Professional Qualifications and Services (Amendments and Miscellaneous Provisions) (EU Exit) Regulations 2020

Lord Bradshaw Excerpts

Monday 14th September 2020 Grand Committee

[Lord Bradshaw (LD) [V]]

My Lords, I believe that the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh of Pickering, has hit the nail on the head with her questions. She asked them in a very unaggressive fashion and said that what is now being faced by many businesses is the fact that we will leave the EU without a deal. What I really want to know is what will happen to mutual recognition if we leave without a deal. Mutual recognition is vitally important in a world where people go all over the place to get their qualifications and expect to be able to use them across a wide area. If the UK exits from that world and does not mutually recognise qualifications, that will be an absolute disaster.

I was going to comment on the huge amount of legal work that has gone into drafting this statutory instrument. I have read it carefully all the way through, but it is very difficult to read. Yet the Government are spending time on this when whole sectors of industry, such as financial services, have practitioners who are not qualified swindling the population out of a lot of money. I wish that the Government had attended to this instead.