Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill

Lord Hacking Excerpts

Report stage
Wednesday 17th May 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

No, I will not let the noble Baroness intervene. She spoke at length.

I spoke yesterday evening on a regret Motion on magistrates’ courts sentencing and afterwards I was told by the Minister very politely—clearly, it was not the Minister sitting with us now—that I had spoken completely off topic. Therefore, I am hoping to be a bit better today.

This group is full of very good amendments; I support them all, and they have all been very well introduced. I am concerned in particular about air and water. In their whole 13 years the Government have done barely anything to clean up our air, and now they are expecting us to wait decades to clean up our water as well. I simply do not understand why they cannot take these basic requirements for human life seriously. I personally would be happy to vote on all these amendments, and probably thousands of others as well.

The Government have to make a clear commitment that they are not going backwards on clean air—although we do not have clean air yet—and that they are not going back on any regulations about cleaning up our air and water. I expect the Minister to make a clear commitment on that today. It is absolutely crucial. None of the things we are throwing out today will actually matter. I was assured earlier that the Government are not being “evil” in throwing out these particular ones and that they are in fact probably fairly benign, but I am not terribly confident about that. I therefore hope that the Minister can explain that they are not going backwards. Of course, I support Amendment 76.

[Lord Hacking (Lab)]

My Lords, I will not get into the debate with the noble Baroness, Lady Foster. The fate of the Bill and how it is here has been correctly described by my two noble friends.

I endorse particularly what the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope, said a few minutes ago. He said that this is an impossible task on Report and that it surely should not have been inflicted upon us. Indeed, the Bill should never have been inflicted upon us. A sensible course, which was the earlier position of the Government, was to let all EU legislation lie where it lay, and if there were a problem with any of it, to bring it to the forefront and deal with it. However, that is all history. What we are having to deal with now are the amendments that the noble Lord, Lord Callanan, has introduced into Schedule 1.

I took the trouble—there was not much time to do so—to read through all 111 pages of the explanatory spreadsheet as best I could. There was an immediate difficulty about that, because the regulations are not listed in the same order as they are in the Bill. That was an unnecessary complication when trying to check through. I noted that, time and again, the explanation, the “reason for revocation”, to use the exact words, reads that this regulation

“is no longer in operation, or is no longer relevant to the UK”.

That description and justification of these 928—in my arithmetic—regulations appear time and again. It must have occurred 100 times as I read it, and possibly 200, and the latter figure is the likely one. The big question is: if this has all been properly researched, is the particular regulation

“no longer in operation, or … no longer relevant to the UK”?

It must be one or the other.

My particular reason for looking through the spreadsheet was to look at what is happening to two sets of regulations, both of which I referred to on our first day on Report. I refer to the Habitat (Salt-Marsh) Regulations and the Civil Aviation (Safety of Third Country Aircraft) Regulations 2006. I could not find the latter regulation at all. I do not know where it was, but I could not see it when going through the 111 pages. The Habitat (Salt-Marsh) Regulations appeared a number of times on a number of pages, all separate and quite disconnected from the original order. I did that because I thought they were rather important environmentally. The first time they appear, they are described as being

“on agricultural production methods compatible with the requirements of the protection of the environment and the maintenance of the countryside”.

I thought that was central and something we should be thinking about. Yet, time and again, a feeble and inadequate “reason for revocation” was given.

I have to say frankly to your Lordships that this is a futile exercise, an exercise we should not have been asked to carry out, and I greatly regret that we are.

[Lord Wilson of Dinton (CB)]

My Lords, as a former head of the Civil Service, I feel bound to say that the criticisms of the Civil Service which have been made are ill-judged and grossly unfair. The Civil Service will ride out these criticisms—it has a thick skin, it will put its head down and go on doing its duty—but there is a serious worry underneath this debate.

It took us 10, 15 or 20 years to join the Common Market/European Union. It was only reaching the Home Office when I became Permanent Secretary in 1994. It will take us 10, 15 or 20 years to leave the European Union. Brexit, whatever your views on it, was undertaken without a proper appraisal of what it entailed—the work and the consequences—and we are living with it with this Bill. It is the most terrible experiment with government and an enormous learning experience for the Government. It will not be done quickly, and what will slow it down is not the Civil Service but the huge volume of work involved in it.

We are dealing with 50 years of complex, detailed regulation that has been put together in consultation with vested interests and public authorities and reaches into every household in the country. I tell Ministers on the Front Bench that there are things buried in these 500-and-whatever-it-is regulations that will embarrass them, will have unforeseen consequences and will go wrong. We are in an impossible position. We cannot look at this schedule in the detail required. It is not the fault of the Civil Service but the responsibility of the Government. The consequences of it will be severe and will take years. History will write this up. It will read these debates and think about the moral involved, which is, “Do the work before you implement the policy”. I will sit down now, but I wanted to defend the Civil Service. It is not its fault that this is such a terrible and deeply worrying mess.

--- Later in debate ---

I understand that it is a task and a half, but what has effectively been said in the last few contributions is that it was too difficult to do this when we decided to do it in 2016. How could we possibly envisage it? We could never do it, but we should not blame the blob because of course Brexit itself was impossible to do. So the British public are effectively being told that it is too difficult. The Bill, for all its imperfections, at least tried to say, “It’s about time, after all that time trying to block it, that we get on and take the instructions of the British public”. We should at least be humble enough to acknowledge that, as far as the British public are concerned, this has been an attempt at blocking their decisions. Let us take the Bill seriously now.

[Lord Hacking (Lab)]

Shut up.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

“Shut up”?—well done. I am just saying: let us get on with the Bill seriously rather than keeping on blaming each other. That was my point in the first place. Drop the smug tone.