Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill

Debate between Jeremy Wright and Alyn Smith

Consideration of Lords amendments
Wednesday 24th May 2023 Commons Chamber

[Sir Jeremy Wright (Kenilworth and Southam) (Con)]

I understand the hon. Gentleman’s point that this House can repeal any legislation it wishes, but we are discussing amendments that have come to us from the other place, not the principles of the Bill. Those amendments, including some that he is speaking to, add friction to the process of this House doing its normal work of passing subsequent legislation that may change the reality of previous legislation. If the hon. Gentleman is in favour of the House going about its normal business, would it not be right to reject the amendments he is referring to?

[Alyn Smith]

Finally, we have a substantive point about the Bill. I want this House to give the normal legislative scrutiny to subsequent changes to the law, wherever they come from. This Bill hands considerable extra power to the Government to do that over retained EU law, without that scrutiny. We support the measures on the devolved Administrations and the future sifting committee not because they bring more friction to the process, but because they insert back into the system some safeguards that the Bill would otherwise bypass. I think that is a legitimate position.

I have said we do not like the Bill or what it does. We are concerned that vast swathes of rights that people have come to rely on—on environmental standards, labour standards and much else besides—are open to deletion without that scrutiny. We do not like the way it proposes to do it. Even with the amendments, the Bill hands far too much power to the Government to delete provisions we all rely on, particularly in relation to the devolved settlement.

If colleagues are not aware that the Scottish Parliament has in the last couple of hours withheld legislative consent to this Bill, they should be. It is not consenting to this legislation. The Parliament of Scotland has done that; it is not an SNP thing. That is not to say that it will not be ridden over, but I suggest that those who were concerned about the democratic deficit in Brussels need to turn their minds to the democratic deficit that exists in the UK, because it is utterly unsustainable and will cause us all problems.

The fact that Holyrood has in the last hour refused legislative consent to this Bill gives us our lead, so we will oppose the Bill. Having said that, we are dug in as a serious party of Government to try and make it better. I accept the arithmetical reality of this House, so we will try to make it better by supporting a number of amendments, including the Government’s. We will support their amendment, Lords amendment 1, on the removal of the sunset clause; we think that is the acceptance of reality. We are not doing it with much praise for the Government, but we will support them in that aim.

Lords amendment 6 to clause 3 respects the devolution settlement. It makes it explicit that any legislative instrument scheduled for deletion in an area of devolved competence, whether in Scotland, Northern Ireland or Wales, should be deleted only with the consent of the relevant domestic Minister in Edinburgh, Cardiff or Belfast.

[Sir Jeremy Wright]

I am genuinely just seeking to understand the hon. Gentleman’s position on Lords amendment 6. The amendment does not define whether we are talking about devolved or retained competences. Is it his view that amendment 6 ought to apply to both?

[Alyn Smith]

That is a fair point. My interpretation of the amendment is that it should be in the devolved areas; otherwise, I do not think it makes any logical sense. I do not think members of the devolved Administrations should be able to withhold consent to other areas being passed. That is a reasonable position that I think we can agree on, and I invite colleagues to do so.

--- Later in debate ---

[Alyn Smith]

In a spirit of intellectual honesty, I will take that point on board. I hope their lordships will, too, because I suspect that this is not the end of the discussion. For today, we will support the amendment to make it clear that we want to defend the devolved settlement from a power grab. I suspect we will come back to this matter, and I am genuinely grateful for those constructive points.

Lords amendment 15, on non-regression from existing environmental standards, takes the statements of UK Government Ministers and various members of the leave campaign at face value that we will not revoke or pull back from our very high environmental standards, some of which derive from EU law and some of which do not. If we are not going to dilute them and there is no intention from those on the Treasury Bench to do so, let us bang that into the Bill and make it explicit.

Lords amendment 42 is an attempt to improve scrutiny, and I come back to the thoughtful points that were made about the possibility that it might introduce friction into the Bill. I would counter that by saying that the Bill goes around the normal legislative scrutiny by which we would deal with these things. I accept that the amendment is an innovative idea, but it is merited, and those on the Treasury Bench should take it as showing the scale of disquiet about the potential for a power grab with the Bill. We will support that amendment.

I will close; I was hoping to be briefer than I have been. We do not like this Bill. We do not like what it is trying to do or how it is trying to do it. From our perspective, it is not in Scotland’s interests, and it is not in Scotland’s name either, with Holyrood having refused consent. I urge colleagues to match their talk of democratic deficits through their actions. If by their actions they prove my party right today, Scotland has a different path to choose if we are serious about democracy in these islands. My party has a clear vision of Scotland’s best future; I do not see a clear vision of any future in this legislation. Scotland has a better choice to make.

[Sir Jeremy Wright]

I will focus on Lords amendment 1, Government amendment (a) to Lords amendment 1 and Lords amendment 42.

Before I do, I want to close the loop on Lords amendment 6. It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Stirling (Alyn Smith), who made an interesting set of observations. As he would expect, I do not agree with all of them, but if I may say so, he is engaging in this debate in exactly the way we ought to when considering matters this complex and important.

Just to finish the thought, the hon. Gentleman is right to say that their lordships may want to consider the matter further, as of course may we. I suspect that the noble Lord Hope, who I think drafted the clause in Lords amendment 6—that gives me considerable hesitation in criticising it in any way, because it is unlikely he has got much wrong—is intending a deal of weight to be put on the phrase

“as the case may be”.

Subsections (2) and (3) refer to a

“responsible Minister of a relevant national authority”

and to

“both Houses of Parliament, the Scottish Parliament, Senedd Cymru or the Northern Ireland Assembly, as the case may be”.

I suspect Lord Hope would say that that indicates that in the case of retained law, the body would be the House of Commons and the House of Lords, and in the case of devolved competencies, it would be the relevant devolved body. Before we sign up fully to the wording of the amendment as it stands, we should have clarity about that, because it is an important point in the hon. Gentleman’s argument about the reinforcement of the devolution settlement.

We do not want to subtly change the devolution settlement by accident. I suspect that the hon. Gentleman would be quite happy to change the devolution settlement either by accident or by design, and perhaps not so subtly, but in the context of the Bill, we had better be clear what we are talking about. For that reason, I certainly will not support Lords amendment 6 at this stage, though I will listen carefully to what their lordships have to say when they clarify the point.

There seem to be similar points to make in relation to Lords amendment 1, Government amendment (a) to Lords amendment 1 and Lords amendment 42. Were we to support amendment (a), it would restate, because the Government have already made their position clear, their new approach that rather than repeal a whole swathe of EU-origin retained law in effect by default, it would be better to list specifically those things that it is intended should be repealed by a certain point, such as the end of this year, unless further action is taken before that point. That is a much more sensible approach, although I will say it was somewhat inevitable, as others have said.

It was always inconceivable that the Government would be able to manage the process of considering properly all the retained EU law in scope of the Bill before the deadline of the end of this year. Therefore, the Government have done the eminently sensible thing and should be congratulated on doing so. I will certainly support Government amendment (a) to Lords amendment 1, because it regularises the position in a much more reasonable way.

The irony is that I rather suspect proceeding in the way originally intended would have led to the retention of far more retained EU law than will be the case under the Government’s revised approach. In fear of losing something vital, it is highly likely that the Government would have had to roll over—by default and before the deadline—a good portion of legislation, just to be sure they had not missed something. This approach is much more sensible and will rather better support the intentions of those who supported our departure from the European Union than the approach originally intended.

If the rest of Lords amendment 1 were passed by this House—not just the part that amendment (a) retains—we would introduce exactly the friction that I mentioned earlier when intervening on the hon. Member for Stirling. It would introduce a Joint Committee process and then debates and votes on the Floor of both Houses. I appreciate that, depending on which side of the argument someone is, they may regard those as additional safeguards or additional procedural friction, but it appears to me that it is more the latter than the former. That process is far more than is likely to have been done in the consideration of any of these laws when they were originally brought into British law. When that happened—my hon. Friend the Member for Stone (Sir William Cash) is the world expert on this—we would have seen that, despite their EU origin, the level of scrutiny and attention those laws got from Parliament was far lower than the level proposed in the amendment.