Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill

Earl of Lindsay Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 6th February 2023 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Lindsay (Con)]

My Lords, the overarching objective of this Bill is a timely and important opportunity to review, rationalise and update a wide-ranging tranche of legislation, and that I warmly welcome and strongly support. However, I have grave reservations about how the Bill proposes that it is done. My concerns are therefore about process, not purpose, and fall into two broad areas. The first is the role allotted to Parliament; the second is the uncertainties for, and potential impact on, consumers and businesses.

I will cover the first area with brevity. Having been a member of the SLSC when it signed off its report on this Bill and having become a member of DPRRC before it signed off its report, I fully endorse the concerns and recommendations set out in both those reports. They deal largely with concerns about parliamentary sovereignty, the need for greater parliamentary oversight, and the extent to which it is intended that secondary legislation will be used. I will not repeat those important concerns in detail, as they have been well articulated by others and not least by my noble friends Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts and Lord McLoughlin, respectively the former and current chairs of those two committees.

I turn to a range of more practical concerns. In doing so, I declare my interest as president of the Chartered Trading Standards Institute, the CTSI, which is the professional body for trading standards. In expressing its concerns, I am raising concerns that have equally been raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Crawley, who was my predecessor as president of the CTSI.

CTSI and the coalition of partner organisations see considerable merit in the opportunity to reappraise and update the legislation and regulations that underpin trading standards and consumer safety. However, they are deeply concerned about the practicability of doing this comprehensively, with due process and to good effect, across such a vast swathe of legislation, given the proposed sunset deadline at the end of the year and the minimalist approach to consultation and parliamentary scrutiny.

CTSI, alongside organisations such as the Chartered Institute of Environmental Health, the Child Accident Prevention Trust and Electrical Safety First, are therefore calling for the proposed sunset deadline of 31 December 2023 to be revisited. Their understandable fear is that, with thousands of pieces of vitally important but often complex legislation needing to be reviewed, rewritten or sunsetted, mistakes, omissions and contradictions are inevitable. This in turn could result in key protections for consumers and businesses being undermined or lost.

More specifically, CTSI and its partners are concerned that the Bill creates a lack of clarity around trading standards’ duties to enforce laws vital to ensuring the safety of products such as toys, electrical appliances and cosmetics; could weaken fair trading rules that protect consumers and law-abiding businesses; could undermine rules that ensure the welfare of animals and the UK’s ability to export animal products to EU member states; could result in diminished information requirements for food provenance, allergens and use-by dates; could make convictions for consumer rights offences unsafe if the laws that underpin them are not clear and coherent; and poses a threat to life due to differences in technical metrology definitions in the healthcare sector on the road and at sea. These are very real uncertainties and concerns, as are those that relate to the role of Parliament and parliamentary procedure.

I said at the start that the Bill is a rare and, I believe, welcome opportunity to review and update a lot of important legislation. We therefore need to ensure that the processes that the Bill is proposing are made fit for purpose and command greater confidence inside and outside Parliament.

Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill

Earl of Lindsay Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 6th March 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hacking (Lab)]

My Lords, I want to draw attention to two paragraphs in Clause 15 to which there has not been any reference in our Committee. Indeed, I do not think there has been any reference to them since Second Reading, but concern was certainly raised then about Clause 15(4)(c) and (d), and it is those that I now want to address.

We should remind ourselves that immense powers are vested in the Minister under Clause 15. Subsection (1) allows them to

“revoke any secondary retained EU law without replacing it”,

while subsection (2) allows them to

“revoke any secondary retained EU law and replace it with such provision as the relevant national authority”—

that is, the relevant Minister—

“considers to be appropriate and to achieve the same or similar objectives.”

That is a power, without reference to Parliament, resting entirely in the hands of the Minister.

I now turn, more precisely, to Clause 15(4)(c) and (d). I shall read those paragraphs out to your Lordships. When replacing revoked secondary EU law, the Minister has the power to

“create a criminal offence that corresponds or is similar to a criminal offence created by secondary retained EU law revoked by the regulations”,

and, in paragraph (d), to

“provide for the imposition of monetary penalties in cases that correspond or are similar to cases in which secondary retained EU law revoked by the regulations enables monetary penalties to be imposed”.

It has been a cardinal feature of our law that the creation of criminal offences and the penalties that arise from the breach of those offences rest entirely in primary legislation. If, hidden under some carpet, there have been EU regulations that create a criminal offence or monetary penalties, then I am ashamed and embarrassed. But for the Government now to seek powers to replace them—again, without putting that before Parliament—is another wrong. My simple contention to your Lordships is that two wrongs do not make a right.

[The Earl of Lindsay (Con)]

My Lords, I shall speak to Amendments 121 and 123 in my name and that of the noble Baroness, Lady Crawley. At Second Reading I welcomed the opportunity created by the Bill to review, improve and update a wide-ranging tranche of important legislation. However, I expressed some concerns about process, and one of those is the constraint that I believe Clause 15 imposes on improving and updating existing legislation. That constraint is also a concern to the Chartered Trading Standards Institute and Which?, among others. Here I should declare an interest as the president of the CTSI, my predecessor in that role being the noble Baroness, Lady Crawley.

The principal constraint I am referring to has been well articulated by the noble Baroness, Lady Chapman, the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, and others: Clause 15(5) —namely, the proposed requirement that any changes to retained EU law should have an overall effect of not increasing the regulatory burden. I say immediately that I am a long-term advocate of better regulation. Over the years, I have served on the better regulation commission and various other bodies advising government on what better regulation looks like and the framework for its development and oversight. I fundamentally believe that regulation should be avoided wherever there is an effective alternative and that, when there is no alternative, it should be designed so that it achieves its desired effect with the least possible burden.