Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill (Second sitting)

Luke Evans Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 8th November 2022 Public Bill Committees

[Ms Ghani]

Thank you.

[Dr Luke Evans (Bosworth) (Con)]

Q My question is to Dr Benwell. Does your organisation have a position on the supremacy of EU law over UK law?

Dr Benwell: No.

[Dr Evans]

Q Yet you are the only organisation here to say that it wants to repeal the Bill, or does not want it to come in, although the principle is to re-enact the supremacy from EU law to UK law. How does that work out in what you have just said? You act as if you do not want the Bill to go through, and yet you do not have a position on the crucial part of the Bill when enacted.

Dr Benwell: I am not sure that is the crucial part of the Bill from an environmental perspective; the crucial part of the Bill from our perspective is that it potentially or inadvertently allows for the loss of large portions of the statute book and for changes to environmental law without scrutiny. It also locks in an old-fashioned view of regulatory costs, seeing cost to business as the only way to judge the costs of regulation.

[Dr Evans]

Q We have heard about this several times, with the debate about the timing of sunset clauses and so on. I am just intrigued as to why your organisation, which you represent, said that the Bill needs to go, whereas every other organisation—whether it liked it or not—tried to work out solutions within it. On that basis, you are unusual as the outlier, and it is always good to question the outlier, to understand their thinking. Perhaps you will explain that thinking for how you got to that position, because the practical problems you assumed and set out we have heard and agreed with, but you are still saying that the Bill should not go ahead at all. That seems to rub against everything else we have talked about and put forward in it. Would you mind answering?

Dr Benwell: I do not think that we are the only organisation to have said that. I think that the Bar Council included the suggestion that the Bill should be withdrawn in its evidence. Wildlife and Countryside Link does not speak as a single body; it speaks on behalf of many of our members. The RSPB, for example, has been very clear in saying that the Bill should be withdrawn, as have lots of our members.

The Government might find features of the Bill they could bring forward separately. I think that the question of supremacy is one where we would see some risks in the interpretation of the law, but that is a political choice and, in itself, it is not the bit that we are most worried about. The bits that we are worried about, however, are so deeply ingrained in the fabric of the Bill that we suggest starting again.

On the sunset clauses, if you look at the House of Commons Library interpretation of what a sunset clause should do, it is there to stop emergency powers existing in perpetuity, giving Parliament a chance to review them. The Bill is taking, en bloc, huge amounts of environmental law and saying that they should potentially end within a year; it is a very strange amplification of sunset powers. On delegated legislation, the provisions in clause 15 that suggest Ministers should be able to bring forward alternative provisions without even tethering that to the original purposes of the regulations on offer are extremely broad delegated legislation powers. Another aspect that is deeply ingrained in the Bill is the idea that no alternative provision should be brought forward if it imposes new costs on business or hampers innovation and that sort of thing. That is an old-fashioned mentality that sees the costs to business of implementing regulation as the only view of the point of that regulation. Actually, if you take a deregulatory approach, it does not reduce costs; it simply transfers them from the businesses responsible for delivering them to the public. Those are all part of the weft and warp of the Bill, and that is why we think that the whole thing should go, rather than starting to amend it.

[The Chair]

That is clear, thank you. I will bring Ruth in on this, and then we will go to Stella Creasy. Ruth, you wanted to come in.

Ruth Chambers: Thank you, Chair. I have two points of clarification to make. First, I confirm that Greener UK as a coalition also wishes the Bill to be paused and withdrawn. That is not inconsistent with our position that we also believe that the body of retained EU law could be improved and that a process could be devised to do so. I feel that there was a little conflation of those two points but, to be absolutely clear, they are not the same thing.

Secondly, Minister, may I come back to your point about environmental targets, the 2030 species recovery target and the relationship with REUL? The relationship is a rather straightforward one: the opportunity costs that will inevitably come with the Department having to review, assimilate and reform such a large body of law. In fact, the Government have already missed their first legal milestone on environmental targets, on 31 October. That is just one example of how this can have a serious impact—because of the sheer deliverability challenges.