing the benefits that we would enjoy as a partner to the agreement.

Is this not also a problem for products that are covered by the Bill? Clause 2(7) seems to indicate that a product requirement will be “treated as met” if it conforms to EU law, whether or not the EU law may have diverged from its previous alignment with UK law. My noble friend Lady Lawlor also referred to this.

I hope the Minister will agree that it is essential that the Secretary of State must retain sovereign powers over all UK rules. That would enable him to be able to choose whether a particular EU rule is or is not in the UK’s interests. If the Secretary of State does not have that power, would it not have profoundly damaging effects on the UK’s trade policy? Would it not also damage the UK’s capacity to improve its regulatory system in the SPS area through taking advantage of technological advances in areas such as gene editing?

Clause 11 explains which powers can be exercised by the Secretary of State under regulations subject to the affirmative procedure and which shall be subject to the negative procedure. It seems fair enough that authority to enter premises should be made subject to the affirmative procedure. Authority to seize products is not subject to the affirmative procedure, but it is hard to understand how products can be seized without entry to premises where the products are held.

I look forward to working with other noble Lords in seeking to improve the Bill in its future stages and to hearing the Minister’s winding-up speech.