Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill

Claire Hanna Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 25th October 2022 Commons Chamber

[Claire Hanna (Belfast South) (SDLP)]

As other Members have outlined, this Bill should not be before us. The chaos that has characterised the Government’s past few months has distracted from the scale and scope of the Bill. By moving the Bill on day one, the Government are undermining the more stable and cautious approach that the new Prime Minister told us they would be taking. There might be a different name over the door, but this is very much the same approach. The idea that Parliament could address all these issues in the next 14 months is for the birds. Members have outlined the vast number of regulations—we are talking more than one a day, in addition to all the other priorities of sponsoring Departments—and the closest we have come to reassurance from the Government is that it is within the realms of possibility, which does not give much comfort.

We have predictably heard quite a lot about sovereignty and supremacy. Actually, retaining these laws, as we decided to do a few years ago, was an act of sovereignty. It was a rational act by a Parliament taking the necessary action to protect its people and the economy, but the Government are now proposing to whip off the tablecloth as a posturing tactic for no real reason, just because other countries—“aliens” we are told—were involved in their shaping. That is petulant and reckless. The Institute for Public Policy Research described it as creating

“extraordinary uncertainty for businesses and workers.”

And it ignores the fact that the vast majority of these regulations, far in excess of 90%, were agreed with the UK’s full consent and, in many cases, with the UK as a driving force.

Handing these powers to Ministers, whoever they may be tomorrow or in the next few months, also undermines the concept of parliamentary sovereignty, which was a core platform of the Vote Leave campaign. Frankly, this race to the bottom stuff—that is what this is really about—would not have flown so well on Facebook in 2016, when that campaign was being run.

As other Members have pointed out, it is for exactly that reason that people do not trust the Conservative party with the scale of these plans. What is at stake is the protection of workers, consumers and the planet. As people have said, maternity, paternity, adoption and parental leave, equal pay, TUPE rights, holiday pay and many other things are at risk of just sliding off the books, with some of the Britannia unchained crew in the driving seat. Unison has called this:

“An attack on working women”.

It is hard to disagree.

As clause 55 makes clear, the only way is down. At no point has there been anything stopping this Government raising standards for workers or for the environment, but they have not done so. The risk to the environment and nature is even more acute. Just in the lifetime of this Parliament, with the Trade Bill and the Agriculture Bill, the Government have had many opportunities to legislate to protect standards and they have absolutely dodged them. So nobody has any confidence that with this Bill things will be any different.

Of course, my key concern is for Northern Ireland, including the impact on the non-diminution of rights provisions in the trade and co-operation agreement and the protocol. Our region is already one of the most nature-depleted on the planet, with more than 10% of species at risk. We only just agreed in the dying days of the last Assembly very basic climate targets. The absence of an Assembly now because of the veto of the Brexit fans and vetoholics who usually sit in front of me means that there is no opportunity for Northern Ireland’s elected representatives to try to design replacement legislation. Even if and when the Assembly returns, this Bill makes good governance all but impossible for Northern Ireland, because the ability to know precisely which legislation applies to us, which is still to be spelled out, and which gaps might suddenly appear in law, is not available to us.

Furthermore, the replacement of retained EU law using delegated powers means that new legislation that could have profound impacts on intra-UK divergence can be made without consulting this House, let alone Stormont or any other devolved Assembly. So the Bill would compound the difficulty we already have of ensuring commonality across the UK and across these islands, including between north and south on the island of Ireland, in the areas that are required by the Good Friday agreement and in the many more areas that have emerged, which we now know need protection and regulation; two and a half decades have passed since that agreement. All the borders that this Government have spent the last few years hardening do not see the environmental problems that this Bill could create.

Unfortunately, the Government have shown themselves to be quite ignorant of the basket of shared norms and regulations that keep these islands together and keep us relatively safe. The Bill will have unknown consequences, with various different Ministers, dozens of them, re-weaving that basket with different threads and different colours, and without any real adherence to any particular pattern or scheme. The concept is bad, the content is bad and the timing is bad. Northern Ireland, once again, appears to be an afterthought. We will be opposing the Bill and we hope others will, too.