Draft Product Safety and Metrology etc. (Amendment) Regulations 2024

George Eustice Excerpts

Monday 13th May 2024 General Committees

[George Eustice (Camborne and Redruth) (Con)]

Of course, the European Union does not represent the entire world and not every country in the world is a member of the European Union, so is the hon. Lady saying that the European Union should also forgo its right to set its regulations and should perhaps accept Codex as a standard to abide by?

[Stella Creasy]

I am not quite sure why the right hon. Member came up with that analysis. I am trying to make the point that we as a country, having left—[Interruption.] I would love to answer his question. I know that he has to chunter from a sedentary position because today is an embarrassment for him as somebody who also promoted the idea that, somehow, if we left the regulatory regime of the European Union, our country’s businesses would benefit. They have not, and this instrument today proves why, because it is about how people can trade together and how regulatory regimes interact with each other. The point about CE marking is one that any business could have told him before we left the European Union. This is not an argument for us to rejoin; it is an argument for some honesty about why having common frameworks and common standards matters.

The right hon. Member would do well to look at the explanatory memorandum and what it means when it says on page 4:

“This EU recognition is implemented in GB legislation”.

What it is actually saying is that our standards are lower than the standards that the EU has set, because through this statutory instrument the Minister is admitting that GB standards will already be being met if EU standards are met. The tail is not wagging the dog; the dog is fully in the doghouse, because the reality is that it is better for British business to have one set of regulations to comply with. There is less paperwork, not more.

The paperwork that came from Brexit shows the fallacy of the idea—the fantasy—that somehow we, a country of 70 million consumers, could set a separate regulatory regime and tell British businesses that they could still trade across the world without incurring additional costs or facing additional barriers, including additional non-tariff barriers, and friction. That is the reality of this SI. My hon. Friend the Member for Bethnal Green and Bow was being kind about it. It is an admission of failure when it comes to the freedoms that British businesses were promised.

In that sense, I have a number of questions for the Minister, because I think British business deserves some honesty about the lessons that can be learned from the mess created over the charter mark in the last couple of years. Will he be honest? Given that the explanatory memorandum says that if EU standards are met, GB standards will have been judged to be met automatically, is that dynamic alignment? Are we saying that if, for example, new toy standards are set by the European Union, we will expect British business to follow them in order to meet the standards set out in this SI? Are we dynamically aligning? If we are not, the Minister needs to tell British business what will happen if British businesses do not meet those standards. Is there a cut-off point? At what point do these standards fall away?

Will the Minister be honest? We have talked about a figure of £583 million in terms of the cost. Of course, that is the cost of not implementing a British standards charter, so this is not actually some great benefit to British businesses. This is an admission that all the time, effort and energy that went into trying to make the Brexit fallacy work in relation to British paperwork has cost them money, so actually, if we do not do this, we can save them money by not implementing the Brexit standards. But the impact assessment says that the total net impact for British business is actually £1.6 billion. Can the Minister clarify what the other £1 billion-worth of impact might be? Is it all that extra paperwork, the time, the cost and the business lost from trying to come up with two different charter marks to meet two different standards?

At what point did the Government recognise that this was in the British interest? How many stakeholder meetings were there? How loud did British business have to shout about the impossibility of trying to run two regulatory regimes at the same time? Why have we not learned the lesson from Northern Ireland on this? The Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Act was about a bonfire of 4,000 regulations. To date, only a handful have been deleted. There is a good reason why that is the case. That is why it is important that we support this SI today. It is better for British businesses to have stability and to have less paperwork if they want to sell both in the UK and to Europe. It is better to be part of a standards regime that, through this SI, we are saying is a high-standards regime, because we are saying that we want to meet those standards.

What else will the Minister admit we have learned? The retained EU law Act gives his Department multiple pieces of legislation to review. Right now, across Parliament, in rooms like this, there are people looking at retained EU law legislation and whether we should have variation, and finding, oddly enough, when we look at it, that we should not. As my hon. Friend the Member for Bethnal Green and Bow says, it falls apart on hard contact with reality. It is better for British business to be able to share one set of regulatory regimes. What lessons have the Government learned from that experience, from all those stakeholder meetings and from all the money, effort and time that has been spent trying to come up with our own set of standards, when it was better for British business, toy safety and British consumers to share EU standards and be part of the CE mark? What will happen if those standards are not met?

The Minister will suggest that I am making an argument for remain, but this is not an argument for remain; it is an argument for sanity. That is what the British people deserve, given the damage being done by the hard Tory Brexit that is now being implemented in this country, and it is what this meeting needs.

--- Later in debate ---

[Kevin Hollinrake]

I thank the hon. Lady for her intervention. It is the UKCA mark, by the way. The reality is that we will take this on a case-by-case basis. Where there are good reasons to diverge for a product or sector, we could use the UKCA mark and diverge from the European Union. We are not going to diverge right across the piece; we can have the best of both worlds. We can make it easier for businesses that want to trade across borders in the European Union and the UK, but we can diverge where necessary using the UKCA mark.

Before I conclude, I will give way to my right hon. Friend.

[George Eustice]

I am grateful to the Minister for giving way so late. I assure him that I am not going to be difficult; I support what he is trying to do. Paragraphs 44 and 45 of the impact assessment make it clear that, under the Product Safety and Metrology (Amendment and Transitional Provisions) Regulations 2022, the Government intended for there to be a very strong dose of mutual recognition. Those regulations provided that if somebody had a CE mark, that could be recognised and used and they would not have to go through additional tests, and that that would stand until 2027 or for the life of the certificate. What consideration did the Government give to just extending that 2027 deadline so that we retained control while having very sensible easements in place and recognising the CE mark for as long as it is valid enough to be recognised?

Let me make a second point about spreading this approach to other areas. I encourage the Minister to resist that. I looked at it very closely on issues such as chemicals and pesticides when I was in DEFRA, and there were serious doubts about whether the European Union would have the technical expertise to do some of these things correctly once British officials had been withdrawn from working groups. We cannot rely on the European Union to make adequate assessments of these products in the long term.

[Kevin Hollinrake]

I am very happy to take up my right hon. Friend’s first point in more detail offline. The thing that we are dealing with here is the expiry of CE certification by the end of this year. On UKCA certification, he is right to say that the deadline is 2027, but that tackles a separate problem. The problem we are trying to solve here is making sure that businesses have the consistency and continuity of being able to use the CE marking. On other sectors, such as chemicals, my right hon. Friend is a much greater expert than I am, and I am sure he will be making approaches to the relevant Ministers about those areas. I certainly urge him to do so and to use his experience in that regard.

Without this legislation, from 1 January 2025 businesses that do not comply with UKCA requirements will not legally be able to place their products on the Great British market. Industry identified that that could increase costs, leading to higher prices and less choice for UK consumers—indeed, as I said, there will be a saving of £558 million to businesses over 10 years. Our officials will of course continue to engage with industry. The Government are committed to high levels of protection for UK consumers and continue to take a pragmatic approach to improving regulation to benefit businesses and consumers. I urge the Committee to approve the regulations.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That the Committee has considered the draft Product Safety and Metrology etc. (Amendment) Regulations 2024.