Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill

Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and Stella Creasy

Report stage
Wednesday 18th January 2023 Commons Chamber

[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.

Legal Rights to Access Abortion

Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and Stella Creasy

Monday 28th November 2022 Westminster Hall

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

The viable point is one that my right hon. Friend admits he cannot define, but there is a clear point of conception where there is a new genetic entity. It is unbelievably clear and straightforward. To say that there is some later date—it may be 21, 22 or 24 weeks—is not the heart of the argument. The heart of the argument is actually that this new life started at the point of conception. The tragedy is the 214,869 lives lost last year.

[Stella Creasy]

The right hon. Gentleman is being very generous with his time. Given the train of thought he is coming up with, would he support the right of women to choose to have an abortion were they a victim of rape or incest?

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

I think the destruction of life is wrong. I do not believe that we should say that a new life should be destroyed. I do not believe that that is the right of the state. I do not believe we can put it into a Bill of Rights, even if we were the United States and had a Bill of Rights of the same constitutional standing as theirs. The hon. Member for North Antrim is right. He said that Bills of Rights are usually about protecting and preserving and ensuring that people are able to get on with their life. This is about destroying life. This is the cult of death. It is the great tragedy of abortion, and it is considered normal.

The extraordinarily high number of babies that are destroyed is something that should sadden us all to the depths of our souls. The idea that we would protect something that is so wrong and ignores that second life, and that we should say that it is an absolute right on par with free elections, seems to me to be an absolute tragedy. I think this petition misfires. I think it is wrong constitutionally and much more wrong morally, because it prefers death to life.

Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill

Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and Stella Creasy

2nd reading
Tuesday 25th October 2022 Commons Chamber

[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.

EU Retained Law

Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and Stella Creasy

Wednesday 22nd June 2022 Commons Chamber

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. What we need is regulations that work rather than ones that require a lot of form filling. The Procurement Bill has been introduced in the other place, and that will replace 350 EU regulations with one British law. That is what we must be aiming at. We are not moving to the wild west. We are not going to have no regulation. However, our regulation must be understandable, simple to effect and accountable to this House. The best check on regulation is Members of this House coming forward and saying, “I seek redress of grievance for my constituent who is being harmed by this regulation.” The Minister at the Dispatch Box is then put on the spot and has to go back to his or her office and ask, “Why are we doing this to the Great British people?” That is how our democracy works, and that is how we must make regulation work.

[Stella Creasy (Walthamstow) (Lab/Co-op)]

The Minister is right that it makes a refreshing change from the practice of his colleagues that he came to this House first to tell us about the dashboard, but he might have tried to see whether it works on a mobile phone, because it does not. I know that he is not a fan of being able to simply charge one, but he might accept that most of the British public who want to use the dashboard will have one. No matter—with some assistance, I have been able to log on to the dashboard and I can see that on the list of items that he has put up for grabs are the length of maternity leave and the duty to pay statutory maternity pay. He said in his statement that everything on the dashboard “can now change”. Will he assure the thousands of women in this country who rely on the protections of maternity leave and maternity pay that they will not change? If so, what is the point of this? If not, will he be honest that it is really about reinventing the Beecroft reforms?

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

The dashboard worked perfectly well on an iPad, so I would have thought that it was not beyond the wit of Members of this House to get it to work. In many cases, the protections that we have in employment law in this country predate the European Union or we are ahead of the European Union. That is true of maternity rights, where we are ahead of the base rights in the European Union under our own law. To say, “Are we going to repeal bits that are not even EU law, but domestic law?” is missing the point of the statement.

Business of the House

Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and Stella Creasy

Thursday 23rd September 2021 Commons Chamber

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

I do of course praise my right hon. Friend’s constituents—they are some of the most civilised constituents in the country, and are brilliantly represented by my right hon. Friend, who always ensures that their concerns are highlighted—and I also compare them with what we must now call the hippie-crites: the people who have been blocking the M25, and who turn out not to be insulating their own homes while lying down in the road to inconvenience and cause danger to others. We know that a lady did not recover from a stroke as well as she would otherwise have done because of the delays caused, and of the risk caused to the police. I commend my right hon. Friend’s constituents for campaigning peacefully, respectfully and in a civilised manner. As he knows, planning decisions are a matter for the local council and are rightly made at a local level, but I am sure that what he has said in the House will be heard by the developer, who will want to maintain community support.

[Stella Creasy (Walthamstow) (Lab/Co-op)]

We know that the Leader of the House is keen to see MPs return to the Chambers of Parliament; and, indeed, the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority refused to fund appropriate maternity cover for me on the basis that people needed to be able to speak in the Chamber. In order to speak today, I have had to abandon my baby leave proxy vote—or else be reprimanded by the House authorities for speaking in the Chamber, which makes Parliament one of the few workplaces in the country where, when a new mother comes in for a “keep in touch” day, she is rebuked rather than supported.

I know that some in this place are not fans of mothers, in the “mother of all Parliaments”, but I am sure that the Leader of the House is not among them. Will he meet a cross-party delegation of MPs to discuss how we can ensure that everyone in this Parliament upholds the law on maternity cover and leave?

Business of the House

Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and Stella Creasy

Wednesday 20th May 2020 Commons Chamber

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

My right hon. Friend is absolutely right to refer to people with endowments and the difficulty that they face. Having spent a lifetime—before politics intervened—in financial services, I can say that there is never an obviously right time to redeem investments, so the difficulty would be the Government intervening and setting a new time and that time not necessarily being any better than the existing time. I think that my giving financial advice from the Dispatch Box would be singularly unwise, but I will take up his point with the Treasury.

[Stella Creasy (Walthamstow) (Lab/Co-op) [V]]

The Leader of the House has said that MPs being in Parliament will enable proper scrutiny. If that return to Parliament has to be physical, can he tell us what provision will be made for MPs and their staff who have childcare or caring responsibilities? I know that he is not a fan of the nanny state, but not all of us have nannies.

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

Not all have six children, either, which I am very lucky and fortunate to have. I absolutely understand, therefore, child caring responsibilities—all my children are quite young. The nursery in the House of Commons is open. Members of Parliament are key workers and therefore schools are available in England for their children. As regards MPs’ staff, they do not need to come back to Parliament. Speaking for my own staff, they are working extremely well and extremely hard from home. This is the first time that I have ever had the opportunity to thank them publicly for the remarkable work that they do for my constituents in North East Somerset. I am sure that many feel the same about their parliamentary staff, and they do not need to come back to the parliamentary estate.

Business of the House

Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and Stella Creasy

Monday 28th October 2019 Commons Chamber

[Stella Creasy (Walthamstow) (Lab/Co-op)]

I have to be honest with the Leader of the House: when, last week, Parliament rejected the programme motion but not the withdrawal agreement Bill on Second Reading, it was not an invitation to get quicker with programme motions. How can he publish a programme motion for a Bill that he says is going to go through all stages in the House in one day tomorrow but not the details of the Bill so that we can properly scrutinise it? Does he not understand that the biggest challenge that this House is giving to this Government is that we want to see the detail before we do the deal?

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

This Bill will be so short that it will be very easy to scrutinise in the limited time available. The Benn Act and the Cooper-Boles Act were both passed in a very short time and they were longer Acts.

Business of the House

Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and Stella Creasy

Thursday 26th September 2019 Commons Chamber

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

My right hon. Friend raises a matter of the greatest seriousness. The Electoral Commission is publicly funded and must be held accountable for its actions. To say that somebody has been referred to the police leaves a great blot on their reputation and ability to carry out their functions if they are elected to office, because there will be a whiff of suspicion around them. My right hon. Friend is right to say that any suggestion of a police referral must take place only when there is a high likelihood of success. This is more an issue for the Backbench Business Committee, but it is a serious matter.

[Stella Creasy (Walthamstow) (Lab/Co-op)]

I thank the Leader of the House for illustrating so beautifully why so many of us fought the concept of Parliament being prorogued and the recess. By setting a date for Second Reading of the Domestic Abuse Bill, he proved that there is business across the House that people want to move forward and work that we could be doing in this place that our constituents would value. Last night I raised the fact that the Government have missed an important reporting deadline in their work to tackle abuse against women, in particular a report to the UN on addressing the elimination of all forms of discrimination against women. When will we see that report from the Government, and when does the Leader of the House envisage that the Committee stage of the Bill will take place? Given widespread support for the Bill in its current form, will he commit to the Committee stage being held on the Floor of the House, so that we can all contribute to making this a country where everyone is safe?

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

I am very pleased that the hon. Lady welcomes the Government’s schedule of business for next week. As I said yesterday, the Domestic Abuse Bill would have been a major part of the Queen’s Speech had it been introduced then instead of next week, and the Government are particularly and singularly committed to it. This important Bill will be brought forward to show the Government’s intent, and I think the speed of its passage will be no faster or slower if it comes next week than were it to have been included in the Queen’s Speech.

Business of the House

Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and Stella Creasy

Wednesday 25th September 2019 Commons Chamber

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that very important point. It is an unprecedented offer. It is available for a limited time only. It is like one of those offers in supermarkets. I cannot promise it will be there forever, but it is currently available, but what has happened so far? What have we heard from these people who say they want an election? Absolutely nothing. By their fruits ye shall judge them.

[Stella Creasy (Walthamstow) (Lab/Co-op)]

It may have taken 21 minutes for moderate language to be lost, but it has taken even less time for the brief moment of—perhaps—pride that everyone in the Chamber will have felt about the sense of certainty about why we are all here, and the need to engage in decent debate and make progress, to be lost.

This piece of paper sends a strong message to every victim of domestic violence in the country: the message that yet again, when it was possible to use time in this place to do something decent and right on which there was cross-party consensus, the Government have said no. Indeed, last week, because the House was unlawfully prorogued when the Government missed an important reporting deadline for the United Nations on progress in addressing the elimination of all forms of discrimination against women, it was not sitting to hold them to account.

May I ask the Leader of the House to do something decent tonight? May I ask him to tell domestic abuse victims that we will have this legislation—that we will not be messing around with jolly japes about taking time off and asking for votes of no confidence, but will put their rights on our agenda? I tell him now that if he does not do that, we will.

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

I think that the hon. Lady has overstated her position. That Bill was going to be a major part of the Queen’s Speech. It is a Bill to which the Government are deeply committed, and to which the Prime Minister is personally committed. It is of great importance.

When we talk about good will across the House and about moderate language, it is worth assuming that, actually, we all have good intentions. We may not always do things in the same way, and we may not have the same philosophy, but this Government have every possible intention of doing everything that they can to stop domestic violence. That is a priority for the Government. The hon. Lady shakes her head; if there is no reassurance that I can give her, why does she ask the question?