Draft Product Safety and Metrology etc. (Amendment etc.) (EU Exit) Regulations 2019

Debate between Hannah Bardell and Maria Eagle

Tuesday 12th March 2019 General Committees

[Maria Eagle]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Gray. I thank both Front Benchers for the way in which they set out the points they made, and the SNP spokesman for his contribution.

I am deeply concerned about this SI. Apart from the fact that it is as thick as a brick and weighs probably more than that, I find it difficult to conceive that anybody who might be affected by it could understand the meaning of it by reading it. It simply is not possible.

Let me give the Minister an example of what I mean: if we turn to schedule 26, which is on page 318 and is something I have picked out at random, it sets out the amendments to the Non-automatic Weighing Instruments Regulations 2016. The schedule goes on to set out what the amendments to those regulations are, but needless to say, the regulations that are being amended are in a different document that, by the way, is not in the room. If I wanted to assure myself that the measures in the SI were doing what they purported to do, it would be difficult for me to do so, because I do not even have the document that is being amended present in the Committee Room.

I know we now have the wonders of the internet, but when I was a Minister it was the practice always to have present in the Committee Room all those documents—primary legislation and statutory instruments—that were being amended, so that if somebody sitting in the Committee wished to consider whether a particular clause was doing what the Minister, in all good faith, said it was doing, they could check that. It is impossible today for us to do that.

It is impossible—and it will be impossible should this instrument pass—for anybody picking it up and reading it to understand, without having a whole library of legislation, what on earth the provisions are doing and whether what they purport to do is what they do do, or whether, because the civil service is so hard-pressed these days from having to produce these documents, there has been some technical error in the drafting. That is a problem that I have referred to in other SI Committees. Not having the documents that are being amended in the room is a problem.

I turn now to the fact that this is the Tyrannosaurus rex of SIs, or the Giganotosaurus—one of those enormous dinosaurs that got really, really large—and the impact assessment tells me in annex A that 38 pieces of legislation are subject to amendment by this SI. Some of them are extremely important bits of legislation in terms of public and consumer safety. They are also extremely varied, from the General Product Safety Regulations 2005 through to specific regulations such as those on toy safety, the making available on the market and supervision of transfers of explosives, aerosol dispensers, gas appliances, cosmetics and cosmetic products, intoxicating liquor, consumer protection more generally, weights and measures, and all kinds of things. I could read out all 38 pieces of legislation, but that would detain the Committee for too long. However, that is an illustration of the problem.

[Hannah Bardell]

The hon. Lady is making a powerful and appropriate point. Those 38 measures include ones on offshore installations: the Offshore Installations (Safety Case) Regulations 2005 and the Offshore Installations (Offshore Safety Directive) (Safety Case etc.) Regulations 2015. What business do those have being in a document with cosmetics? That is not to diminish the importance of regulations about cosmetics, but those on offshore installations are vital and should have had specific time dedicated to them. Is not the reality that we are in such a rush and a dash to do something that might never even need to be used that such things are being rushed through without proper scrutiny?

[Maria Eagle]

I cannot but agree with the hon. Lady. The scope and range of the legislation subject to amendment by this one SI are extensive and startling. Many of those pieces of legislation do not have obvious connections to others being amended by the same instrument.

I must agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough about the assessment of the costs of implementation. I bear in mind the fact that the Minister has said, in total good faith I am sure, that the aim of the draft regulations is to keep things as they are in the envisaged circumstances of no deal. I do not suggest for a minute that there is any bad faith in any of this, but it is impossible for us to consider properly whether what the Minister seeks to ensure happens will actually happen. The extent and size of the regulations, and the way in which the legislation is written, with the powers that Ministers have given themselves to change legislation, is impossible to scrutinise properly.

In answer to my intervention, the Minister told us about stakeholder reading rooms and the 6,000 businesses involved. That sounds like a lot until one turns to page 21 of the impact assessment: the number of manufacturing industries covered by specific product safety regulations amounts to 24,255. Just over the page, in table A1.2, we see that other manufacturing industries producing consumer products amount to 38,614. The wholesale industries affected consist of some thousands more and the retail industries affected consist of very many thousands more businesses.

I also note that paragraph 87, on page 17 of the impact assessment, states:

“Based on data from the ONS…around 95% of manufacturing businesses and over 96% of distributors in the industries affected by the SI are small or micro businesses.”

Those are exactly the kinds of businesses that simply do not have the time or capacity—if they are to stay in business—to buy this statutory instrument; to look in it to cross-reference it to the EU directives, other statutory instruments and primary legislation that it amends; to understand and interpret the legal language, of which there is a lot; and therefore to understand what their obligations are.

I, too, will vote against the draft regulations because they are too large a piece of legislation, with too wide a scope to enable those of us scrutinising it in Committee the appropriate opportunity to do so properly. Not only that, but even after the SI passes, it will be almost impossible for anybody who is bound by an element of it to pick it up and understand what on earth it is that they are bound by.

The Minister says that the SI is not intended to make any changes, but changes may have been made, even inadvertently, through the language it uses. We have been unable to check that; I certainly could not check that in Committee today, in respect of even one of the pieces of legislation it amends, never mind 38 of them. It is an exceedingly bad way of making law, it is to be deplored, and I will not be supporting it.