Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill

Lord Rooker Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 6th February 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Rooker (Lab)]

Your Lordships’ House has been sent the Bill by the elected House of Commons to, in effect, snuff out the elected House of Commons from its role in primary legislation and to subordinate Parliament to Ministers in respect of nearly 4,000 items of legislation, in which the elected House will have no role. I was not sent to this House in 2001 to oversee the dismantling of the accountability of the Government to Parliament in order to make Parliament accountable to Government.

The Government’s delegated powers memorandum indicates in paragraph B that a key role of the Bill is

“restoring the primacy of Acts of Parliament in UK statute.”

That is not achieved by the Bill. The European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018 made repeated references to Parliament making the changes to law after the exit from the EU. However, according to the Bill, Ministers alone will decide what happens to retained EU law, with no role for Parliament.

Members will have seen the delegated powers report on the Bill. Our approach is meticulous and concerned not with policy but with the use of delegated powers. These are constructed in a way to remove power from Parliament. In fact, the Bill is the concluding evidence that the Government have not intended, are not intending and do not intend to pay the slightest attention to the reports debated as recently as 12 January, Democracy Denied? and Government by Diktat. There is one group that ignores the reports at its peril and ours: the group drafting the legislation. Its members are clever and know what they are doing: they are following orders from Ministers in a way that their predecessors from a couple of decades ago would not recognise. Those who drafted Bills were a constraint on Ministers stepping over the line—not any more. Parliamentary counsel are wholly owned by the Government; they work for, and are accountable to, the Government and not Parliament. They are currently located in the heart of government departments, rather than in their own buildings. In July last year at a joint meeting of the Delegated Powers Committee and the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee, when I asked the First Parliamentary Counsel about the current process, Dame Elizabeth Gardiner said:

“I think things have changed a lot.”


Yes, they have; and the Bill is proof that government counsel are not fit for purpose as far as the primacy of Parliament and the House of Commons is concerned. I do not buy the “only following orders” defence given by Dame Elizabeth when she said that

“we have a key role in what the Bill looks like, but we do not decide on its contents”;

it is

“a political and policy decision.”

If they had any professional self-respect, there would have been a resignation of counsel on a par with that of Sir Jonathan Jones, the former head of the Government Legal Service, in 2020. Anyone associated with drafting the Bill should not be welcome in a regime that believes that the Government are accountable to Parliament.