Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill

Lord Frost Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 23rd February 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Frost (Con)]

My Lords, I fear we are in for quite a repetitive afternoon as we work through proposals to exclude one law after another from this Bill.

I want to make a couple of broader points. First, we must remember what the Bill does. It defines a corpus of law inherited from the European Union and says that it needs to be reviewed by the end of the year. As a result of that review, laws will be dropped, retained or restated. There is an attempt being made to suggest that the only option is the first one—that all these laws that are an important part of our regulatory framework will somehow disappear and that people should be very frightened about that prospect. That is obviously not going to happen. This is a fiction.

[Noble Lords]

Oh!

[Lord Frost (Con)]

It is not in any way the Government’s intention to—

[Lord Clement-Jones (LD)]

How do you know?

[Lord Frost (Con)]

We know because the way that companies and employment rights are regulated cannot be changed overnight. I have no doubt that when the Minister comes the Dispatch Box he will make it perfectly clear that our intention is to maintain high standards in this area, and that is the approach that will be taken through this process. That is what is necessary.

Secondly, as many people know, before I came into this House I was a diplomat and a civil servant, and did other things. Under a Labour Government I ran the campaign against the working time directive, out of the Foreign Office. The then Labour Government did not like the working time directive and mounted what the then head of the TUC said was the most effective campaign against a piece of employment legislation ever. The Labour Government did it again on the agency workers directive.

Therefore, forgive me if I take with a pinch of salt the suggestion that the laws that we are debating, and each suggestion for an exclusion, are somehow a perfect emanation of the wonderful European law-making process. They are not, and the behaviour of the party opposite in the past on some of these specific pieces of legislation demonstrates that. The correct way forward is for the Government to review these laws en bloc in accordance with the provisions set out in the Bill and to come to a reasonable and appropriate assessment of them, not to give any of them quasi-constitutional status by excluding them from this review process. I am sure that is what the Minister will say, and we look forward to it.

[Lord Carlile of Berriew (CB)]

When the noble Lord made his transfer from diplomacy to contentious politics, did he expect that he would be coming to this House and suggesting that the practices that he had followed throughout his very distinguished career in the public services would involve excluding Parliament from a vast swathe of legislation when, as my noble friend Lady Meacher and the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, made clear a few moments ago, there are ways of doing this which do not exclude Parliament?

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Frost (Con)]

Well, I had sat down. Nevertheless, of course, most of the time that I was a diplomat and civil servant, this Parliament was excluded on most of those provisions. Once the working time directive or agency work directive or whatever had been agreed at EU level, this Parliament was excluded. What we are doing is now giving the Government—and Parliament, let us not forget, through secondary legislation—the power to take a view on these things, and that is quite right.

[Baroness Andrews (Lab)]

My Lords, it is quite extraordinary that the noble Lord says that Parliament has been given power. We have been given no power. He has been in this House long enough to know that we are excluded from changing or even challenging secondary legislation. We have no purchase on this Bill, other than by the process we are going through now.