Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill

Lord Whitty Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 6th February 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Whitty (Lab)]

My Lords, the Minister will remember that, about four years ago, we were discussing the EU withdrawal Bill. It was flawed in many ways—it took a long time, and we were raising all sorts of points —but we all recognised at that point that we needed something such as that, because we needed some degree of continuity, stability and time to consider whether we wanted the EU regulations or whether we wished to change them. We agreed, in principle, that we needed a Bill. The opposite is true of this: 80% of speakers in your Lordships’ House today have been fundamentally opposed to the Bill. A larger proportion of representations from civic society, industry and business—almost everybody; not just the usual wussy bugbears of the Government, such as human rights lawyers, trade unionists and environmentalists—is opposed to the basic precept of the Bill. So I will scrap the rest of my speech, except to pose the key question: what is your Lordships’ House going to do about it, with this unanimity of view?

If they were put to the vote tonight, I would vote for the amendments to the Motion. While I would have preferred to try to block the Bill at Second Reading, the House of Lords does not do that. So what shall we do if we follow our normal course? We need to make some fundamental amendments to the Bill, and I will suggest five. We should establish, before we go any further, a proper parliamentary process for considering the remains of the EU regulations, which probably needs to be a body of both Houses. We should delete the arbitrary sunset deadline of December this year, which is less than 11 months away. We should delete the provisions in Clause 15(5), which mean that we can alter the regulations only in a deregulatory way, with a very narrow definition of deregulation. We should put in the Bill the declarations made by Ministers that workers’ rights and environmental protections will not diminish. We should also move back the ultimate sunset clause of the end of 2026, as we need more time. Frankly, the reindeer in Lapland can wait a bit; there is, after all, still a statute on our book that says that you are allowed to kill a Scotsman in Carlisle if he is carrying a bow and arrow, but not on a Sunday—we have never deleted that one. While we need to delete some laws in due course, let us take proper consideration under parliamentary procedure and not under ministerial fiat.

There is such unanimity of view that the House of Lords needs to get out of its pram and assert itself. If necessary, we should do so more than once. If the Government do their usual job of rejecting all Lords amendments, let us send it back again; then the Government will have to decide whether to use the Parliament Act, by which time we will be in a general election and, hopefully, the world will change.