Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill

Jacob Rees-Mogg Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 25th October 2022 Commons Chamber

[Mr Jacob Rees-Mogg (North East Somerset) (Con)]

May I say what a pleasure it is that normal service can be resumed, and that I am now able to speak slightly more freely than I may have done when I sat in a different place? I congratulate my hon. Friend the Minister on his particularly brilliant speech. I think it was particularly brilliant because I was involved in writing it; I may therefore be a rather prejudiced audience, but I thought it was delivered with panache and verve. He took so many interventions and put the case brilliantly.

I know that it is not orderly to mention people in the Galleries, but I do not know whether the officials’ Box counts for that purpose. Nevertheless, I would like to thank the officials who have been involved with the Bill. They have done a terrific amount of work to get it ready in a short time. I confess to the House that when I was Leader of the House, I thought that getting the Bill ready for Second Reading by this date would not be possible, but the work that has been done is absolutely terrific. Let me reassure those who may think that I have sometimes criticised the civil service that in this instance it is worthy of paeans of praise.

The Bill is of fundamental constitutional importance because it removes the supremacy of EU law. We have heard arguments about certainty. Certainty, certainty—everyone always wants certainty. In an uncertain world, I am not sure that certainty is ever possible, but in a legal context the Bill provides more certainty than the alternative, which would be to retain two different legal systems in these islands of ours that would apply in different circumstances. I know that we have Scottish law, English and Welsh law and Northern Ireland law, but we would have a separate law applying differently in each of those three jurisdictions. We are now removing that, so the law made and voted for by people in this country will be the supreme law. That is surely right.

The issue of supremacy is of constitutional importance. Anybody who opposes the removal of the supremacy of EU law is fighting the Brexit battle over again, saying, “We didn’t really leave after all. We’d like to pretend we’re still there. Isn’t it nice to allow this alien law to continue to tell us what we ought to do?” No, it would not be nice to do that. Let us clarify the law. Let us get as close to certainty as humanly possible, so that we have a sensible, intelligent and well-formulated statute book.

[Richard Graham (Gloucester) (Con)]

For some of us, the point is not the constitutional argument about which laws should be sovereign, which we may well happily accept, but the practical issue of how we convert literally hundreds of laws, for DEFRA and so on, within the timescale imagined. Does my right hon. Friend understand the severe doubts that many people have about the practicality of what is on offer?

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

I am afraid that my hon. Friend has never liked the decision to leave the European Union, and everything he says must be taken in that context. Otherwise, he would not have intervened—

[Richard Graham]

rose—

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

I am not giving way again. Otherwise, my hon. Friend would not have intervened at this stage, because I was setting out the issue of supremacy before coming to the crucial point about why the Bill is now necessary and how it works in practice.

[Dame Andrea Leadsom]

rose—

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

I give way to my right hon. Friend.

[Richard Graham]

On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. [Interruption.]

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[Madam Deputy Speaker]

I appreciate the sensitivities. The hon. Gentleman knows that the content of the right hon. Gentleman’s speech is not a matter for the Chair, and not one on which I will comment, but he has made his point.

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

I now give way to my right hon. Friend the Member for South Northamptonshire (Dame Andrea Leadsom).

[Dame Andrea Leadsom]

I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for all the work that he has done. I was actually hoping to clarify the point that our hon. Friend the Member for Gloucester (Richard Graham) was making. Having myself held the role of Leader of the House during that attempt to leave the EU between 2017 and 2019, I recall that the House was able to get through some 800 or 900 pieces of secondary legislation. In my opinion, it is very much within the realms of possibility that this amount of legislation can and will be dealt with by the House very successfully.

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

I am very grateful to my right hon. Friend, who has made an excellent point. The ability of the House to get through its business is exceptionally good, and it is able to do so in an orderly way, as my right hon. Friend showed in dealing with the no-deal Brexit legislation.

[Patrick Grady]

Given his commitment to scrutiny by the House, the right hon. Gentleman, who said that he was involved in drafting of the Bill, must have had sight of the draft programme motion as well. The European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018, which created retained EU law, was given eight days of scrutiny on the Floor of the House in Committee, and two days on Report. Does he really think that the time the Government are providing for scrutiny of this Bill is sufficient?

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

There is always a discussion to be had about whether a few days in a Committee of the whole House or upstairs in Committee provides better scrutiny. People sometimes reach different conclusions on that, but there will be a proper opportunity for a Committee stage upstairs, and I think that is perfectly reasonable.

I want to go back to the fundamental point about the supremacy issue. Let me reiterate that anyone who opposes the Bill is in fact re-fighting the Brexit battle.

[John Redwood]

I thank my right hon. Friend for all the great work that has been done on the draft legislation. Does he not find it an odd paradox, or contradiction, that many Opposition Members come to this place apparently to form laws but do not believe we can ever make a law that is good, and we need to rely on EU law in so many areas where I think we can actually do better?

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

I am grateful to my right hon. Friend, who is wise, as always. But it is even odder than that, because there is this very strange view that laws that came in without any scrutiny at all—regulations of the EU that became our law automatically—cannot be removed without primary legislation. That is just bizarre.

The laws with which we are dealing came in under section 2(2) of the European Communities Act. Either they came in with minimum scrutiny but could not be amended or changed, or they came in with no scrutiny at all. I know that my hon. Friend the Member for Stone (Sir William Cash) disagrees with me on this, but we are not using this procedure to repeal Acts of Parliament. Even though these measures have the effect of introducing EU law, an Act of Parliament has had full scrutiny in the House, and to be repealed it deserves full scrutiny to be taken away. That is the correct constitutional procedure.

[Stella Creasy]

Does the right hon. Gentleman recognise that some of us may be a little bit sceptical about the definition of democratic engagement that he has just set out? He is arguing that, for example, taking away laws that require cosmetics not to contain cancer-causing chemicals or laws on illegal trading—as well as maternity rights and TUPE—is a matter that does not require the scrutiny of the House, but only that of statutory instrument Committees. If he had been so wedded to restoring democracy, might he not have at least written the affirmative resolution procedure into these statutory instruments? Why he is taking back control, not for this House and the great democratic institutions—and he is now joining us on the Back Benches—but to No. 10?

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

I do not accept that construction of what is actually happening. The House will have the ability to focus on issues on which it thinks the Government are going in the wrong direction. Let me pick at random one of the retained EU laws that may be reformed or become redundant:

“a common methodology for the calculation of annual sales of portable batteries and accumulators to end-users”.

Does the hon. Lady really think that deserves primary legislation—a count of batteries? That is what is in the 2,400 statutory instruments on the dashboard, and, as has been pointed out, that is not necessarily the full list.

There are all sorts of minor and unimportant things that need to be dealt with. As for those that are of major significance, it was said clearly at the Dispatch Box that environmental protections would be maintained. That is fundamentally important. It is a commitment from His Majesty’s Government to this House. The Bill will allow those protections to become UK law—which I use as shorthand to cover the three different types of law in the United Kingdom—to ensure that they can be enforced logically and sensibly by our courts in accordance with our legal maxims. That must be a right and certain means of proceeding.

It is interesting that people, having been told this, are still opposing the Bill. I come back to the conclusion that those who are opposing it actually do not like Brexit altogether.

[Jonathan Reynolds]

I am grateful for the chance to put a question to the right hon. Gentleman. I was going to welcome him to his position, but I did not want to seem ironic. He says that we can take a guarantee from the Dispatch Box. Even the Conservative party’s manifesto commitments no longer hold: we have seen that. How can we take the word of Ministers when even manifesto commitments no longer bind this Government?

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

The hon. Gentleman knows that Dispatch Box commitments have a very high standing in our political system. As Leader of the House, I was concerned that we were not using legislative reform orders as comprehensively as the legislation seemed to imply. In fact, the reason for that was a Dispatch Box commitment given by Paul Goggins, in the last Labour Government, during the passage of the Bill that limited the application of LROs to non-controversial issues. Dispatch Box commitments are actually a fundamental part of the way in which our discussion works, as the hon. Gentleman knows only too well.

[Sammy Wilson]

The right hon. Gentleman is entirely correct. This is an issue of the supremacy of this Parliament, and this law will enforce, and reinforce, the point that when we left the EU we made Parliament sovereign. Does the right hon. Gentleman accept, however, that the Bill will also highlight the fact that Parliament is not sovereign across the United Kingdom? Some of this cannot apply to Northern Ireland, where EU law past and future will still apply. If anything, the Bill could drive a greater wedge between Northern Ireland, constitutionally, and the rest of the United Kingdom.

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

I am certainly concerned about that. In the last couple of days I had to sign off a couple of explanatory memorandums covering law that was going to come into Northern Ireland from the European Union. That is an unsatisfactory constitutional situation, which is why I am so supportive of the Northern Ireland Protocol Bill that is in the other place today. That is something we must push forward with, to ensure that we have a unified legal system across the whole of the United Kingdom.

[Margaret Ferrier (Rutherglen and Hamilton West) (Ind)]

The Bill creates several new powers that will not require UK Government Ministers to seek consent from the devolved Administrations, essentially retaining power over areas within devolved competence. Does the right hon. Gentleman recognise the impact of this Bill on the devolution settlement?

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

The Scottish Parliament has been reluctant to give legislative consent motions to any Brexit-related legislation because of the politics of the SNP. That is a view that it has taken because it wanted to remain in the European Union—as the SNP, to its credit, argues for firmly and clearly on these Benches. The SNP is rather clearer about this state of affairs than the socialist friends we have in here who like to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds. That inevitably means that, in my discussions with the devolved Administrations, there has not necessarily been a meeting of minds with the Scottish Parliament. But that is to be expected. This Bill in fact returns powers to the devolved Parliaments, because it gives them the authority to reform and repeal EU law too. They will be the decision makers over those areas that are devolved, so we are increasing devolution.

[Jonathan Edwards (Carmarthen East and Dinefwr) (Ind)]

The right hon. Gentleman will of course accept that the Welsh Government have similar concerns to those of the Scottish Government. The Welsh Government are run by the Labour party, which is a Unionist party. Indeed, the Counsel General of the Welsh Government, Mick Antoniw, has said:

“As currently drafted, this legislation could see UK Government Ministers given unfettered authority to legislate in devolved areas.”

These concerns are being expressed not just on the nationalist Benches but among Unionist colleagues.

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

I know from my previous experience that His Majesty’s Government will observe the Sewel convention in relation to this. There may be occasions on which, for simplicity, the devolved authorities want the Westminster Parliament to move ahead with something on which everybody agrees, but what is devolved is devolved and the devolved Administrations will have the right to pursue it.

This Bill is not only one of constitutional importance that will get our statute book tidied up but one of massive opportunity. It presents an opportunity, not necessarily to do any one big individual thing—like the Financial Services and Markets Bill, which can change Solvency II involving billions of pounds for the economy—but to go through every single individual issue in detail, one by one, so that we can see, bit by bit, those rules that have made our businesses less competitive, those regulations that have put our businesses under more pressure and those intrusions that have made people’s lives less easy. We will be able to sweep those away, and we will be doing so in a proper constitutional process.

[Craig Mackinlay (South Thanet) (Con)]

My right hon. Friend previously served on the European Scrutiny Committee, as I still do. Does he recall the inches-thick paperwork that used to land in front of us on a regular basis? Despite the pleadings of the Chairman, my hon. Friend the Member for Stone (Sir William Cash), that legislation never had any debate, and even if it had, there was little to nothing we could do about it. This is the true victory and the Brexit dividend that we can now face.

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. The ports directive was debated and debated, and opposed on both sides of the House, but it went through anyway. There was absolutely nothing we could do. This is why I challenge Opposition Members who say that this is not proper scrutiny. Why did they not object to the section 2(2) power? Why were they not joining my hon. Friend the Member for Stone on the European Scrutiny Committee to ask, week in and week out, why these laws were going through without anybody being able to gainsay them and why parliamentary sovereignty was not being upheld? We are restoring parliamentary sovereignty by ensuring that there is a parliamentary process, that Parliament will have its say and that we will have our own law for our own country.

[Graham Stringer (Blackley and Broughton) (Lab)]

The right hon. Gentleman will not be surprised to know that I agree with the core of his speech about returning supremacy to British law and getting rid of EU supremacy. The way in which statutory instruments and the negative procedure have been used in this House has not always been satisfactory. For instance, covid regulations, past the time they had been implemented, were brought into operation and were inappropriate in many cases. I could give many other examples. As somebody who campaigned to leave the EU and is glad to get back control of our laws, I am disappointed that the process will not see full transparency of debate, because our regulations and laws are better when they are transparent and when different people can bounce their ideas off each other. Does the right hon. Gentleman agree with me?

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)]

We must not have such long interventions.

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

The hon. Gentleman makes a valid point. The scrutiny of statutory instruments in this House is not all that it should be. I actually think that the other place does it better. I think there are too many statutory instrument Committees that look at things for two minutes before they all go home, but that is an issue we must face as a House to decide how we want to improve it.

My final point is that those who oppose the Bill seem to think that British politics and the British electorate count for nothing. They stand up and say that we will have no employment law protections—practically arguing that we will be sending children up chimneys. Do they think the British voter was born yesterday? Do they really think the British electorate and the British people will accept or vote for a party that takes away the protections they already have and enjoy? Are they unaware of the fact that our maternity leave protections antedate the European Union’s regulations, and have always gone further than those regulations?

What sort of a country do opponents of the Bill think we are? Why do they have no confidence in our democracy? Do they think that right hon. and hon. Members on this side, when standing on a parliamentary platform and going before our constituents, will say that we are going to have a burning of everything they like? Of course we are not. We will stand up for people’s rights, we will stand up for people’s dignity and we will stand up for the rule of law. Most of all, we will stand up for that fundamental right, that overarching right, that right on which all our constitutional freedoms are built and on which all human rights depend—the right of the ballot box.

Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill

Jacob Rees-Mogg Excerpts

Report stage
Wednesday 18th January 2023 Commons Chamber

[Ms Ghani]

I always respect my hon. Friend’s opinion, but he is fundamentally mistaken. We have undertaken a considerable amount of consultation with our courts and have worked with them consistently. It is absolutely right that we deliver Brexit by ensuring that laws made here are sovereign over EU laws.

[Mr Jacob Rees-Mogg (North East Somerset) (Con)]

My hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Sir Robert Neill) is fundamentally wrong. The Bill is providing legal certainty. Rather than having a flow of EU law interpreted according to EU principle, from now on we will have a single set of laws within this country. That must be certainty rather than otherwise.

[Ms Ghani]

Having a single set of laws across the UK will provide far more certainty.

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[Justin Madders]

If people are going to intervene, they should read the Bill and the amendments, because they would see our suggestion for a deadline. Of course, as everyone else in this Chamber seems to know, we have already left the EU, so this is not about leaving the EU, but about the remaining laws.

The Regulatory Policy Committee has said that setting a deadline is not enough and that a stronger argument is needed for choosing that particular date, and we agree. What is far more convincing than the arbitrary date that we are presented with are the warnings that we have received that there is not sufficient capacity in the civil service for a genuinely effective appraisal of the regulations that the Bill seeks to remove in the timescale allowed. The case for the cliff edge is incredibly weak. The arguments for removing it and putting it on a more realistic footing are much stronger.

The potential for things to be missed is clear. If worse comes to worst and some vital regulation ceases to be law by accident and nobody notices until it is too late, our constituents will rightly ask us, “What on earth were you doing? What were you thinking of?” No wonder the impact assessment on the Bill is silent on the issue of the sunset date.

The Regulatory Policy Committee has made it clear that it believes that the analysis of that sunset date is inadequate. This is a deadline in search of a headline. Presumably, that headline will be, “Free at last”. I would suggest that a more apposite headline might be. “The sun has set on your employment rights, your consumer rights and your environmental protections.” Indeed, the sun has set on parliamentary democracy.

Overall, the Regulatory Policy Committee puts a red rating on the impact assessment of the Bill as not fit for purpose, yet here we are, ploughing on as if it will be all right on the night.

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

rose—

[Justin Madders]

I will give way to the architect of the Bill.

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

Surely the hon. Gentleman is aware that our first legislation on consumer rights was in 1893, some time before the European Union, and that the Act giving paid holidays was 1938, again before the European Union. We have never needed the European Union for worker and consumer rights.

[Justin Madders]

I am sure that those were the glory years—the right hon. Member’s favourite period of time. This is about protecting the rights that we have, and this Bill allows those rights to fall by default if no action is taken. That is why we are so concerned about the Bill.

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[Stella Creasy]

I rise to raise amendment 36, tabled in my name and in the name of the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis) and many other Members across the House.

As far as I can see, there have been three responses to the Bill in Parliament. First, there are those who have not paid attention because—let’s face it—many years on from the Brexit referendum still anything that involves Europe is cold cup of sick territory. That is understandable but not excusable because it means that those people have not woken up to the fact that this is nothing to do with Brexit and everything to do with an audacious ministerial power grab.

The second group are those who have read the Bill and are completely happy with the idea that the Government should just hit delete on all legislation with the word “Europe” in it, with all the confusion, chaos and complications that will cause for our constituents, because it is a price worth paying. That is not understandable, but it is excusable, because they do not see the laws at stake here—they just see the word “Europe”. There is an honesty in being so hellbent on the idea that anything we have ever shared with Europe is bad and it does not matter whether people value it—employment rights, environmental protections, consumer standards, flight safety rules. For them, if the choice is cake or death, it is death every time.

The third group of people are the people I am trying to appeal to today. They know this is not the right way to deal with retained EU law, but they hope that somebody else will step in and sort it out—the Opposition, other MPs, the Lords or perhaps even some divine intervention from the Lord himself. That is not understandable or excusable, because if the Bill goes through unamended it will stop us doing our job and it is our job to speak up for our constituents.

Today’s debate is not about how the Europeans make legislation. We have left the European Union. This debate is about exactly what taking back control meant, and about whether we will be able to speak up for our constituents on the issues that they care about. The emails in our inboxes show that they care. What was promised during the Brexit referendum campaign was not a sovereign Whitehall or taking back control in Downing Street, but that is exactly what the Bill does—and it does it in a way that is beyond parody. Personally, I think that the dashboard was created as a way to keep the then Business Secretary occupied putting random words into it. It is a farce that, as my hon. Friend the Member for Ellesmere Port and Neston (Justin Madders) said, we are legislating by website.

It matters that the scope of legislation is correct, which is what amendment 36 would ensure. Let me help Ministers out here, because they do not know how many laws are missing. We have already found many, including the Conservation of Habitats and Species Regulations 2017, the Conservation of Offshore Marine Habitats and Species Regulations 2017, the Marine Strategy Regulations 2010, the Marine Works (Environmental Impact Assessment) Regulations 2007 and the Welfare of Animals (Transport) (England) Order 2006.

In other cases, the dashboard lists regulations that are no longer laws, so some poor civil servant is going through them even though they no longer exist. The Financial Services and Markets Bill seeks to revoke at least four sets of EC regulations that do not appear on the dashboard. Two of the first five statutory instruments that it seeks to revoke are not listed on the dashboard either.

It is estimated that the process will cost the taxpayer tens of millions of pounds, at a time when we are all being told to tighten our belts because of the Government’s mismanagement of the economy. There are 3,500 pieces of legislation involved—that is the estimate, but there could be more, and I suspect that that is why the Minister does not want to be honest with us—in comparison with the 600 that we made during the Brexit process.

The Minister says that the dashboard will be updated, but it will be updated after the point at which we are being asked to approve the process. I will withdraw my amendment if Ministers can just give us a clear number and a clear list of what is in scope. I do not understand why that is an unreasonable proposition. Frankly, Back Benchers of any political party should be worried about the precedent set by legislation that allows the Government to give themselves an enabling power without defining its limitations.

That is before we even get on to who makes the decision about what happens next. Ministers want to tell me that I am scaremongering when I raise concerns about how they will use these powers—they say, “Of course we wouldn’t get rid of these laws.” Well, let us have a look at that scaremongering. I have been tabling parliamentary questions to try to understand what will happen to rights that all our constituents care about, such as paid annual leave, bathing water quality, sharps rules in hospitals, consumer protection from unfair trading, food hygiene and toy safety legislation. Those are surely things that Ministers would want to put beyond reach, so nobody could say that they might be revoked or accidentally lost down the back of the ministerial sofa, along with the 800 sets of regulations that have no ministerial leads and are quite likely to get lost in the process.

The problem I have is that Ministers are clear that there are some regulations that they are going to revoke and some they are going to keep. So they do know what they want to do with the power that Members are going to hand them; they just do not want to be honest about it. Why do they know that they want to keep the regulations on bird flu, but not those on maternity and paternity leave? The Minister ought to talk to her colleague the Minister for Food, Farming and Fisheries, who wrote back to me clearly saying that the Government were reviewing that.

That is the problem: Conservative Members may trust their Government colleagues to do the right thing, in the same way that they might trust a 17-year-old when they ask for the keys to a Porsche “just to polish it”, but those of us who have been here and seen Governments of different colours, and the temptation that comes with ministerial power, know that the point about taking back control was parliamentary sovereignty. That starts with knowing what we are being asked to hand over: we are being asked to hand over oversight of an unknown number of laws. That is what amendment 36 asks for clarity on.

We also have to hope that our colleagues in the other place will make it clear that we can have influence—and not just in like-it-or-lump-it statutory instrument Committees; don’t kid anybody who has sat on one that they are a good or effective version of parliamentary scrutiny—and that we can speak up for our constituents. It may feel like cold cup of sick territory when we see something with the word “Europe” in it, but with all the rights and regulations up for deletion under the Bill, I promise that our constituents will not forgive us if we do not stand up for parliamentary sovereignty and support amendment 36.

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

May I begin by thanking the fantastic Bill team, some of whom may be listening to our proceedings this afternoon? This was an extremely difficult piece of work to pull together. The hard work that they have put in to achieve that in a timely way shows, it has to be said, the British civil service at its best. I am sometimes quite critical of the British civil service, so it is nice to be able to put on record in Hansard my grateful thanks for the deeply impressive work that has been done.

The Bill is being enormously overinterpreted by Opposition Members, and—it has to be said, as my hon. Friend the Minister did—mainly by people who never wanted to leave the European Union anyway. I think the laws of physics are being rewritten by the opponents of Brexit, because as far as I am aware, things do not expand in black holes; that is rather the point of them. Things are sucked in, and even light is trapped by the gravity.

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[Ian Blackford]

I hope the right hon. Gentleman will understand this point. Of course there is a difference: we wish to be back in the European Union as an independent country, but by dint of this Bill we are going to have to introduce legislation to make sure that we remain aligned with the European Union. We have no desire to do that, because we are already closely aligned. These measures are going to be forced on us, against our will, by this Parliament.

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

The right hon. Gentleman makes a fair point. There will be some work for the Scottish Parliament to do to maintain the status quo. That is a policy decision for the Scottish Parliament, resulting from a decision that was taken by the whole United Kingdom. That is how devolution works, and that is a proper and fair working of devolution. That, actually, is what gives the Scottish Parliament the power to do what it wants to do. It flows from our constitutional settlement, and from the overarching decision made by the British people, as one people, to leave the European Union.

I now come to the entirely bogus point about the threat to rights. In his opening speech on Second Reading, my hon. Friend the Member for Watford (Dean Russell) made it clear, on the Government’s behalf, that the environmental rights would be maintained. The Government have been and are committed to that. But they will maintain them in UK law. We have been able to that before. I believe Henry Brooke was the Home Secretary who introduced the Clean Air Act 1956. The Conservative party has a pretty good record on that. It turns out that the Sale of Goods Act 1893, to which I earlier referred the Minister, was one of the last Acts of Gladstone, so the Liberals should be proud of their history of doing things in a British way rather than needing the European Union to do it. The Conservatives introduced the Holidays with Pay Act 1938—again, the protection of workers’ rights. That is before we go back to Lord Shaftesbury and the Factory Acts. We do not need to go into the mists of time to see that we can do it ourselves.

Finally, I must mention amendment 36. This is the man upon the stair. We all know about the man upon the stair:

“Yesterday, upon the stair, I met a man who wasn’t there. He wasn’t there again today. I wish, I wish he’d go away.”

If we do not know what our laws are, how are people supposed to obey them? If the laws are unknown, mystic and possibly imaginary, surely they should not be laws in the first place. They have made the best argument for getting rid of the man upon the stair who was not there in the first place.

[Alex Sobel (Leeds North West) (Lab/Co-op)]

I will keep my remarks to the Bill’s impact on laws that fall within the remit of the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. The Government’s dashboard lists only 570 laws that DEFRA identified as within the scope of the Bill. That figure alone would make DEFRA the most heavily impacted Department. However, in Committee it became clear that as many as 1,000 laws may be at risk of being revoked by the Bill’s sunset clause in December.

There are not the resources in DEFRA to enable officials to examine properly each of those laws in turn in the time remaining before the sunset sweeps them away. That is forgetting all the other work on environmental land management, sewage, waste, air quality and our commitments at the nature COP in Montreal. While our nature is depleted further due to the Government’s short-sightedness, we will have a year of navel gazing and the entire Department will be clogged up with months of pointless work reviewing lists of laws that no one wants to drop.

I take umbrage with the right hon. Member for North East Somerset (Mr Rees-Mogg). There are no guarantees. The Government are not guaranteeing that a single law will be retained in UK law. They should prioritise their environmental commitments in the Environment Act 2021 and the 25-year environment plan, including the actions and policies necessary to deliver nature’s recovery by 2030, as well as the environmental targets, the statutory instrument for which will become law next Monday. Those should be the Department’s priorities.

A definitive list of environmentally important measures does not exist. One could say that the Government have played themselves. It is the same old story, but there is still time to change the ending. We know that the list is even more extensive than the comparable list of retained EU law that provides critical protections for workers’ rights and conditions. The inventory of workers’ rights legislation is shorter and more easily identifiable.

There are important differences between the three domains of rights and protections highlighted by Labour’s amendments, all of which would set us back on the right path and change the ending. The Bill is unnecessary and we need to retain all those regulations and laws as minimum standards in this country. The retained EU environmental laws covered by the Bill include major protections that we rely on for clean air, clean water and safe foods. They provide crucial safeguards for the world’s most nature-depleted nation. Those are not my words but the words of Lord Goldsmith, a Government Minister in the other place.

Under the Bill, critical environmental protections face the prospect of being revoked or replaced by weaker regulations. Those are our real, identifiable concerns. Due to the extremely limited time available to consider and draft workable replacements before the application of the sunset clause, and the lack of parliamentary oversight and public consultation, we must focus on those issues if we want the Government to change the direction of the Bill. The Government have said that they are committed to maintaining environmental protections. The right hon. Member for North East Somerset said that

“the Government is committed to maintain all the environmental protections that currently exist and met a number of the environmental lobby groups to confirm this”.

That quote was from an earlier time but I think he just repeated himself. There is no guarantee—it his just words on the record, and he is no longer a member of the Government.

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[Alex Sobel]

There is a point about REACH—the EU regulation concerning the registration, evaluation, authorisation and restriction of chemicals—which was mentioned in the Bill Committee, but I want to give other Members time to make their speeches, so I will take on the hon. Lady’s points and I am sure others will pick them up later in the debate.

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

rose—

[Alex Sobel]

As I have mentioned the right hon. Gentleman twice, I will give way to him.

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

I am very grateful. I just want to clarify a point. It is not my word that has any significance in this; it is a Dispatch Box commitment, by which Governments tend to be bound successively. I would point out that, on legislative reform orders, this Government have tended to follow the Dispatch Box commitment given by Paul Goggins when he was a Labour Minister. Dispatch Box commitments are important.

[Alex Sobel]

I look forward to repeating the words of the right hon. Gentleman and the Minister on the Treasury Bench in December this year, to see if that is true. Only time will tell. Maybe my poor level of trust might be wiped away or eroded, but I doubt it.

I will conclude, to give others more time. The Bill as it stands today gives us no protections and is a charter for a bonfire of rights and protections that the public not only hold dear but need in order to breathe clean air, drink clean water and ensure that our countryside is not ravaged by destruction and extraction. That is why I am supporting our Front-Bench Members and the amendment tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Walthamstow (Stella Creasy).

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Davis]

If the hon. Lady had given me 30 seconds, I would have made exactly that point. I agree with her. This morning, or last night, we had No. 10 rushing to brief the papers and to write to us saying that the Bill will not remove existing rights and protections, which is plainly not true, and that it will not impinge on environmental rights and so on. That demonstrates what a great hole there is in the middle of this legislation. If those matters were covered in the law, we would not need to have that assurance. All of the non-governmental organisations that are concerned—I do not agree with all of them—would not have had to have their say either.

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

I am very grateful to my right hon. Friend for giving way, because I, too, am very much in favour of parliamentary scrutiny and things being done properly. Everything that is covered by this Bill came in by a secondary measure and therefore it is proportional. Primary legislation is not within the scope of the Bill. If anything that came out of Europe came through in primary legislation, it will have to go through consideration on the Floor of the House. Unless my right hon. Friend is against secondary legislation altogether, I do not quite understand why he finds this Bill so shocking.

[Mr Davis]

I am sorry, but two wrongs do not make a right. The reason why I did not like the European Union was precisely what my right hon. Friend has just described. We had things almost de facto imposed on us. We went down an SI-type route to do things that I thought were important enough to justify discussion on the Floor of the House. The depletion of debate on the Floor of the House, mostly in the years before he came into the House, was one reason I was a Brexiteer.

We have approached this issue in a different way in other respects. Let us imagine that we are talking about 4,000 pieces of law, regulations or whatever. In truth, probably 90% of that may be clunky and may not work very well, but there is one thing in the Bill that I approve of, which is dealing with the superiority of European law—taking those priorities out of it. That is sensible. Once we have dealt with that, things will broadly work and will not justify a rush at this exercise. Let me explain very briefly what I think the consequences of that will be. I said that it is not democratic, but it will also be inefficient and possibly incompetent. I give the House, as a demonstration of this, what we did on 3 March 2020. You may remember, Mr Deputy Speaker, that that was the day that we gave the Government all sorts of powers under the emergency Coronavirus Act 2020. If we look, we can see how many errors were made in governing the country over the next six months, until we corrected that Act. If we do not bring a Minister to that Dispatch Box to justify what they are doing, the quality of the decision goes down, and that is dangerous when we are talking about measures as important as these.

The right approach is the one that we have actually taken in some areas. For example, we are rewriting the General Data Protection Regulation under a digital Bill. We are rewriting Solvency II and other financial measures under primary legislation, and the same is true for some procurement work. We should be doing similar things with some other software elements and biomedical rules. That is the way to do it: pick off the 10% or the 5% that really matter—that make 100% of the difference—and do that properly, on the Floor of the House, and not by remote control on a ministerial diktat in an SI Committee upstairs.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

First, may I congratulate the Minister for Industry and Investment Security, my hon. Friend the Member for Wealden (Ms Ghani), on her brilliant performance today and on taking on this Bill and driving it through? I will now confess to this House that a year ago, as Leader of the House, I thought it was going to be impossible to get this Bill done, written and ready for Parliament. I know I am not meant to mention people in the Galleries, Madam Deputy Speaker, but I hope you will indulge my saying that some of the Bill team are there and they were fabulous. They made the impossible happen and they deserve great thanks, because this is about restoring British law, with the common law replacing European law.

The Bill is a tidying-up law, but it is of great constitutional importance. It has been sent from this House with technical amendments from the Government but no fundamental amendment. I hope that the other place will note that carefully; the Bill goes with a strong democratic mandate and a wind behind it. It is one of the really important completions of Brexit and the people who oppose it are, in their hearts, the ones who opposed Brexit all along. The Bill is a reclamation of democracy, of parliamentary sovereignty and of our proper law.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)]

I call the SNP spokesman.

Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill

Jacob Rees-Mogg Excerpts

Consideration of Lords amendments
Wednesday 24th May 2023 Commons Chamber

[Alyn Smith]

I will choose my words: the hon. Member is right in what he says, but he misses the point that we have left the EU and that did not apply from that point onwards. What he says was correct about two years ago, but what I am saying is correct now. It is open to this Parliament to revoke any piece of legislation wherever it came from. This Bill is borne of malice rather than being a constructive blueprint for the UK’s future.

[Mr Jacob Rees-Mogg (North East Somerset) (Con)]

The hon. Gentleman has just correctly said it is open to this Parliament to repeal any European law; that is exactly what this Bill does. It is not malice; it is just using the power we took back.

[Alyn Smith]

Can anybody explain to me what additional power, focus or agenda this Bill gives to the power that exists already by this Parliament being sovereign—that is not my worldview, but it is the worldview of many Members? I do not see this as necessary.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

The Bill spells potential disaster for the environment and for working people. It sets out exactly what is wrong with the way we write and pass laws. For that reason, I will vote against it. I support the Lords amendments to stop the power grab, and Lords amendments 15, 6 and 42 to protect our vital environmental regulations. The Bill should not condense power into the hands of Ministers. We should have a say in this place about what laws we want to throw on the scrapheap.

May I begin by congratulating my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Mid Dorset and North Poole (Michael Tomlinson) on the exceptional elegance with which he put forward the case this afternoon? I understand now why members of his profession take silk, because it was certainly a silken performance. I reiterate my thanks to and admiration for the Bill team, which I mentioned on Second Reading. I think my hon. and learned Friend would agree that he has worked with one of the finest Bill teams with which Parliament has had the pleasure of bringing forward legislation in recent years. The team was completely on top of a difficult subject from a very early stage.

Those are not all the nice things I will say at this stage, but I will say how much I regret the Government’s amendment in the House of Lords to reverse the whole basis of what the Bill is trying to achieve. The Bill aimed to achieve a balance whereby EU law would go rather than stay. Now, the balance is that EU law will stay rather than go. There are 587 laws in the new schedule that are going. There is no way that my hon. and learned Friend can think that they are serious—they are trivialities of remaining EU law that have been dusted off and found to make a reasonable number.

When the Secretary of State told people she was thinking of taking this approach, she indicated that there might be some important repeals in that list. There is virtually nothing of any importance in that list. Fishing, as far as countries with which we do not have particular relations is concerned, is utterly trivial, with details on anchovies—all sorts of things that do not matter have been put in the schedule. That is a failure by His Majesty’s Government. They ought to have been looking at which things we could put in it that people already know need to be repealed.

I would elucidate that point by saying that over the last couple of days, we have heard that the Government have come to the conclusion that things can be done to help the wine industry. Dare I say, those were known a year ago? They are not novel. DEFRA has been sitting on them for that year. It could have brought them forward and included them in the revocations in the Bill to give us something solid and practical that would have been beneficial in the next few weeks, rather than something that merely deals with old hat, the passé, the gone and the mainly forgotten.

[Simon Hoare]

May I begin by wishing my right hon. Friend a very happy birthday?

I have a huge amount of sympathy, as I think most Members do, with the argument that a lot of that stuff could have been done. But last year, post covid, we had Ukraine and a huge amount of political instability in this place, with changes of Ministers more often than most people change their socks—sometimes within a couple of weeks. The idea of trying to get the job done in that atmosphere and environment of huge change, instability and uncertainty, undermines his point that it was a wasted year.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

I am rather worried about the air fresheners that my hon. Friend must need in his household if he changes his socks only once a fortnight. I am afraid that the Government’s argument that “We cannot do it because we have not put the effort into it” is particularly weak. With ministerial drive—and it has to be said, with some very good civil servants in some of these areas—it is possible to get things done. A £4 million contract has been given to a law firm to help take the Bill further and faster. I think that “We can’t do it, it’s all far too difficult” is a worse argument than saying “We do not want to do it” in the first place, which may be closer to the truth.

[Simon Hoare]

Either I was not clear or my right hon. Friend is deliberately misinterpreting my point, because that was not the point I was making. It is not that it could not be done, but that there was a reason why it was not done, and that was the chaos and confusion of last year. Those are two entirely different things.

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

The point my hon. Friend misses is that there is still some time between now and the end of the year. This work could be pushed through if there were the desire to do it.

This Bill is a tremendous missed opportunity. It is a missed opportunity not because of Brexit per se. It is not a missed opportunity because those of us who voted for Brexit expected the will of the British people—expressed in 2016 and 2019—to be pushed forward, although that is important. It is not a missed opportunity because the unelected House has decided to try and block a Brexit-related reform, as it has consistently done. Interestingly, the amendments passed in the unelected House are all designed to frustrate the progress of the Bill and its operation, and are, by and large, although not exclusively, supported—lo and behold—by people who never wanted Brexit in the first place. It is noticeable that the overwhelming majority of people in this House who do not want the full revocation of EU laws always opposed Brexit. However, it is not about that. The missed opportunity is in not achieving supply-side reforms that would get growth for the UK economy.

We had the Prime Minister at the Dispatch Box this morning—the Leader of the Opposition missed a trick here—saying how marvellous it was that the IMF had said the UK economy would grow by 0.4%. Now, I happen to think that the IMF is absolutely useless and that its forecasts are valueless—it gets them wrong the whole time—but the idea that 0.4% economic growth is a success, when inflation has only just come out of double digits, is not factually accurate. This Bill was the opportunity to get growth, but instead we are changing laws on anchovies. That seems to me to be pretty fishy, because there are other things that we could have done. That is the point.

The challenge that has been put down—it was put down by the Secretary of State herself—is what people like me would do instead. Well, there are a whole swathe of laws that it would be a good idea to remove. If we look at the EU’s basis for regulating, it takes a process approach rather than an outcome approach. This Bill was an opportunity, even with a cut-and-paste scheme, to move from a process approach to an outcome approach.

What am I talking about? I am talking about product specification regulations, of which there are dozens. No country does that; only the EU specifies products in that way. We are now keeping all those regulations, whereas we should have been getting rid of them and saying that what we want are safe products, which encourages competition and innovation and encourages us to import goods at lower cost from places other than the EU.

We should have been looking at the absolutely lunatic emissions trading scheme that we have. We heard from the hon. Member for Sheffield, Hallam (Olivia Blake), and Sheffield is famous for its steel. However, we have made life for steel producers in this country completely impossible. Why have we done this? Because we have very high energy costs and a mad ETS that then tries to wind round some subsidy to help lower producers’ costs. If we just had lower energy costs in the first place and got rid of the ETS, which came out of the European Union, we would do better. Where could we have done that? We were going to do it in the Bill until a Lords amendment was so unwisely brought forward.

There are also the working time regulations. It might be possible to say that some people in this Chamber, when dozing off while listening to speeches that are intolerably dull, are in fact working—it seems heroic that our Doorkeepers never doze off, considering some of the things they have to listen to. However, under the working time directive, hours when people are asleep count as work. That is an enormous burden on the NHS; it has been calculated that the working time directive costs the NHS £3 billion. We could have dealt with that in the revocations under this Bill, had the Government not lost their nerve.

What about new opportunities in food and the regulations that stop us having novel foods? You may not wish to eat novel foods, Mr Deputy Speaker. I do not wish to eat novel foods. However, if there is a market for them, surely the UK should be regulating in a way that opens it up. We had a Bill in front of us that, unamended, would have allowed us to deal with novel foods swiftly by getting rid of EU regulations.

[George Eustice]

rose—

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

Of course I will give way to the expert on foods.

[George Eustice]

I am grateful to my right hon. Friend, because he has made many references to the Department in which I was once Secretary of State. I have a great deal of sympathy for the argument he is advancing, and I do understand that he wanted to ensure that the concrete did not set around these EU regulations so that they just stayed in place. However, as he will know, I was a bit more sceptical than he was about the idea of a sunset clause.

In a Department such as DEFRA where 80% of the legislation is legacy EU law, there would be three broad categories. The first would be the trivial regulations involving olive oil labelling and so on, whose removal would require considerable effort but would not help business. The second category would be regulations that were a bit contentious; we would probably not want to do anything about them. The third would be the big things such as the habitats directive, which ought to be addressed, but everyone would say, “It is too difficult to do it just now.” I think it right to prioritise the bad law that needs attention, rather than getting bogged down in some of the more trivial laws when it would probably cost businesses more to remove them than to leave them in place.

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

It must be said that my right hon. Friend was an excellent Secretary of State who was enormously co-operative with me, when I was in the relevant role, in trying to get DEFRA to be positive about this at a time when, as he rightly says, it was carrying a huge burden of work.

The problem is that we cannot shy away from the difficult decisions. That is what government is about, as in the old cliché “To govern is to choose.” Nature Britain, or Natural Britain, or whatever it is called, has prevented 160,000 houses from being built because of the nutrients rules resulting from a decision made by the European Court of Justice in 2018. It is all very well for Opposition Members to say that we should keep every environmental rule we have ever had, but I want my constituents to have houses, and I want other people’s constituents to have houses. We should be making those choices and putting the case to govern. That, I am afraid, is at the heart of this: a lack of decisiveness, of drive, of backbone to get things done.

I agree with my right hon. Friend that there would have been some things that were difficult. That is why the Bill contained provisions to roll things over and to say, “If you can make a good case for why this must stay, it will stay”, but the default was that it would be removed. I have mentioned the nutrients problem, and the habitats regulations are another example of rules that stop us doing things that are environmentally friendly and would benefit the environment because there may be some habitat nearby. I had to delay a decision on using waste to provide energy because of the common seal. Well, the very name of the common seal demonstrates that it is common, and that we should not be worrying about it too much when we could do something that would be enormously environmentally beneficial. The habitats directive is too dirigiste, too continental in its approach to regulating how we operate and how our economy runs.

I have already mentioned novel foods, but what about the other advantages for a modern, knowledge-based economy? What about clinical trials? I cannot tell you, Mr Deputy Speaker, how pleased I am to see my right hon. Friend the Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Sir Iain Duncan Smith) lurking by the Chair, because he produced a brilliant report explaining how some of these things could be done. Why have they not been done? Did the Bill not offer a perfect opportunity for us to do them? Instead, people are appealing against rules relating to anchovies, and that really seems to me not to be the Gentleman’s Relish that we would desire. This is a loss of opportunities—an opportunity for economic growth, and also an opportunity to move away from the civil code approach to law to the common-law approach, which is fundamental.

We see this in other emerging legislation. I hope you will forgive me, Mr Deputy Speaker, for a brief digression. The monstrous Energy Bill is all about regulating rather than allowing. What the repeal would have done, had it gone through, was to allow rather than regulate. This is based on the principle that wise bureaucrats—I praised civil servants earlier—really understand how business can best operate, if only people will follow the rules of those bureaucrats. What we want, according to our tradition, is an approach that says it is legal to do something unless it is specifically dangerous.

[Sir Iain Duncan Smith (Chingford and Woodford Green) (Con)]

The taskforce on innovation, growth and regulatory reform report produced over 100 recommendations for the Government, but the big case it made was for moving regulation making from what is essentially a coded base and returning it to a common law basis, which—exactly as my right hon. Friend was about to say—is, “It’s okay unless it turns out that it is damaging.” That is how our courts work, and it is the best practice in the world. That is why we should have made that progress.

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

My right hon. Friend is right. That is what the Bill did until it was gutted and the key part of it was removed so that the basis is now to retain a law unless it is specifically removed, rather than removing it unless it is specifically retained.

Unfortunately that approach is getting worse. In October we will apply rules on goods coming into this country from the EU that are safe, adding costs to consumers in an inflationary era, which is what these regulations continually do. The fundamental problem—the suspicion that we can see people beginning to think about—is that of the 587 rules that are being repealed, hardly a single one changes alignment with the European Union. Is there, hidden away in the bowels of Government, some decision that we will in fact remain aligned with the European Union, possibly because of the Windsor protocol? Otherwise, why are we not repealing all those strange and unimportant things? Apparently we cannot get a dog bone from a butcher because of EU rules. Why has that not gone? Why have we not been allowed to bring back imperial measures, which have been promised for years? They are not the biggest reward of Brexit, but why are we doing these little bits and pieces in the 587 that are there? Why are we not making the changes that would have made our wine industry more successful and economic?

Unfortunately, the Bill is a great lost opportunity. The reason—the excuse—given is not that it is impossible or that we do not want supply-side reforms but the inertia of officialdom. Whether that is ministerial inertia or other inertia, it is ultimately the politicians who must take the responsibility. I am afraid that a lot of responsibility has been abdicated in these amendments.

[Layla Moran (Oxford West and Abingdon) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for North East Somerset (Mr Rees-Mogg). We agree on nothing but he makes his points very well. It is a help as I will be able to tell my constituents that, in front of the architect of the Bill, I made the case for why the approach was entirely wrong, and I shall do so. His speech reminds us that it was the plan all along to make food standards poorer, to attack the environment—not only to build houses, as in his case, but for other reasons too. At the time, the Government said, “Oh no, we’ll never make standards poorer”. Released from his ministerial role, however, the right hon. Gentleman is clear about the things that he wanted to do. Why on earth, he asks, do we not want to change alignment? The reason is that it is bad for the economy, and I will focus on that in my response to the amendments.

I disagree with the motion to dismiss Lords amendments 15 and 42. I agree with the statements made on Lords amendments 1 and 6. There was a useful exchange earlier in which Members clarified the specifics of the amendment tabled by Lord Hope. On the principle of taking back control, the Minister said that we had taken back control, but that begs the question: who does “we” refer to? That is still one of the biggest reasons why a huge number of my constituents care about the Bill.

It is worth reminding ourselves that Second Reading fell on the first day of the current Prime Minister’s premiership, the day when he promised to govern with “integrity, professionalism and accountability.” It is fair to say that promise has been utterly broken, especially given the behaviour of some of his Cabinet colleagues. He also promised to review and repeal all EU law within his first 100 days and, with the completely gutted Bill before us, we see that promise has been broken, too. It is a completely different Bill and a different proposition from how it began. Some of us are happy about that, and some are not, but I am pleased that it is a different approach.

When the Bill was first introduced, I and others felt it was ideologically driven, particularly the cliff-edge provisions that would have ended up in chaos. I said at the time that the provisions were “corrosive” and “unnecessary”. What we need now, above all else—post-pandemic and amid the war in Ukraine and the cost of living crisis—is calm. Members have spoken about throwing the baby out with the bathwater, which is exactly what this Bill would have done. It would have been a chaotic slash-and-burn approach, and I am pleased the Government have come to their senses.

I thank my Liberal Democrat colleagues in the other place for their work. Their exposure of the Bill’s potential damage through the reams of amendments they tabled has effected change. In particular, the Government have rightly made an amendment to eliminate the cliff edge for thousands of laws, to many of which we did not know whether the Bill would apply, which I have always found hugely bizarre.

I would hope that every Member in the Chamber believes in securing vital standards on, for example, sewage, although I find myself questioning whether every Member, indeed, does. It beggars belief that those standards were ever under threat, not least because of the result of the local elections, which were fought on such issues.

In introducing this Bill, what exactly was the Government’s problem with the Bathing Water Regulations 2013 and the Water Environment (Water Framework Directive) (England and Wales) Regulations 2017, which never went far enough—we would have gone much further—but would have protected our hard-fought bathing water status in Oxford. The fact there had to be a fight, taking up so much parliamentary time, is one reason why we felt the Bill took entirely the wrong approach.

More than 400 constituents have written to me about the Bill, and they are rightly concerned about what it might still do—I will come to the “still” point in a moment—to workers’ rights and environmental protections. One constituent said:

“I don’t understand how the government can promise to improve our environment at the same time as setting out a law that could lead to basic protections getting weaker.”

I could not agree more.

The Berkshire, Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire Wildlife Trust wrote to me about the Bill just this week and, although it welcomes, as we all do, some of the concessions that have been made, it is still concerned:

“We are in a nature and climate emergency. It is essential that the current level of legal protection is upheld and not weakened.”

There is still more work to do, and these Lords amendments, which the Liberal Democrats support, go some way to achieve that. Although many crucial standards and safeguards have been saved, thanks to the Government’s U-turn, the truth is that the Bill will hand Ministers, not Parliament, the power to meddle with them at a later date via secondary legislation, which means we need to remain vigilant on workers’ rights, sewage and the natural environment.

Should the next election result in anywhere near what the polls suggest, with the shoe ending up on the other foot, would Conservative Members trust the next Government always to get it right? Casting no aspersions, I do not, because I believe in parliamentary democracy. Even ideas with which I might agree benefit from scrutiny, a bit of prodding and other people’s experience, not least the experience of our constituents. That is why we support Lords amendment 42, which would ensure that if Ministers want to make changes to law in the future, a Joint Committee would be involved. I have heard those who have said that that is not the right mechanism, but do they disagree with the principle I have just put forward? If that is not the right mechanism, what is? I ask them to find one. We need a mechanism by which this House can bring our experience and scrutiny to bear, and, unfortunately, if it is not just a Joint Committee, it simply does not exist.

The Liberal Democrats also support Lords amendment 15, which provides a double lock on regulations that protect the environment or ensure our food is safe. It was put forward by my constituent Lord Krebs of Wytham, an eminent Cross Bencher who was the first chairman of the British Food Standards Agency. He will have constructed this provision thoughtfully and knowledgeably. For those regulations that will not be scrapped by the Bill, the amendment will ensure that Ministers cannot meddle with them in any way to lower standards. At the Dispatch Box, they consistently say—