Draft Medical Devices (Amendment) (Great Britain) Regulations 2023

Patrick Grady Excerpts

Monday 22nd May 2023 General Committees

[Patrick Grady (Glasgow North) (SNP)]

I will echo a lot of what we have heard from the hon. Member for Bristol South on the Labour Front Bench; there were some very fair points, well made. These innocuous-looking regulations actually cover a very wide range of devices, many of which our constituents find essential for going about their daily business and daily lives.

Here we are, in a Commons Committee Room, not taking back control, not doing things differently, but extending regulations that have already been in place and operating very successfully across the European Union for many years—but now with the added Brexit bonus of all the bureaucracy and resources necessary to approve a statutory instrument that has the effect of maintaining the pre-Brexit status quo. I am sure that that is what all the Conservative Back Benchers who campaigned so hard for Brexit were looking forward to when they were out knocking doors and then found themselves elected to this place. The necessity of these regulations demonstrates exactly the kind of policy and legislative cliff edge that the Government were repeatedly warned about, particularly as they brought forward the Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill, which of course they are now having to retreat from in the face of amendments made by the House of Lords.

The Minister says that the Government want to bring forward their own framework for regulating medical devices, so perhaps she can give us a preview of her vision for that and how it will diverge from the European Union’s. Will the United Kingdom have higher standards than the European Union for the production and manufacture of medical devices? I am sure that she will also want to reassure us that the Government have absolutely no intention of allowing poorly made, poorly tested or otherwise substandard devices to enter the UK market, and certainly not as part of any trade deals that they might be looking to make with non-European countries.

In the meantime, we will have to continue to consume time and energy and much passion—as is visible on the Conservative Back Benches here today—dealing with these kinds of extensions, carry-overs and all the rest, because Brexit has not been the great liberation that was promised. It has made many aspects of life more difficult, more complex, more bureaucratic and more precarious for many people—particularly, in this case, people who rely on access to medical devices and want confidence in and assurance of the quality of what they are going out to access through the NHS or on the UK market. The statutory instrument is yet another example of how Brexit has not lived up to any of the promises that were made.