Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill

Alexander Stafford Excerpts

Report stage
Wednesday 18th January 2023 Commons Chamber

[Ms Ghani]

The hon. Lady has got the meme for her Facebook page. Unfortunately, she wholly misrepresents what the Bill is doing. Environmental standards will be maintained or enhanced. At the moment, the laws that come down from Brussels on the environment and land cover everything from the Arctic to the Mediterranean. This Bill is a great opportunity to maintain, to enhance and to review what more we can do to make things better for our environment across the UK. We already have flagship legislation in place: the Environment Act 2021, the Fisheries Act 2020 and the Agriculture Act 2020. The Office for Environmental Protection has been fully established to enforce those elevated environmental rules and standards. The water framework directive covers our water. Instead of misrepresenting what the Bill does, why not take the opportunity to ensure that we enhance provision for what we are not maintaining?

[Alexander Stafford (Rother Valley) (Con)]

Listening to the Opposition, we might think that the EU is the land of milk and honey when it comes to the environment. This is the same EU that put fossil fuels and gas in last year’s green taxonomy. Getting out of the EU allows us to have our own taxonomies and to make far greener efforts than naming gas as a green technology, which it is not.

[Ms Ghani]

We can make sure that we have a better focus on renewables, and we can take the decisions that work best for our communities. Fundamentally, we are maintaining and enhancing. We must not forget that the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has been able to introduce substantial law on water, animals and land. I have covered the dashboard, and I assume colleagues will now be pouncing on it.

Departments have been actively working on their retained EU law reform plans for well over 18 months to ensure that appropriate action is taken before the sunset date. Additional work to lift obsolete laws will inevitably be slow, but that work will continue. We cannot allow the reform of retained EU law to remain merely a possibility. The sunset provision guarantees that retained EU law will not become an ageing relic dragging down the UK. It incentivises the genuine review and reform of retained EU law in a way that works best for the UK. What reforms are desirable will differ from policy area to policy area.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Watford (Dean Russell), the then Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, said on Second Reading, the environment is one of the Government’s top priorities. We will ensure that environmental law works for the UK and improves our environmental outcomes. As I said, we will be maintaining and enhancing. The Bill does not change the Environment Act, and we remain committed to delivering our legally binding target to halt nature’s decline by 2030.

--- Later in debate ---

[Justin Madders]

I will go on to explain why that deadline is inappropriate and, indeed, impractical.

The Government are using the Bill as a motivational tool. That message has not got through to DEFRA, which, as we know, is considered to be the Department with the most regulations, although, of course, until we see a definitive list, we cannot know that for sure. At the moment, according to the Secretary of State, there are probably about 1,100 regulations in DEFRA that are subject to the sunset. I will not get into whether the word “about” is good enough in this context, but the number of civil servants that we have been told are working on this in that Department is three. It is no good this Bill being used as a way of focusing Departments’ minds if they do not have the resources to do the job properly in the first place.

This is a serious issue. The House of Lords Common Frameworks Scrutiny Committee even complained about a lack of engagement from that Department after not receiving a response from it to five separate letters. We know from a written ministerial answer that the Department itself does not know how much the exercise will cost or how many staff it will need. If the deadline is meant to focus attention, it has not succeeded in doing so yet.

[Alexander Stafford]

I am listening carefully to the hon. Member’s speech, especially about the timeline. My question is this: when does he want this to end. My constituents in Rother Valley voted in 2016 to leave the EU—lock, stock—not to wait. Even now, I would want to bring the deadline forward, because we should have left fully years ago. When do the Opposition and those who want to stifle our leaving want us to leave—2024, 2025, 2026 or never? I want to leave fully and utterly now.

[Justin Madders]

If people are going to intervene, they should read the Bill and the amendments, because they would see our suggestion for a deadline. Of course, as everyone else in this Chamber seems to know, we have already left the EU, so this is not about leaving the EU, but about the remaining laws.

The Regulatory Policy Committee has said that setting a deadline is not enough and that a stronger argument is needed for choosing that particular date, and we agree. What is far more convincing than the arbitrary date that we are presented with are the warnings that we have received that there is not sufficient capacity in the civil service for a genuinely effective appraisal of the regulations that the Bill seeks to remove in the timescale allowed. The case for the cliff edge is incredibly weak. The arguments for removing it and putting it on a more realistic footing are much stronger.

The potential for things to be missed is clear. If worse comes to worst and some vital regulation ceases to be law by accident and nobody notices until it is too late, our constituents will rightly ask us, “What on earth were you doing? What were you thinking of?” No wonder the impact assessment on the Bill is silent on the issue of the sunset date.

The Regulatory Policy Committee has made it clear that it believes that the analysis of that sunset date is inadequate. This is a deadline in search of a headline. Presumably, that headline will be, “Free at last”. I would suggest that a more apposite headline might be. “The sun has set on your employment rights, your consumer rights and your environmental protections.” Indeed, the sun has set on parliamentary democracy.

Overall, the Regulatory Policy Committee puts a red rating on the impact assessment of the Bill as not fit for purpose, yet here we are, ploughing on as if it will be all right on the night.