Draft Product Safety and Metrology etc. (Amendment etc.) (EU Exit) Regulations 2019

Martyn Day Excerpts

Tuesday 12th March 2019 General Committees

[Martyn Day (Linlithgow and East Falkirk) (SNP)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Gray. I am grateful to the Front-Bench spokespersons for setting out the case. It certainly is a mammoth tome, and I am glad that I got it this year and not last year when I was waiting for a hernia operation. Humping it around Parliament was a fair job. I emphasise the point made by the Opposition spokesperson that it will take considerably longer than three hours to go through and digest it, even with an informed summary.

While I have some sympathy for rolling different measures together to make things simpler for the future, I noticed in the impact assessment that the principal reason for doing this was for

“effective use of Ministerial and Parliamentary time.”

Bearing in mind that this is a no-deal provision, we could have made much better use of our time by simply ruling out no deal in the first place, had we had the sense to do that. However, we are where we are.

I find myself concerned about a number of points, many of which have been mentioned already. I worry about things such as the loss of access to cross-border regulators such as the European consumer centres, which affect customers and not only businesses. Coming on to the businesses, which is the main issue, points have been made about the simple cost to them of doing this: 241,000 businesses, many of which will be very concerned, spending around £19.6 million—I fear that is a conservative estimate—is too much and we should not be forcing that on people during such a hard-pressed and stressful period as the Brexit process.

Of course, all of this could have been avoided by remaining in the single market and customs union, and avoiding having dual sets of standards. I worry about dual standards, from both a business and a consumer point of view, so I too will not be supporting the regulations today.