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.