Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill

Patrick Grady Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 25th October 2022 Commons Chamber

[Patrick Grady (Glasgow North) (Ind)]

On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. I have the Bill in front of me. It states that it is presented to the House by “Mr Secretary Rees-Mogg”, but the right hon. Member for North East Somerset (Mr Rees-Mogg) is sitting on the Back Benches. Can you explain to the House how on earth we can possibly proceed with what was essentially a vanity project for that particular individual? Would it not be better for him to try his luck with a 10-minute rule Bill, or in the private Members’ Bill ballot?

[Madam Deputy Speaker]

The hon. Gentleman gets the prize for making the best point of order of the day, and possibly of the month or Session. His observation about what is printed in the Bill is correct, as is his observation that the right hon. Gentleman to whom he refers is sitting in his previous customary place on the Back Benches. At the point the Bill was printed, the Secretary of State was the right hon. Member for North East Somerset (Mr Rees-Mogg), but government is seamless. The name of the right hon. Gentleman, then Secretary of State, being on the Bill is of historical importance, but of no constitutional importance today. Other Ministers are now ready to speak at the Dispatch Box representing the Government, and all Government Ministers are Ministers—[Interruption.] I hear a sedentary interruption from somewhere of “for now”, but that is exactly my point: individuals are transient; government is permanent—[Interruption.] Permanent during the space of one Parliament. As we are in that same Parliament, the personal position of the right hon. Member for North East Somerset is, I am sorry to tell him, irrelevant for the moment. I call the Minister, who last week was a new Minister and is now a seasoned Minister, to move Second Reading.

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[Dean Russell]

I will not take many more interventions. I will continue for a short while.

Prior to 31 December 2023, the Government will determine which instruments should be preserved, which should be reformed and which should be revoked. I commend colleagues from across all Departments for their gallant efforts in establishing ambitious reform plans that will help to drive growth. We are already in the process of removing outdated retained EU law in financial services through the Financial Services and Markets Bill and have already repealed outdated rules, which has enabled us to capitalise on tax freedoms.

[Patrick Grady]

I thank the Minister for giving way. He is making the case for the constitutional importance of the Bill. As I asked him in Westminster Hall last week, will he not accept that the timetable proposed by the Government in the programme motion is wholly inadequate for the scrutiny of a Bill of such constitutional importance? If he will not commit the Bill to a Committee of the whole House, can he at least guarantee that we will have longer than a day on Report, so that it can receive the scrutiny it really deserves?

[Dean Russell]

I thank the hon. Member for his comments and for taking part in the debate last week. To be honest, we would have had more time today to debate if we had not played silly games earlier with votes and points of order, although I accept that they were important.

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[Mr Rees-Mogg]

I am very grateful to my right hon. Friend, who has made an excellent point. The ability of the House to get through its business is exceptionally good, and it is able to do so in an orderly way, as my right hon. Friend showed in dealing with the no-deal Brexit legislation.

[Patrick Grady]

Given his commitment to scrutiny by the House, the right hon. Gentleman, who said that he was involved in drafting of the Bill, must have had sight of the draft programme motion as well. The European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018, which created retained EU law, was given eight days of scrutiny on the Floor of the House in Committee, and two days on Report. Does he really think that the time the Government are providing for scrutiny of this Bill is sufficient?

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

There is always a discussion to be had about whether a few days in a Committee of the whole House or upstairs in Committee provides better scrutiny. People sometimes reach different conclusions on that, but there will be a proper opportunity for a Committee stage upstairs, and I think that is perfectly reasonable.

I want to go back to the fundamental point about the supremacy issue. Let me reiterate that anyone who opposes the Bill is in fact re-fighting the Brexit battle.

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[Patrick Grady (Glasgow North) (Ind)]

Some 78% of voters in Glasgow North voted to remain in the European Union in 2016, but now in this Bill they find out what “Brexit means Brexit” really means: not just moving away from European directives and regulations, but an attempt to literally erase from history the fact that the UK statute book was ever influenced by them at all. It was this Government who invented the concept of retained EU law with the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018, and now they want to abolish it.

I was going to say that the former Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, the right hon. Member for North East Somerset (Mr Rees-Mogg), like some even more terrifying version of the Borg queen from “Star Trek”, would decide which regulations would become assimilated and which would be ejected into the cold vacuum of space, but he has ejected himself to the cold vacuum of the Conservative Back Benches.

The rejections being imposed by the Government start with the core principles of European law: the equality principle and the protection of fundamental rights. That is what Brexit really means in the minds of the hard Brexiteers: getting rid of all the protections that have improved the safety and wellbeing of people and nature, and putting the drive for profit, externalising responsibilities and the race to the bottom back at the heart of trade and the economy.

Can the Minister name a single stakeholder, even among the former Secretary of State’s friends in the City of London, who genuinely think this Bill is a sensible, pragmatic approach to reforming retained EU law? As we have heard from Members across the House, there is a list as lang’s my arm of groups and organisations who think it is the precise opposite. They call it dangerous, a cliff edge, a power grab and more. Workers’ rights, environmental rights, consumer protections, health and safety standards, the Northern Ireland protocol, the devolution settlement and the building blocks of parliamentary scrutiny and democracy are all at risk from the provisions of the Bill. Yes, there are suggestions from some of the stakeholders for reform, amendments or changes, but the overwhelming consensus is that the Bill should be stopped and scrapped outright.

In Westminster Hall last Wednesday and in the debate today, Ministers have been unable to give a coherent or compelling reason as to why the provisions of the Bill are necessary at all. If Parliament genuinely is sovereign, and if we really have taken back control as a result of Brexit, surely the approach to retained EU law should be the same as to the rest of the statute book: propose policies, engage with our constituents, consult stakeholders and then legislate as necessary through the usual processes of political debate and deliberation in Parliament— but no.

The irony is that the Bill was proposed by a Secretary of State who carved out a role for himself as a defender of Back Benchers, the rights of the House and parliamentary sovereignty, and now from the Back Benches he cheerleads a power grab of unprecedented proportions, even in a world where unprecedented events seem to be taking place on a daily basis. The Brexiteers’ logic was that the EU had become all-consuming and stood in the way of this Parliament’s freedom to consider and legislate for the allegedly unique challenges facing the United Kingdom. Faceless Brussels bureaucrats and unaccountable commissioners were standing in the way of hallowed British parliamentary sovereignty, but now faceless Whitehall mandarins and out-of-touch Tory Ministers will essentially be given all the powers that were once held by the whole suite of EU institutions—its Executive, its legislature and its courts. All those processes will be wrapped up into this one piece of legislation.

That is to say nothing of the total disrespect being shown by the Government to the devolved legislatures on these islands. Tory Ministers sometimes like to ask Members from Scotland to name one devolved power that is being taken back by Westminster after Brexit, and now we know the answer: pretty much all of them. Anything previously regulated by retained EU law can be changed across the whole of the UK at the stroke of a ministerial pen, even if it is in a devolved area. The whole edifice of devolution is being undermined faster than you can say “Sewel convention.” That is particularly important because the Scottish Government have committed to remaining aligned with EU regulation wherever possible.

Alignment makes trade in goods and services easier and more beneficial to all. It will also make the process of Scotland rejoining the European Union as an independent country that much more straightforward, so perhaps it is not surprising that the UK Government want to ensure that as much of the UK diverges as much and as quickly as possible from the EU acquis.

If that was not bad enough, as I have said in interventions, we need to look at how the Bill is being scrutinised. The European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018, which created retained EU law, was scrutinised for two days on Second Reading, eight full days in Committee on the Floor of the House, a further two days on Report and then two rounds of ping-pong with their lordships’ House. But this Bill is getting whatever time we have been able to squeeze in before 7 pm today, with a bog-standard programme motion kicking it upstairs to a Committee full of hand-picked Government loyalists to rubber-stamp. A Bill of such constitutional significance should have been debated in a Committee of the whole House, and the Minister and his former boss, the right hon. Member for North East Somerset, know that. I hope that Ministers can commit to a supplementary programme motion for a Report stage that allows proper time for debate and for amendments to be discussed by the House as a whole.

As many hon. Members have said today, this Bill is not about efficiency; it is about ideology—the ideology of a Secretary of State who has now returned to the Back Benches. In reality, as hon. Members have also said, the Government will have to come crawling back to the House, either through the statutory instrument provisions or perhaps even with primary legislation, because what is proposed in the Bill will simply prove unworkable. It is not possible or necessary—let alone safe or secure—to sunset thousands of regulations at the end of next year.

As the right hon. Member for Leeds Central (Hilary Benn) and other hon. Members have said, there will have to be extensions, whether to the next arbitrary date of 2026, or perhaps a broader kind of continuation, much like what was established under the European Union (Withdrawal) Act in the first place. In the meantime, there will be uncertainty, confusion and a further erosion of any pretence of democratic scrutiny and accountability in the House. In among the Westminster chaos, people in Glasgow North and across Scotland can see what is happening, and they want no part of it. Their chance for a different kind of repeal Bill—the repeal of the Act of Union 1707—is coming very soon.