Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill

Lord Krebs Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 23rd February 2023 Lords Chamber

The lack of communication on what will happen to retained EU law across the board is creating not only massive uncertainty for businesses against an already tough economic backdrop, as we have heard, but real dangers for consumers and, in particular, for children. Does the Minister have answers to any of these questions? If not, why not?

[Lord Krebs (CB)]

My Lords, it has been a long day of debate and I will invite noble Lords to pause and think about tea—maybe the tea in the Peers’ Dining Room—and about one particular ingredient in their tea: milk. You may have milk in your drink or in the form of butter; you may even have a cream tea with clotted cream on your scone. Whichever of those you have, you make the assumption that the milk and the products derived from the milk are safe—and you are right to make that assumption. But it has not always been like that. Turning the clock back 90 years to the 1930s, an estimated 2,500 people a year in this country died of bovine tuberculosis, mostly contracted from drinking unpasteurised milk. Yet the Parliament of the time concluded that that risk did not justify introducing mandatory pasteurisation. It was not until 1949 that Dr Edith Summerskill, Parliamentary Secretary at the Ministry of Food, finally introduced the pasteurisation Bill. She said that pasteurisation had been prevented by “ignorance, prejudice and selfishness”.

Amendments 30, 39 and 146 are jointly in my name and that of the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, whom I thank. They are designed to prevent ignorance, prejudice and selfishness inadvertently or deliberately making our food less safe and of lower standard than we are used to. There is ignorance, because we do not know the precise number, nature and impact of the rules that are potentially being removed at the end of this year. There is prejudice, because, as the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, said, the plan to sunset is driven by ideology and not logic. There is selfishness, because ideology is trumping the protection of the public. As my noble friend Lord Kerr of Kinlochard said earlier, the reason our food is so safe today is a raft of legislation, 90% of which is derived from the EU. Without proper scrutiny and consideration, these protections could be lost.

Interestingly, the noble Lord, Lord Benyon, in a separate debate on food shortages earlier today, listed food safety as one of the three priorities for the Government. In light of that, I will quote what Professor Susan Jebb, the chair of the Food Standards Agency, said on 2 November last year:

“In the FSA, we are clear that we cannot simply sunset the laws on food safety and authenticity without a decline in UK food standards and a significant risk to public health”.


She also said that the FSA was facing “substantial headwinds” and “real challenges over resources” to scrutinise properly the more than 150 pieces of relevant legislation. According to the government department in charge of food safety and standards, the sunset clause is putting public health at risk. There is no point in the Minister trying to deny it, because that is what a government department is saying.

I declare my interests as in the register. As one of the leading retailers said to me yesterday, as soon as protections are lost, the criminals are keen to fill the gap. The noble Lord, Lord Rooker, who was also at one stage chair of the Food Standards Agency, will know as well as I do that the food industry is not totally clean. There are crooks around. This is starkly illustrated by what happened at Dover as a consequence of the lack of post-Brexit border controls. Last October, a 24-hour crackdown on imports from the EU at Dover revealed that 21 out of 22 lorries coming from eastern Europe contained a truly disgusting mixture of rotting raw meat kept at room temperature, mixed with products such as crisps, cheese and cake. This food was destined not for places where you or I shop but for cheap, independent outlets and markets where the most disadvantaged people in this country get their food.

My amendments take three approaches. Amendment 30 refers to the Trade and Co-operation Agreement. Amendment 39 carves out 14 regulations from the sunset clause. I also support Amendment 4, which we have already debated, and Amendments 20 and 38, which are similar or overlapping carve-out amendments. Amendment 146 in my name refers to the Food Safety Act 1990.

I will start with Amendment 30, which simply requires the Government to commit to abide by the Trade and Co-operation Agreement they signed with the European Union a little over two years ago. Surely that is not a big ask. I am sure that many noble Lords know the Trade and Co-operation Agreement off by heart. For those who may like a reminder, I will explain it very briefly. Chapter 3 of the TCA is entitled “Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures”, usually known as SPS for short. The term “sanitary and phytosanitary” may deserve explanation. Despite its name, it is not to do with the provision of bathroom appliances. The WTO puts it like this:

“How do you ensure that your country’s consumers are being supplied with food that is safe to eat —‘safe’ by the standards you consider appropriate? And at the same time, how can you ensure that strict health and safety regulations are not being used as an excuse for protecting domestic producers? …The Agreement on the Application of Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures sets out the basic rules for food safety and animal and plant health standards”.


The TCA that we signed with the European Union sets out seven objectives, which include protecting human, animal and plant life or health, enhancing co-operation between the parties in the fight against antimicrobial resistance et cetera, and enhanced co-operation with the relevant international organisations to develop international standards.

This simple amendment asks the Government to continue to adhere to that agreement, whatever it does with sunsetting in the Bill. I very much hope that the noble Baroness will confirm that the Government do intend to adhere to the Trade and Co-operation Agreement. If they do not, I will consider the counterfactual, which would in effect be saying, “I know we signed up in December 2020, but we’ve now changed our minds”. If the Minister cannot confirm that we will abide by the Trade and Co-operation Agreement, what does she think that the food industry, UK consumers and our EU neighbours will see as their response?

I turn to Amendment 39. It lists a series of EU-derived regulations that provide vital protections for food safety and consumer information. We have already discussed some of these, so I shall keep it very short. My list covers food additives, contaminants, health claims and nutritional information. The list is by no means comprehensive—as I have already said, there are more than 150 EU-derived regulations—but it makes the point. As we have heard in earlier debates, these are all things that consumers simply take for granted when they buy food. They would be shocked to hear that the Government might even consider ditching the protections provided by these regulations.

Amendment 146 takes a different approach. It aims to ensure that any changes to food law as a result of this Bill do not alter the protections provided by the Food Safety Act 1990. The Minister explained that she was involved in that Act, so she will be very well aware of what I am talking about. To summarise it, the Act covers all businesses involved in selling food; buying with a view to sell, as intermediates; supplying food; consigning or delivering it; and in preparing, presenting, labelling, storing, transporting, importing or exporting food. It makes it an offence for anyone to sell or process food for sale which is harmful to health.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Bloomfield of Hinton Waldrist (Con)]

We will give as much further clarification as we can.

[Lord Krebs (CB)]

I am sorry to interrupt the Minister yet again but I was pleased to hear that she has agreed to write to the noble Lord, Lord Fox, to clarify this question, which was asked by the noble Baroness, Lady Chapman of Darlington. Can the Minister include in that letter a couple of worked examples to fix this in our minds? When it is all very abstract—increase a bit here, subtract a bit there—what is the common currency? How do you combine the four or five different criteria for burden into a single unit? I am a scientist so I like to be able to measure things. If she could just give us a couple of worked examples in her letter, that would be great.

[Lord Harris of Haringey (Lab)]

My Lords, while the Minister is considering her response to that, may I say that the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, has just made an extremely important point? It strikes me that, when you are defining regulatory burden, you need to decide whether the regulatory burden on, for example, one very small group of businesses ranks the same as something that affects every workplace in the country. The calculation becomes vital if the Government are now saying, as seems to be the case, that the regulatory burden has to be looked at in the totality of all these regulations.