Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill

Lord Jackson of Peterborough Excerpts

Report stage
Monday 15th May 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Finlay of Llandaff (CB)]

My Lords, very briefly, I too added my name to Amendment 16, so well introduced by the noble Baroness, Lady Jolly. I simply remind the House that, when we remove legislation and regulations, it can have unintended consequences. There is evidence that accidents happen. For example, if we abandon working time directives and regulations, when people are overtired their accidents can be fatal—and there have been fatal accidents. Let us not lose sight of the clear evidence of harms when regulations are no longer in place, because lost lives cannot be reclaimed or replaced. The amendment proposed by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope, provides a check mechanism for Parliament to look at regulations and allow scrutiny before things are abandoned. Therefore, although I do not anticipate Amendment 16 being pressed to a vote, I strongly support Amendment 2.

[Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)]

My Lords, I will speak—briefly, I hope—to the Government’s Amendment 1. I direct your Lordships back to the comments of the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, who is absolutely right: this Bill, in its current position on the Order Paper, is substantially different from the Bill that was considered by the House of Commons and at Second Reading by this House. If we are to properly scrutinise and analyse the Bill, and have proper oversight of it, we have to be cognisant of that fact.

Notwithstanding the comments of my noble friend the Deputy Chief Whip, where else are we going to acknowledge the very substantial and significant change that has come as a result of the Government’s announcement last week? It is a reasonable point to make. If this were any other Bill—any other potentially epoch-making primary legislation—your Lordships would be up in arms about the fact that we are rushing through on Report the Government’s amendment to Clause 1, which effectively rips up the Government’s policy on the Bill.

I defer to no one in my admiration for my noble friend Lord Callanan, the Minister. I worked with him in DExEU in the run-up to Article 50 and the TCA. He is one of the most gifted Minsters. He has obviously had a very difficult time in your Lordships’ House, putting a viewpoint that has not always been universally popular.

However, the wider context is very important, as put forward by my noble friend Lady Noakes. The Prime Minister did say that in his first 100 days as PM we would review or repeal post-Brexit EU laws. Indeed, that bastion of blue in tooth and claw Conservatism, the Independent newspaper, described the government retreat as a course of action that

“turns the logic of the bill on its head”.

I do not underestimate the task that we as a Government—or this House and the Government—gave to civil servants. In fact, the agency Thomson Reuters estimated in 2017 that 52,741 laws were introduced in the UK as a result of EU legislation between 1990 and 2017. Many of them of course were worthwhile and much needed, but many were about protecting boondoggle schemes, market distortions, oligopolistic behaviour and were designed to ossify market dominance, restrict the need for innovation and lock out more agile and dynamic competitors.

Notwithstanding that, I welcome the Government’s sincere endeavours to both review the regulations and to deregulate more broadly. But we have seen that 52,000 shrink to 600. Most EU laws will remain on the statute book, seven and a half years after in the EU referendum we decided to take back control and trust our own elected politicians rather than a foreign legal entity—in this case the European Court of Justice.

Ministers pray in aid the capacity and capability—or not—of civil servants to scrutinise, prioritise and audit so much of our retained corpus of EU law. But I saw, in my role as a special adviser in the run-up to the TCA and the Article 50 process, that with firm and principled political direction and drive, so much more could have been achieved with vision rather than capitulation.

In fairness, it is not solely the responsibility of this Administration. I concede in all fairness—it would be churlish not to—that the previous Johnson Administration could and should have legislated for a Bill in 2021 rather than last autumn. The Government have resiled from a well-understood political commitment, which voters supported with a strong mandate, and which passed, as my noble friend Lady Lawlor said, in January in the Commons.

No one ever voted for these proposals. The Government have picked a side: big business, senior civil servants, special interests, well-remunerated lobbyists and the ex-Mandarin cohorts ably represented in this House. Leave was the biggest vote in British electoral history, but that counts for nothing as opposed to the pearl-clutching vapours of big business, self-interest and shareholder value dressed up as defending parliamentary sovereignty and concern for “significant uncertainty”. Whither the vision of self-government, independence, democratic renewal and sovereignty of June 2016? Instead, we have the cold pragmatism and cynicism of a technocratic elite.

This has not been handled well by the Government. I refer in particular to the lack of proper scrutiny by the European Scrutiny Committee in the other place, and the failure of the Minister to properly attend to those issues.

I will finish by making reference to Schedule 1. We are offered the mere scraps from the table with the new schedule. It is not so much a bonfire of regulations but a damp, fizzing Catherine wheel. There is no fundamental interest in that schedule in the governance of our country.

--- Later in debate ---

[Noble Lords]

Oh!

[Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)]

I will have my say; plenty of people have had a say on the other side.

The disillusionment of people who supported Brexit in good faith is bad for democracy. People are beginning to ask, “Does democracy work?”

[Lord Hacking (Lab)]

My Lords, I will move the House away from the Bay of Biscay and back to this Bill. I tabled Amendment 7, that Clause 1 should not be retained, but I will not move it in view of the radical changes that the Government have brought to the Bill. I therefore easily support the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope, on his Amendment 2. However, I do so with a substantial caveat: that whatever decisions are made by way of advice from the Joint Committee. We must remember that the Joint Committee’s central role is to decide whether the item of legislation before it will bring about a substantial change to current UK law, although the Joint Committee will also bring other considerations.

Important as that is, this is only part of our duty; indeed, our duty is to the whole of the Bill and to the whole of the new schedule before Schedule 1. The Minister referred to 600 specified pieces of EU law, which are represented in the long list represented in the long list before Schedule 1. I have done the arithmetic—even though my arithmetic has never been quite perfect—and the total is 928. We have a responsibility for every one of those 928 EU measures.

I ask your Lordships to concentrate on our wider responsibility, such as whether there is a need to revoke a particular piece of legislation. Is it causing any harm? There are a number of other tests which your Lordships should apply, but which will not fall under the remit of the Joint Committee. I draw noble Lords’ attention to the six sets of Habitat (Salt-Marsh) Regulations stretching over pages 24 and 25 of the Marshalled List. The question, for which we have a responsibility to answer, is: are they defective? If so, how?