Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill

Lord Whitty Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 23rd February 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Kerr of Kinlochard (CB)]

I too welcome the Minister to her role. I knew her first as a very distinguished civil servant in the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, so know that she will understand far better than I do what I am now going to touch on.

It seems to me that this Bill has flown under the radar so far, as far as public opinion is concerned. It came through the other place with very little public attention. I do not think many people realise how much of the statute book that is directly relevant to them is in play and will stay in play until some Minister has decided whether it is to be amended, replaced or die. When the public get to know that this is the case, I think they are going to react rather badly. I wonder about the politics of this, late in a Parliament, but that is not my business.

The issue arises first very clearly in relation to Amendment 4, and later in relation Amendment 20. Food safety is a real concern, right across public opinion. The idea that food labelling and safety rules could be in play will have considerable resonance, in a negative sense, across the country. When people were talking in an overexcited way about how we might have a free trade agreement with the United States, I was struck by the issues that really had public resonance, which were those concerning chlorinated chicken and the hormones in beef. As a member of the International Agreements Committee, I am struck that what is of most interest to the public in free trade agreements are food imports and whether their standards will be equivalent to ours.

I learn from the Consumers’ Association that 90% of our food law is retained EU law. Unless the Government accept amendments such as Amendments 4 and 20, in play will be a raft of legislation which is important to people. They take it seriously; they want to know what is in the food they are going to give the kids. It would be in the Government’s interest to look seriously at these amendments and at the sunset clause, which just does not work, as the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope, said earlier.

Particularly in relation to food safety, people think, “salus populi suprema lex”—I try that on the Minister because she is a great classical scholar—that is what they believe. Therefore, what the rest of us are doing now, along with singularly few on the Government Benches—

the boy stood on the burning deck,

Whence all but he had fled—

will have considerable resonance out there.

[Lord Whitty (Lab)]

My Lords, I want to follow the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, in intervening on this issue because this is the first consumer protection part of the Bill. I was once a consumer champion—I hope I continue to be so privately—and this amendment and many in the next group relate to food safety. The noble Lord is absolutely right: this is one of the most acutely difficult areas of consumer protection, and labelling in particular has caused a certain amount of controversy. But there is settled law here, and the bulk of it originates from Europe.

There are other areas of consumer law where UK law is better than EU law, but here, our scientists, our food industry and the Europeans have come up with an agreement which goes right across Europe. We have to remember that processed food and fresh food is a very well-traded commodity, probably the biggest trading commodity within the European continent, and we need some commonality. The threat of this being changed is surely a real difficulty for the food industry—although the Minister can answer that—and certainly for consumers. It is difficult enough to follow the labelling and consumer information currently required; if we have different labelling and requirements for things originating in France and in the UK—or for those originating in the Republic of Ireland and in Northern Ireland—we will have huge difficulties.

But there is something more behind this. When the Government presented the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018, I think we all accepted that whether we liked Brexit or not, we would have to have a process whereby government looked at whether some of these laws continued. The real difficulty with this legislation is that it does not provide for a steady look at what the highest priority is for government to intervene on over the next few years, in order to see in a broader context whether we ought to change it. There is the threat that every single regulation and law mentioned in these amendments and in subsequent groups will end on 31 December this year without any replacement, whether with consideration or not.

We are on Clause 1, which deals with the sunset. The noble Lord, Lord Kerr, has referred to the relatively sparsely populated Government Benches. I ask Ministers if during their lunch break they have taken note of the points made by the noble Baroness, Lady Altmann, and the noble Lord, Lord Lucas. If they are taken on board, that would reduce the anxiety here and in civil society about this approach. If the sunset clause disappears, and with it the threat of regulations entirely disappearing at the end of this year, we would give the Government credit for being able to make a proper assessment of whether those rules are needed.

Regarding the suggestion of the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, if we had an amendment to Clause 15 which, broadly speaking, said “no regression”, the level of anxiety would again be greatly relieved, at least in relation to some of the regulations we are talking about.

So I hope the Minister took the opportunity of the 50-minute adjournment to think about what his colleagues were saying, and that he will come back to us, either now or subsequently, with an assurance that there will not be the death of all these regulations as of 31 December, and that regression will not occur in relation to any of them, particularly those dealing with food labelling information and the protection of consumers whenever they go to the supermarket.

[Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)]

My Lords, I support all the amendments in this group. The noble Lords, Lord Fox and Lord Clement-Jones, and the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, in the way she introduced them, have done a very good job of bringing these important issues to our attention. I want to make a couple of points that have not yet been made about this process. We have had a lot of discussion on process, as we do on Bills that are all about enabling rather than substance. That is inevitably what our debates end up focusing on; we use these issues as a prism to look through. It helps us to realise just how dreadful an approach the Government are choosing to adopt.

As we all said at Second Reading, I do not think anybody objects to the Government looking at retained EU law and asking Parliament to make changes to it. That is what Governments are there to do: to improve the law of the land. We respect this Government’s right to do that. We might not like it, but that is what they are there to do. However, we feel that to do it in this way is just wrong in principle, and the usefulness of these three amendments is that they make that point very well.

When I was looking at Amendment 3, I noticed that in February last year the Government presented an SI dealing with health professional qualifications. They said that it was needed because the measures concerned had been dealt with in a hurry as we left the EU. At that point, in that SI, the word “pharmacist” had been used instead of “dentist”. That is quite an error. I raise this for a couple of reasons. The first, obviously, is to demonstrate that the Government can and do change regulations arising from our exit from the EU as a matter of course. It is a perfectly normal thing for both Houses to do. I myself, and I am sure everybody else in the Chamber today, have had the great honour, privilege and delight of taking part in many SI debates. It is what we do. Even when things are not done in a crazy rush, trying to get hundreds or thousands of these done by Christmas, significant errors are made and things are put into the law of this country that were never intended to be there and should not be there. I also raise this because I wanted to highlight that however brilliant our civil servants are—as I think they are—and however diligent and hard-working they definitely are, errors are made by civil servants too. I am not someone who has described our Civil Service as “broken”, “lazy” or “bloated”, but government Ministers have, very recently; yet they are asking civil servants to undertake this Herculean process. There is a tension there.

Amendment 4 and the issue of food labelling is important; I am not surprised that that is what the majority of the contributions on this group have focused on. There are multiple examples of deaths occurring as a consequence of food labelling not being right. I am very supportive of an examination of our food labelling laws. I am very happy that this could be done by the UK Government—ideally in consultation, at the very least, with the devolved Administrations.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Bloomfield of Hinton Waldrist (Con)]

I know that this is of concern to a number of Members in the Committee, but officials from the UK Government are working very closely with those from the devolved Governments in order to identify the REULs that cross over devolved competences. I know that there is a general concern within the devolved Governments that they simply do not have the manpower to look at all these EU laws themselves, so we are helping them in that process. That is an ongoing job of work being done from official to official.

[Lord Whitty (Lab)]

My Lords, the Minister has rather changed the rules on this. If the dashboard is almost complete and there is an intention to put something next to every thing on the dashboard—perhaps not using my noble friend Lady Young’s terminology but a slightly more bureaucratic one—we need to have that list before we move to any further stage of the Bill, otherwise we do not know what we are talking about. The noble Baroness has explained in relation to asbestos, rightly and thankfully, that those regulations will not be sunsetted. What happens to the other 4,700 regulations? We do not know. We need that list before we take any definitive decisions on the Bill. I hope that government Ministers and the business managers will go away and recognise that, and that we will not move until we know a lot more about where we are going.

[Baroness Bloomfield of Hinton Waldrist (Con)]

The dashboard is ongoing work. It does not put things into buckets, but just includes all the EU laws that are subject to review. That will be published but it will certainly not have the buckets that I think the noble Baroness, Lady Young, is asking for.