Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill

Debate between Lord Hamilton of Epsom and Baroness Thornton

Committee stage
Thursday 23rd February 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Thornton (Lab)]

My Lords, I apologise for not having been involved in the Second Reading debate on this but I think it is worth noting that in the last couple of days the EHRC has issued a briefing note about its concerns about the Bill, particularly these amendments. I am here partly to read into the record some of the concerns that our Equality and Human Rights Commission has about the things that are contained in the Bill, including:

“The Bill covers legislation on limits on working time, the right to paid holiday, rights for temporary and agency workers, and parental leave. These are important legal protections for all UK workers which have specific impacts for people with certain protected characteristics under the Equality Act, such as sex and pregnancy and maternity”,


as my noble friends have already outlined. The EHRC also says:

“Any negative impacts on people sharing protected characteristics must be identified and mitigated by Government”


and that it is

“concerned at the potential impact of the Bill on workers with the protected characteristics of sex and pregnancy and maternity. This is because the workers’ rights at risk, such as maternity and equal pay, and parental leave, disproportionately affect women”,

as the Minister will be aware. It continues:

“There may also be negative economic impacts if the ability of women to participate in the labour market is eroded.”


The EHRC goes on to talk about the “legal uncertainty” that this will create within our labour market and our equalities field. So my question to the Minister is: how are the Government going to mitigate these risks?

[Lord Hamilton of Epsom (Con)]

My Lords, what we seem to be ignoring in all these amendments is that it is essential in this legislation that we do have a sunset clause, because if we did not, we would not know how many bits of legislation we are talking about. Ministers have been asking departments to produce all their EU retained law and absolutely nothing happened until minds were focused by the fact that the sunset clauses were put into this legislation. I am going to oppose every conceivable amendment saying “This bit of EU retained law should be retained” for the simple reason that the sunset clauses are absolutely critical.

What we must do is decide how we deal with all the EU retained law. It must be sifted, because some of it is completely irrelevant to British statute. I mean, we talk about movement of reindeer between—

[Lord Hamilton of Epsom (Con)]

I am not arguing that at all. I am saying that much of this legislation is going to be retained and some of it will be discarded. What we have to do is decide which legislation falls into which category. That is the critical element of all this. We cannot say that we should start retaining this bit, that bit or the other, because that is not relevant.

[Baroness Thornton (Lab)]

The noble Lord is being distinctly unsuccessful in convincing his own Government that that is indeed an important thing to do.

[Lord Hamilton of Epsom (Con)]

I am saying that we have to decide how we handle the whole bulk of EU retained law. If the noble Baroness had been here for Second Reading, she would have known that I actually raised this issue. We have to sift this legislation and decide what is going to be debated in primary legislation and what is going to be subjected to secondary legislation and so forth. You cannot generalise about all the legislation coming into one category or another—it will not. Some of it will be retained, some of it will be amended and some of it will be abolished altogether. There has to be some sifting system that makes the decisions on that. Therefore, we should not be pleading for individual bits of EU legislation to be retained; we should be saying that we need a system that divides it up and sensibly deals with it in one way or another.

That is why I am not going to vote for any of the amendments that go against the sunset clause, because I think the sunset clause is critical. We would not know how many bits of legislation we were dealing with if we did not have a sunset clause.