European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

Debate between Baroness McIntosh of Pickering and Baroness Bowles of Berkhamsted

Committee: 5th sitting (Hansard - continued): House of Lords
Wednesday 7th March 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness McIntosh of Pickering (Con)]

My Lords, I am most grateful to speak to Amendment 81, which for these purposes is joined with Amendments 95, 96, 100, 227C and 244. I see that the noble Lord, Lord Bassam, is not in his place. I would be interested to hear the content of the other amendments, but they seem to make very positive noises that there should be no increase in legislative burdens on individuals in businesses; that we should not exceed what is essential and not impose greater burdens; and that the Government should seek to make only technical changes and not to change policy materially.

I speak specifically to Amendment 81, which relates to deficiencies arising from withdrawal from the EU and considered in this group. The difficulty that I have with the wording as it stands in Clause 7(4) is partly because it contains a double negative and does not seem to be plain English, saying,

“retained EU law is not deficient merely because it does not contain any modification of EU law”—

and so it goes on. So partly the amendment is to express what is clearly meant, to seek greater clarity, but it also goes to the timing of the laws deemed to be deficient.

I think that it was my noble and learned friend Lord Mackay of Clashfern who said earlier that it was for Parliament to veto any statutory instrument put forward by government through the normal procedures of negative or affirmative resolution. Someone else in an earlier debate said that it should be the right of Parliament to be able to scrutinise amendments that fall under this clause—and, I would argue, particularly under Clause 7(4). So the question really to the Minister is to ask, if there is to be this scrutiny, at what stage this scrutiny would take place. My understanding is that the Minister is going to be able to act before Brexit to be able to prevent a deficiency from arising. My question is at what stage that would be and how Parliament will have the opportunity to scrutinise that. Also, if failure of retained EU law is a type of deficiency, and a failure means that the law does not operate effectively, we have already established that deficiency could cover a wider range of cases where it does not function appropriately or sensibly. Guidance as to who will actually decide what the deficiency is and when it will apply will be extremely helpful.

I mentioned at the outset that subsection (4) is not immediately clear. One turns to the Explanatory Notes and particularly paragraph 120, which says:

“Subsection (4) provides that the retained EU law in the UK is not deficient just because the EU subsequently makes changes to the law in the EU after the UK has left, or planned changes come into effect after exit. The law is being preserved and converted as it was immediately before exit day. The EU might go on to make changes to its law but those subsequent changes and the consequent divergence between UK and EU law do not by themselves automatically make the UK law deficient”.


I am not sure that this entirely clarifies the situation, nor does paragraph 116, relating to the earlier subsection (2). I want to probe the Minister to perhaps tease out what is the legislative deficiency, whether there is more than one stage at which it can apply, and who actually decides. If it is the Executive, at what stage can Parliament call them to account to scrutinise that? I hope that, in summing up on Amendment 81, the Minister can clarify, to create greater legal certainty, the legal basis for the functional restriction—where this is contained in a directive and therefore not retained or transposed into domestic law—to be described as a deficiency.

[Baroness Bowles of Berkhamsted]

My Lords, I speak only to Amendment 227C, just to say that this is a sort of “double omnibus” amendment in that it covers the whole Bill and also puts together, in its proposed new paragraphs from (e) onwards, some ideas about how to address in a generic way some of the concerns that other noble Lords have expressed in what I call the “Thou shalt not” clauses. Clearly, we cannot go through the Lobbies 20 times to deal with them all but, if this kind of formulation is adopted, we could achieve something that was both votable and covered a lot of the common ground that there appears to be when looking at other amendments, many of which will be spoken to later. I will limit my comments to that for now.