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—