Product Regulation and Metrology Bill [HL]

Baroness Lawlor Excerpts

Report stage
Wednesday 5th March 2025 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Baroness Lawlor]

21: Clause 2, page 3, line 37, at end insert—
“(7A) Any regulations under subsection (7) which specify a relevant foreign law must specify that the foreign law referred to is that which is in application on a particular date, which must be specified.”Member's explanatory statement
This prevents the Bill enabling ambulatory references or dynamic alignment to relevant foreign laws, but only to laws as they stand on a particular and defined date.

[Baroness Lawlor (Con)]

I wish to test the opinion of the House.

--- Later in debate ---

Moved by

[Baroness Lawlor]

43A: After Clause 8, insert the following new Clause—
“Report: scientific evidence(1) When making regulations under this Act, the Secretary of State must publish a report indicating whether the regulation is supported by any scientific evidence.(2) The Secretary of State must lay the report published under subsection (1) before both Houses of Parliament.”

[Baroness Lawlor (Con)]

My Lords, in moving my Amendment 43A, I of course support the amendments from my noble friends Lord Sharpe and Lord Frost in this group, to one of which I have added my name. My amendment would require the Government to place before Parliament a report on whether scientific—which includes technical—evidence supports a regulation covered by the Bill, because assessment of risk and for safety should be based on objective evidence, technical and scientific.

The regulations for sanitary and phytosanitary, SPS, explicitly mention scientific evidence, whereas reference to science is not typically found in regulations on technical barriers to trade, or in the chapters in FTAs. They are often implied by wording: for example, a requirement that regulations on risk are based on documented and objective evidence. For international trade agreements, such evidence is assumed. Either our goods conform with internationally agreed standards or, if they derogate, they should draw on scientific and technical evidence to show that they conform to an agreed standard. There are good reasons for this.

Such objective evidence and assessment is not only needed to assess risk objectively but is implied in the WTO framework, on which many trade agreements are based. They have to be WTO-compliant. The WTO’s own Agreement on Technical Barriers to Trade, TBT, requires that, where appropriate, parties

“specify technical regulations based on product requirements in terms of performance rather than design or descriptive characteristics”,

one aim being to ensure that regulations, standards, testing and certification procedures followed by WTO members do not create “unnecessary obstacles” to trade. That is certainly one of this country’s enduring free trade objects.

My amendment would promote a number of benefits and aims. It would help to focus attention on real risk, on the basis of provable evidence and that alone. It would make for transparency: those who produce, market or buy a product could know where they stand and trust the measures assessing risk. It would avoid saddling producers and consumers with costs for unnecessary, overburdensome obligations that result from the political attempt to tie the UK to unproven regulations, which may flout WTO international trade law, to protect their own products against competition from another trading partner.

In products, the contents of which may include some agricultural content, it will help the UK to keep its eye on the evidence and purpose. I commend my noble friend Lord Sharpe’s amendment, which would specifically require that a statement on the need and purpose for such regulations be made. I have already mentioned one example in Committee, which is the difference between UK REACH and EU REACH regulations. The stated purpose is vital to the difference in how one is more burdensome than the other.

My amendment would also reflect the way the UK has moved to make the most of international trade opportunities in our trade treaties, with, for example, the CPTPP. The UK can help shape these, as a leader of the oldest rules-based international trade order, while trading globally as one of the world’s oldest and most successful free-trade economies. Above all, it would avoid obliging businesses to follow the EU’s code-based precautionary principle. That may be unrelated to evidence and often driven by officials, while being costly to producers and raising prices sky-high for consumers, making some countries uncompetitive in world markets and the product not safer but, in many instances, less safe. I therefore beg to move.

[Lord Frost (Con)]

My Lords, Amendment 56 stands in my name. As it is, I guess, the last time that I will speak on this Bill, perhaps I may use the opportunity to join others in saying thank you to the Ministers for the willingness they have shown to meet us and to show flexibility on parts of the Bill, even if that flexibility has possibly been more evident on its more marginal and peripheral aspects than on the core provisions, which matter so much to us. I thank them anyway for it.

One of those core provisions, which we have debated at length, is of course Clause 2(7), which creates the power to align UK legislation with EU law. My Amendment 56 would ensure that the affirmative parliamentary procedure applied to such secondary legislation under that provision. This is important, as the procedure of legislating by cross-reference to the laws of another entity is certainly, to borrow terminology from another sphere, novel and contentious. Therefore, if it happens—I am sure it is going to happen and probably quite a lot, I fear—it really ought to do so only consciously and according to a procedure that gives both of this Parliament’s Houses the maximum powers to be aware that it is happening and to influence it to the maximum possible. Of course, that is what the affirmative procedure is about. I hope that, even at this late stage, the Ministers might look favourably on this amendment in the interests of respecting the rights and powers of this Parliament.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Leong (Lab)]

My Lords, like I say, I really do not want to repeat what we debated last week, but the whole purpose of where we are today is to give us the freedom either to diverge from or to mirror any regulation, particularly product regulation, as most of it comes from the European Union. Either we follow it, or we do not—that is the freedom that we have.

As I said, I am aware that we have Third Reading still to come but, as we approach the end of Report, I thank all noble Lords for their contributions. It will probably come as no surprise that, for the reasons that I outlined earlier, I ask for the amendment to be withdrawn.

[Baroness Lawlor (Con)]

I beg leave to withdraw Amendment 43A.

Amendment 43A withdrawn.