Draft European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018 (Consequential Amendments) Regulations 2018

Matthew Pennycook Excerpts

Thursday 25th October 2018 General Committees

[Matthew Pennycook (Greenwich and Woolwich) (Lab)]

May I, too, say that it is an absolute pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Buck?

The regulations are uncontroversial, so we do not intend to divide the Committee and I do not intend to detain us for very long, but I would like to probe the Minister on a number of points in the hope that he may be able to offer some answers.

It is an essential feature of the rule of law that legislation is not only clear but can be understood by those who are bound by it. Given that principle, will the Minister confirm plainly for the record that the purpose of schedule 1 to the regulations, which repeals provisions contained in two Acts of Parliament and repeals a third in its entirety, is only to tidy up redundant references to approval procedures for certain EU treaties, and that it therefore has no bearing, either directly or indirectly, on how any future treaty or treaties with the European Union will be approved and ratified? On a related point, can he confirm that any withdrawal agreement, subject to the additional procedures for approval that have been agreed, will still have to be laid before Parliament under the terms of the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act 2010 as a matter of law?

Turning to the various issues raised by schedule 2 to the regulations, could the Minister give the Committee a sense of why the Government feel that they have to legislate in this way and whether it is a direct response to the concerns set out by the Lords Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee? Its main concern was that clause 8 of the EU (Withdrawal) Act allows for tertiary lawmaking powers currently exercised at EU level to be reassigned to a domestic Government agency or other public body, say the Food Standards Agency or the Environment Agency, and for that agency or body to then make changes to the law in the same way that a Minister would, but without those changes being approved by this House by means of a statutory instrument pursuant to an Act of Parliament. If that is the reason for legislating in this way, will the Minister confirm that the schedule 2 is nothing more than, as he put it, a means of tidying up to ensure consistency and clarity and to close that loophole so that lawmaking powers contained in retained direct EU legislation will henceforth be subject to the same forms of domestic scrutiny as lawmaking by SI under Acts of Parliament?

I will take this opportunity to press the Minister on the wider issue of the progress that the Government have made to date in their legislative preparations for exit day. We all know that we will need approximately 800 to 1,000 SIs to be passed to ensure that we have a functioning statute book on 29 March next year—assuming, that is, that the Government do not use the forthcoming withdrawal agreement and implementation Bill to repeal the fixed exit day that they themselves inserted into the European Union (Withdrawal) Act. A recent report by the Hansard Society found that, so far, only 71 SIs have been laid before Parliament and that even processing SIs at the pace we have seen to date appears to be creating problems, with 20% of the SIs put before the European Statutory Instruments Committee found to contain some form, minor or otherwise, of technical deficiency. Given the importance of processing the hundreds of SIs necessary for an orderly exit, will the Minister give the Committee a sense of precisely how the Government are going to ensure over the coming weeks that all the SIs necessary will have been passed before exit day?