Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill

Lord Hamilton of Epsom Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 6th February 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hamilton of Epsom (Con)]

My Lords, I add my congratulations to the noble Baroness, Lady O’Grady, and my noble friend Lady Bray. They made excellent maiden speeches, and I am sure they will bring great expertise and enhance our proceedings in the future.

In 2018, we passed the European Union (Withdrawal) Act, which made it absolutely clear that we were going to review all the EU legislation. You would have thought that that would have been a signal to the civil servants of the noble Lord, Lord Wilson, to start sorting out what this actually meant and how much EU legislation they had in their departments. In fact, as far as I can make out, almost nothing happened at all. They thought, “Well, we needn’t bother about this. It will never happen and, anyway, most of us voted remain and we would quite like to rejoin the EU anyway.”

It is an absolute disaster that we are now having to impose sunset clauses in this Bill which has galvanised the departments to produce the EU retained law that they have. They are even sorting out in archives and so forth to bring this stuff out. The briefing that we got said that there were 2,000 bits of EU retained law. That then went up to 3,300; now we have heard today that it is 3,700. Most people think it is going to top out at 4,000. I only hope they are right, as it seems to me that there is no limit to the amount that this number might grow.

When we come to review it, it seems to me that there are a number of options in front of the Government. We could retain the laws from the EU and, presumably, it would be pretty uncontroversial with most of your Lordships in this House if we retained the law intact and unamended.

We could repeal some of the law. As my noble friend Lord Callanan said last week, some of the bits of EU law involve—and the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, made light of this—movement of reindeer between Denmark and Sweden. That is of no concern to this country whatever. What we need to know is how many more bits of legislation there are which are as irrelevant as reindeer in Denmark. I would ask my noble friend to give us the percentage. But I am afraid that, as he does not even seem to know the number of bits of EU law there are, the chances of him knowing the percentage that are completely irrelevant to this country probably are not very great.

Other bits that we would want to repeal are ones where EU provision is actually less than what we provide already in this country in our legislation. Presumably, that would be relatively non-controversial if it could be proved that we make greater provision for workers’ rights or whatever than under the EU law. If we follow the suggestion from my noble friend Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts to somehow filter this stuff, then it would be quite possible to say that it could go through under a statutory instrument because it would be basically non-controversial.

We then come on to the more difficult areas where we are revising legislation to bring it up to date. They are technical changes. As we well know, technical changes can be a number of different things. They can be very dramatic changes or just genuinely technical, and that is why once again I support my noble friend’s suggestion. We have to filter out genuinely technical changes from those that are not.

What is very bad news about this legislation that we have in front of us is that it enables Ministers to completely change legislation altogether, and that is something that we did not vote for in the referendum. When we wanted to get our powers back, we certainly did not say, “We will bring undemocratic edicts from Europe and enhance the power of Ministers and increase the powers of the Executive.” That is not what we are here for and not what we should be voting for.