Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill

Lord Hannan of Kingsclere Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 6th February 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

My Lords, I think I detect a certain limp and enervated air in the Chamber, largely as a result of the length of this debate—I am the 57th and last of the scheduled Back-Bench speakers. However, I fancy that it is also perhaps a little because of, in the wider sense, the length of the debate. We have been arguing these points for six and a half years now, and one sometimes feels that it is as though we were in the trenches in Flanders, with every clause—every legislative proposal—fought over as fiercely as a clod of dirt in no man’s land.

The battle lines were drawn this afternoon in the early speeches, and very little advance was made. My noble friend the Minister—and my noble friend Lord Frost, who I suppose is the ultimate author of these proposals—set out the case for the Bill, which is that you cannot have a special category of law in perpetuity on the statute books and that this was always intended to be a contingent and transitional arrangement; and then the case on the other side was made eloquently from all sides, from people in every party and on the Cross Benches, namely that we should be careful about transferring powers from the legislature to the Executive, and that this constitutes a Henry VIII clause.

I have a lot of sympathy with that view. In a perfect world, we would not need to do this. However, the world we inhabit is not perfect: it is gross, sublunary and very much imperfect. I wish that we had gone ahead and deregulated at some point over at least the last three years since Brexit came into effect, if not the last six years since the referendum. We have been very slow to seize the regulatory and competitive opportunities afforded to us by independence. However, as I say, we live in an imperfect world. The real reason for the haste was given—with the frankness that a Back-Bencher is allowed and Front-Benchers are not—by my noble friend Lord Lilley: if this corpus of law is left untouched, people will make all sorts of claims about the likely impact of its abolition, and we will be left with this image of some kind of Dickensian workshop at the end of the day. The only way of anticipating and disproving that is to go ahead and show that it was not the case.

I had not heard much mention of Henry VIII before I came here but I have been hearing it a lot recently. It is worth remembering that every law here that is being scrapped is itself a piece of secondary legislation that came before your Lordships’ House out of a system which really does involve a massively powerful Executive and a very weak legislature. I was in the European Parliament for 21 years. As many of my former colleagues on all sides here will recall, the European Commission, extraordinarily, is both a legislative and an executive body, despite being unelected. It has a monopoly on the right to initiate legislation. Yet very few of the people who are complaining now about these Henry VIII clauses complained then, and nor did they complain about the mother of all Henry VIII clauses, Sections 2 and 3 of the European Communities Act 1972—whoever the mother of Henry VIII was. Oh, it was Elizabeth of York, the luckless lady who lost so many of her kin in the Wars of the Roses.

I suppose that it is a very good thing that we do now care so much about the supremacy of our Parliament. It would have been nice if more voices had been raised when we had this torrent of law imposed from abroad, but better late than never. It would have been nice, as recently as the lockdown legislation, if there had been a little more concern about the powers being granted to the Executive, but joy shall be in heaven more over one sinner that repenteth. If one of the great advantages of Brexit was that it would restore Parliament to its centrality in our national story, then it is already working.

Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill

Lord Hannan of Kingsclere Excerpts

Report stage
Monday 15th May 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

My Lords, I am very struck by the change in tone in this House. For years, we were told that the EU was an association of nations and that it was some abstruse, recondite obsession of Eurosceptics to claim otherwise; now we are told that it is a massive Jenga set and that, if we take anything out, the whole structure will come tumbling down because it is so deeply embedded in our domestic law. For years, we were told that we had extraordinary Rolls-Royce civil servants and that we were the best country at implementing everything; now it is suddenly beyond them to repeal the same things within a reasonable deadline. For years, we were told that parliamentary sovereignty was a 19th-century hang-up of interest only to eccentrics; suddenly—I welcome this—it has become a deep concern on both sides of the Chamber.

In accepting the previous debates in this House, the Government have done their best to reach a balance. They must implement the decision and have done so in a way that takes account of the objections raised on all sides by your Lordships. They deserve rather more recognition than they are getting this afternoon.

[Lord Collins of Highbury (Lab)]

My Lords, to pick up that point, we have heard in every debate a recognition that the Government have moved, which has been very important and welcome.

Some people want to continue a debate about Brexit. These amendments are not about that. That is why I totally support the noble Lords, Lord Hamilton and Lord Hodgson, who have previously participated in debates in this House on the nature of secondary legislation and how it has increased, and how it empowers the Executive. This is a unique situation; we have established the principle in the first group but, if we are to make changes—revise, reform and revoke—how will we ensure that the people with the responsibility to legislate have the responsibility properly to scrutinise and amend if necessary? People jump up and down and ask whether this is the right place to have a debate about secondary legislation. I am not too bothered about that. I am concerned about outcomes. Parliament should have the opportunity properly to scrutinise the changes and powers in this legislation. The noble Lord, Lord Lisvane, and the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope, have offered us a process in this Bill for those changes to be made.

The noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, has pushed me on numerous occasions, particularly when we debated his committee’s report, on whether a future Government would adopt this for statutory instruments. I cannot make that commitment, but I know that, if we adopt Amendment 76, it will establish a practice that people might see is beneficial for future arrangements. We can have a win-win situation. This debate is not about Brexit. It is about who has responsibility to legislate in this country. It is not the Government; it is our duty. That is why we should support Amendments 76 and 15.

Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill

Lord Hannan of Kingsclere Excerpts

Report stage
Monday 15th May 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Fox (LD)]

My Lords, my name is on both of these amendments and I am happy to support them both. The proposers will be pleased to know that I do not intend to speak for long, because I have heard two excellent speeches that set out the reasons why supporting these amendments is important.

The noble Lord, Lord Hendy, talked about the danger of back-door watering down of legislation. It may not be this Government; once this is in statute, it could be any Government going forward. We do not necessarily have to distrust the people we see before us—I personally do not—but we do not know who in future will be able to use these measures.

If the Government want to water down workers’ conditions, that should be done through primary legislation, straight up, and negotiated and scrutinised properly. It should not be put through the backdoor, which could happen here. Throughout the process of the Bill, the noble Lord, Lord Callanan, has said over and over again that it is not the Government’s intention to water down workers’ rights. By supporting Amendment 50, the Government can make sure that they are absolutely as good as their word.

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

My Lords, one of the worst objections that I had when I was a Member of the European Parliament was to the doctrine of the occupied field—the idea that you could never withdraw from a field in which you had once legislated. So the acquis communautaire can only ever grow; it could go only in in one direction. You could call it a ratchet, a one-way street or, as its supporters did, a bicycle that has to go forward, but the objection was fundamentally the same: it lifted certain issues out of the democratic field and made them immune to the political process.

For what it is worth, I have never had much time for the idea that our workers’ rights come from the EU—the EU did not travel back in time and pass Barbara Castle’s Equal Pay Act 1970 or Neville Chamberlain’s Holidays with Pay Act 1938—but, whatever view you take of it, these are precisely the sorts of issues that ought to be determined by our national democratic mechanisms and procedures. You can take the view, as the noble Lords, Lord Collins and Lord Hendy, did, that this is wonderful, helps employers and all the rest of it, which is a perfectly respectable position, or you can take the view that there comes a point where too many workers’ rights means fewer workers—but surely that is a debate that ought to be had here and in another place, not something that is effectively made invulnerable to the ballot box.

[Noble Lords]

Then support the amendment!