Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill

Lord Cormack Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 6th February 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Cormack (Con)]

If the Minister does not and my noble friend does, I will be glad to give him my support.

My Lords, I begin by congratulating our two new Members, my noble friend Lady Bray and the noble Baroness, Lady O’Grady. I want just to say to the noble Baroness, Lady O’Grady, that everyone in this country has reason to be grateful to her because, at a time when her party did not have its most responsible leadership, she was a model of temperance, pragmatism and good leadership, and we are all in her debt for that.

I am afraid I share the misgivings of those who do not like the Bill. That will not come as a great surprise to many people. Government by diktat and by deadline is never a good idea. It is particularly not a good idea when it marginalises Parliament in the process. What we face is a marginalisation of Parliament and an accretion of power to the Executive. Yes, individual Ministers may exercise that with discretion and good sense, but they should not have that power, which will be vested in them if the Bill goes through on this ridiculous deadline when there is no need for a deadline. We would have escaped the Irish protocol had there been a good acceptance that a deadline was not the best way to govern. We would have avoided many other disasters in recent years if we had adopted a similar process.

I say to my friends and colleagues who take a different view of the Bill, please, tomorrow, read the speeches of my noble friends Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts and Lord McLoughlin; one a self-proclaimed Brexiteer, who sees the constitutional difficulties in the Bill, and the other a former Government Chief Whip and a very good friend of mine who has done a wonderful job in his career in Parliament—I was proud that he came from my constituency. These are not ciphers; these are people who have strong, coherent views based on real facts.

Although my noble friend Lord Hamilton—I listened to him; he might just give me the benefit—tried to dismiss this Bill, it should not be dismissed. It is a constitutional monstrosity. That point was also made by my noble friends Lady Altmann and Lord Young of Cookham and many others around your Lordships’ House. We have a duty to parliamentary democracy. We do not have the final word, and nor should we; we are not the elected House. However, we have a constitutional duty.

Although people talked of great majorities in the other place, they were more or less on party lines—majorities of around 50 or a little more. They were not sweeping majorities, such as we have had with certain Bills before us, but majorities on party lines with people obeying the party Whip. As far as I am concerned—I have always adopted this stance throughout my 53 years in Parliament—a Whip is a guide. It is a request, not an instruction or order. I ask all my noble friends to remember that.

Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill

Lord Cormack Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 28th February 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

I think the noble Baronesses for their interventions and understand their depth of feeling. I should explain that this is a framework Bill, and it has been presented as such. The regulatory process will be gone through, and this House will then get a chance to look at the SIs.

[Lord Cormack (Con)]

I follow up the impassioned speech of the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher. We were given a very good example yesterday of what to do with a lousy Bill. Why cannot we follow that example today?

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

The noble Baroness, Lady O’Grady, mentioned asbestos as another example, and of course we dealt with that area yesterday: we have been going carefully through in a reassuring manner. I have been trying, in this transport debate, to respond helpfully where I am able to do so. I feel that this is not being appreciated, so I shall try to make some further progress.

--- Later in debate ---

[Viscount Stansgate (Lab)]

My Lords, this is a very unsatisfactory and frustrating Bill in which to take part. I am sorry that I missed most of the first day of Committee—I was on a committee visit—but I have listened to a great deal of the debate, and I was present in the Chamber on Thursday to hear the remarkably idiosyncratic triage description of my noble friend Lady Young of Old Scone. Like other Members, I listened to some of the exchanges on the previous group, which show that the Bill is being done in the wrong way and should be withdrawn. At the very least, the deadline should be put back several years so that we do not inflict upon ourselves the harm that we are about to.

I point out that the Environment Minister, who is with us today and for whom I believe there is an enormous amount of good will around the Committee, will nevertheless have a very difficult job to persuade the Committee that his department has the sheer capacity to process the large number of regulations that are covered by the Bill.

I will speak strongly in favour of Amendment 37, ably spoken to by my noble friend from the Front Bench. Of course, that list is very good—she said it was not exhaustive, and that is certainly the case. I add my voice to that of the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, who is not in his place but lurking, on the importance of the REACH regulations, for example. For Members who do not know, this is an enormous and substantial body of work that was in fact the largest piece of legislation ever considered by the European Parliament, for a very good reason: it is really important and covers such a wide range of areas. To adapt the phrase used by the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, it is about human health as much as anything else.

I would be happy to vote for Amendment 37 but, to be quite honest, even if I did and it passed, would it be the complete list of all of the environmental protections that we want to see retained? Would it fulfil the Minister’s own commitment, which I am sure that he will make from the Dispatch Box, that the Government remain committed to supporting environmental legislation? The best thing that the Minister can do, apart from withdrawing the Bill, is get up at the Dispatch Box and say, “Amendment 37 is very good and I support it, but it leaves out all of these other measures that I have unearthed by Google-searching the National Archives. If we want to be a Government and Parliament that fully support the environmental legislation that we are so proud of, I would like to add the following range of other matters to the amendment”. We could then perhaps make a better attempt at improving what is, I am afraid, a very bad Bill.

[Lord Cormack (Con)]

My Lords, I apologise for not being present for very much of the Second Reading— I had other parliamentary duties.

We have had some very wise, brief speeches just now, from the noble Viscount, Lord Stansgate, and my noble friend sitting behind me, who made a very good brief speech. Various things stand out. It is never good to legislate by deadline. When you are dealing with such a vast amount of regulations—some complex, some simple —to say that all of them have to be effectively expunged by the end of the year, apart from some that may be retained, is not a sensible way to behave. It places an enormous burden upon Parliament and places enormous power into the hands of Ministers.

I share the respect and affection that people feel for my noble friend Lord Benyon, whose father and I entered the House of Commons on the same day, way back in 1970, along with my noble friend, Lord Clarke of Nottingham, who is with us this evening. He was an environmentalist par excellence, and I know that his son has inherited his love for the countryside and his determination that it should be properly preserved and used.

Many of the directives listed in Amendment 37 are of great importance. We have to remember—I do not want to cross swords with my noble friend Lady Lawlor, who made one very good point about the selling of caged birds—that we do not have the best record in this country. On loss of species, you have to look only at what were very common birds when I entered the House of Commons, such as the starling and the sparrow and many others. Some of them are hanging on by a thread. The wonderful counterexample of the red kite is not unique, but not many fall into that category. It seems very silly to decide that the Bill has to go through in this form.

We had a very good example yesterday of the Prime Minister realising, after painstaking negotiation, that the protocol Bill, which many of us in this House opposed and were determined not to let through, should be dropped. He achieved more than that Bill would ever have achieved, and not only that but he achieved a wonderful improvement in our relations with our European friends and neighbours, which is a very good example to take.

Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill

Lord Cormack Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 2nd March 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Crawley (Lab)]

My Lords, briefly, within this important group introduced so ably by the noble Baroness, Lady Humphreys, I support in particular Amendments 34 and 55 in the name of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope of Craighead, with whom I am delighted to sit on the Common Frameworks Committee—noble Lords will be sick to death of hearing about the common frameworks by the end of this—which is under the marvellous chairmanship of my noble friend Lady Andrews.

As noble Lords will know, common frameworks are a voluntary way of bringing the nations of the UK together and being the building blocks for the new UK internal market post Brexit. The legal underpinning for these frameworks is EU-derived subordinate legislation and retained EU law, the very law threatened by the Bill and its insistence on sunsetting by the end of 2023. Along with other members of the committee, I do not wish to see a large part of our economic relationship with the devolved nations damaged or threatened by having a question mark, even if it is only a question mark and not definitive, hanging over these frameworks.

If we take as a quick example a snapshot of the framework law in the Department for Business and Trade, we do not know what is to become of the European Public Limited-Liability Companies Regulations, or the Statutory Auditors and Third Country Auditors (Amendment) (EU Exit) Regulations 2019, or the late payment of commercial debts regulations of 1998, 2002, 2015—and on and on. This is not exactly law to make your heart sing but it is vital to the smooth running of the UK’s new internal market.

If we take the framework law in the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, we discover that we have signed up to international conventions through EU retained law, but we are not sure—as we heard in our tutorial from the noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas—whether the SIs for them are to be included on the now infamous dashboard. Just to make things more uncertain, if that is possible with this Bill, some of this retained law has Northern Ireland aligned directly with EU law and some has not.

In the Department of Health and Social Care, we have secondary legislation on nutrition and health claims, on vitamins and minerals and on foods intended for infants and young children. They are a brave Government, in the words of Sir Humphrey, who would bring uncertainty to such law. The food safety and hygiene provisional common framework is again based on retained EU law and it involves Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales, as many of them do. It deals with issues raised by noble Lords last week in Committee such as food labelling, food contaminants, flavourings, additives and, very importantly for farmers in the devolved nations, animal feed.

The consumer protection enforcement authorities across the UK need certainty. If they are going to be able to bring perpetrators to book in the future, they need to know that all the legal pages are still in the book. The stand-alone SIs in this framework include everything from EU regulations on curry leaves to the Fukushima power station disaster to rice from China. That is not even to go through all the SIs arising out of them on jam and honey. I will do so if noble Lords would like me to, but I think we do not have the time—there are a lot of them.

Like Mr Micawber, we are hoping, regarding common frameworks, that everything will turn out for the best and all this primary and secondary EU-derived law will, if needed, be retained. But here is the rub: we hope but, as the noble and learned Lords, Lord Thomas and Lord Hope of Craighead, have said, we do not know. We do not know how law in scope is to be retained, reformed and revoked. We do not yet know all the law that is in scope. Perhaps at this very moment the National Archives is hunting for it down the back of the national sofa. We do not know where the DAs are in going through their devolved law to see what needs keeping and letting go. We do not know whether the devolved authorities have the time, the political inclination or the Civil Service resources, as noble Lords have said, for such a sifting exercise and to feed that data onto the dashboard. The Northern Ireland Assembly, as we know, is not even meeting at the moment.

We do not know whether the devolved authorities are mining the National Archives as the UK Government are. We do not know when the dashboard will be complete, or how we will know when it is. We do not know whether the upper limit of the National Archives search is every piece of legislation since the UK joined the EU. Maybe that is a department by department choice, in which case we do not know which departments are going back 40 years and which have decided not to.

Finally, as a Committee we were told in correspondence with Ministers that some retained EU law had been orphaned due to the machinery of government changes. I have no idea what that means—maybe the National Archives does, but we do not. No wonder we are getting urgent lobbying from across every possible UK sector. They want to know what is going on with this Bill and what it means for them. We can only tell them at this stage that we do not know. What a fine mess the right honourable Jacob Rees-Mogg has got us into.

[Lord Cormack (Con)]

And not for the first time. As the noble Baroness was talking about the dashboard, I could not help but just carry the analogy a little further. How much is hidden in the glove compartment?

This has been a very interesting debate. It was extremely well introduced by the noble Baroness, Lady Humphreys. What I want, above all, is a period of stability for our country. I want to feel that the United Kingdom is more united after these turbulent years than it has been of late. I took great encouragement from that happy photograph of the Prime Minister with the President of the European Union on Monday. I want to feel that we really are beginning to build a proper relationship with our former partners, but our remaining friends and allies. If anything underlines the need for that, it is one word: Ukraine.

I do not know, any more than any of us do, precisely what we are dealing with. The noble Baroness, Lady Humphreys, made that plain in her speech with regard to the devolved Governments. I happened to be one of those who fought quite strongly against devolution, because I thought it would threaten the integrity of the United Kingdom.

[Lord Forsyth of Drumlean (Con)]

You were right.

[Lord Cormack (Con)]

My noble friend interjects that I was right. Well, I may have been right, but I lost. We all lost. The fact is that we have devolved Administrations. Two of them are active and I devoutly hope and pray that the third will be active again very soon. It is very important that we make this system work. All we are asking for is for my noble friend Lord Callanan to adopt as his motto “festina lente”—make haste slowly—and make real progress as one does so.

The noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd, made a very wise speech. He laid out just the sort of complexities that we face. I just hope that this Bill, which I believe to be unnecessary in its present form, and premature, can be paused. I hope it can go into the same compartment that the Northern Ireland Protocol Bill has now gone into. That is what I hope for. I believe passionately—the amendment moved by the noble Baroness, Lady Humphreys, underlines this—that this is going to do harm to our United Kingdom and to our relations with our European friends and former partners. Neither of those things is in the interest of our country or is going to contribute to a stable future for it.

[Lord Wilson of Dinton (CB)]

My Lords, I am not sure I am wise to rise and speak, but I feel as a matter of honesty I must, in response to my noble and learned friend Lord Thomas, who spoke brilliantly.

Let me confess that I was Cabinet Secretary during devolution legislation and its implementation. I oversaw the implementation of devolution. I can confirm everything that my noble and learned friend said. It was messy behind the scenes. Noble Lords may not remember that the legislation went through Parliament amazingly easily and very fast. A lot of points that are being raised now should have been raised in different ways on that legislation. I was under instructions from the then Prime Minister Mr Blair that my misgivings about whether it would weaken the union—I shared them—should be set aside and we should use devolution as a way of strengthening the union, and implement it with harmony.

I had in place a structure with my colleagues in Wales and Scotland to oversee the effective implementation. There were endless points of the kind that my noble and learned friend raised from before 1999 and on the legislation, which we had to sort out. I had monthly meetings—these went on for years—with my Permanent Secretary colleagues from Wales and Scotland in particular to discuss and go through detailed issues which arose on the legislation on assets, personalities, quangos and everything, some of which were legal and some of which were not. I am pleased to tell noble Lords that I cannot remember them now. It is a blessing. I have tried to shed them, because they were difficult. But what I can say is that we dealt with them in the end with good will, good lawyers and great ingenuity. And we dealt with them—if I can confess it in the privacy of this Chamber—with a certain amount of fudge, because some of them were impossible to deal with without good will and pragmatism.

But I am certain that this Bill has overlooked a great deal. I am afraid that there will be more horrible loose ends for my successors to try to sort out. The amendments that the noble Baroness, Lady Humphreys, my noble and learned friend Lord Hope and others have put down are wise. The Government should allow themselves every scope for sorting things out for years to come, whatever the sunsetting clause says, because there will be awful problems to sort out.

Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill

Lord Cormack Excerpts

Consideration of Commons amendments
Tuesday 6th June 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

My Lords, I strongly support this Motion and I disagree with the noble Lord who has just spoken, because it is our job not to let things through that are actually dangerous or damaging for our constitution and for the British people. I think the Bill has a huge number of flaws. I know the Minister to be an honourable man and I am sure he believes what he is saying, but the point is that he cannot tell us that this Motion is not necessary and he cannot say he gives us all the reassurance: how do we know he is going to be in post within a few weeks?

And of course, then we have the next Government. One of the things that staggers me about the Bill is just how much power the current Government are giving into the hands of the next Government, which could of course be a Labour Government. Surely, when the next Government come into power, those opposite will bitterly resent the powers they have put into the Bill. Personally, I think it is a dereliction of MPs’ duties as legislators to allow this to happen, so I thoroughly support the Motion in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Anderson. I think we have to be very responsible here and say, no, we will not let this pass.

[Lord Cormack (Con)]

My Lords, “Do not take to yourself powers that you would not wish your opponents to have” is the substance of the noble Baroness’s speech, and I agree with that. I greatly admired the speech made by my noble friend Lord Hamilton at Second Reading. I admired his courage in putting his name to the amendment and I totally respect his view that one has to consider and judge how long ping-pong should go on. So, there is no disagreement between us on this issue, even though we were on opposite sides in the Brexit argument.

But I come down very strongly in favour of the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Lisvane, who, remember, is a very distinguished former clerk of the House of Commons and understands these procedural matters perhaps more than any of us. The noble Lord, Lord Anderson, called in aid the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, and we do indeed all miss his presence today and wish him a speedy return to full health and to vigorous debating in this Chamber. He has, perhaps above all of us, talked of the danger of Parliament becoming the creature of the Executive. That is to turn our constitution on its head, and it is something that none of us should be complicit in.

We do have a duty in this House, if we think the other place has got it wrong, to say, “Please reconsider”, and it is not in any way an aggressive use of our limited powers if we think their rethink, which did not take very long, has not been adequate. Therefore, I believe it would be entirely consistent with our relationship with the other place, and with our duty to Parliament, of which we are the second House, to say to our friends and neighbours along the Corridor, “We think you have got this wrong: you are giving power to the Executive which no Executive, be it Labour or Conservative, should have”. I do not want them to have it if they come into government, and I do not think it is right that we should have it. For those reasons, I shall support the noble Lord, Lord Anderson.

[Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)]

My Lords, I oppose the Motion in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Anderson of Ipswich. For what it is worth, I support the new iteration of Amendment 16, to which I put my name on Report, in Motion D.

I very much respect the noble Lord, Lord Lisvane, and indeed my noble friend Lord Cormack, but I think we are missing the bigger picture here. We are effectively asking the other place to invalidate a Bill, for reasons I will develop shortly, which it passed by 53 votes when the will of that House was last tested. As I have said before in this House, I think there is a danger of legislative overreach—of assuming powers and of imposing responsibilities and obligations on the elected House, fettering its discretion and, by so doing, interfering in its rights and obligations. Notwithstanding what my noble friend Lord Cormack said, yes, it is our duty and responsibility to ask the other place to think again, but we have already done that. It has thought again and debated the issue. I have to agree with my noble friend the Minister. He is far too polite to describe the approach outlined by the noble Lord as it truly is: extremely radical. He described it as a “novel” approach.

Let us think about what this Motion would mean in practice. If we are in the business of improving governance by scrutiny and oversight, unless we vote for a fatal Motion to kill the Bill—which is very unlikely, because the Opposition Front Bench would not support such a move—surely the logical corollary is that we want to improve it. The perverse application of the noble Lord’s amendment would result in quite the opposite. The opportunities to revoke and, importantly, to reform the caucus of EU retained legislation would be slowed. There would be a process of delay and obfuscation, and it would not be effective government. In fact, it would be a betrayal of the responsibilities and duties we have as the upper House in scrutiny and oversight. Indeed, even above that, the Motion would invalidate the very raison d’être of the Bill, which has to exist. The noble Lord’s amendment is too rigid. It is instructive, and it would assume the powers of Ministers. In some respects, it would make this House itself part of the Executive in a way that Amendment 16 did not, which was much more permissive, declaratory and flexible in seeking to get to the same objectives.

For those reasons of legislative overreach, inadequate scrutiny and oversight, and delay and obfuscation if we were to go down the path of this Motion, I respectfully ask your Lordships’ House to reject it and support the Government.