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

Peter Grant Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 24th November 2022 Public Bill Committees

[Alex Sobel]

I take on board what the Minister says, although that last comment on the environment is slightly galling considering that on 31 October the Government were meant to bring forward, under their own domestic post-Brexit legislation—the Environment Act 2021—targets on a whole range of areas, including air quality and water quality. It is now 24 November and we still have no targets. If I am a little concerned about the Government’s performance here, she should not be surprised, but I beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.

Clause 9 ordered to stand part of the Bill.

Clause 10

Scope of powers

[Peter Grant (Glenrothes) (SNP)]

I beg to move amendment 50, in clause 10, page 11, line 12, leave out paragraph (b) and insert—

“(b) for sub-paragraph (2), substitute—

(2) Power may only be exercised by virtue of sub-paragraph (1) if—

(a) a written statement explaining the modification has been published by the Secretary of State,

(b) the Secretary of State has made an oral statement on the modification to both Houses of Parliament, and

(c) the Secretary of State has published an assessment of the impact of the modification.”

The intention of the amendment is to do what Brexit was supposed to do: restore some parliamentary oversight to the way in which the Government make and change legislation in this place. The amendment is pretty self-explanatory. It is not ideal that Ministers are giving extensive powers to chop and change laws as they see fit. If, in exceptional circumstances, it is necessary for them to have those powers, the very least Parliament should expect is that Ministers will be held to account and will explain to Parliament—ideally beforehand, but certainly afterwards—why they have done what they have done and what the impact has been.

If the Minister genuinely believes in improving accountability in this place, she will accept the amendment. In saying that, it is clear that all Ministers—nothing against this Minister—in all Public Bill Committees are under instruction not to accept anything from the Opposition. If we moved an amendment that said, “Today’s Thursday”, the Government would keep talking until it was Friday and then vote it down.

[Ms Ghani]

I recognise that none of that was directed at me personally, but rather collectively at all Ministers. I beg hon. Members to reject the amendment. The Government recognise the significant role that Parliament has played in scrutinising instruments to date and we are committed to ensuring the appropriate scrutiny of any secondary legislation made under existing delegated powers. We must end the restriction that some existing powers may only be used to amend retained direct principal EU legislation or rights under section 4 of the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018 if they are also capable of amending domestic primary legislation.

The hon. Member for Glenrothes suggests that a written ministerial statement made by a Secretary of State is accompanied by an oral statement when an existing power is exercised. I remind him that all statutory instruments that are subject to parliamentary procedure must be accompanied by an explanatory memorandum. These memorandums provide Parliament with the information and explanations required. When powers are exercised by virtue of paragraph 3(1) to schedule 8, explanatory memorandums would be laid as appropriate. Any statutory instrument that reforms retained direct EU legislation made under existing delegated powers will be subject to the proper processes for impact assessments. However, a blanket requirement for impact assessments is not appropriate as some reforms could fall below the de minimis threshold set out in the “Better regulation framework” guidance.

Now that we have left the EU, it is only appropriate for retained direct EU legislation that was not scrutinised or approved by Parliament to be treated in the same way as domestic secondary legislation, which is amendable by existing delegated powers that this Parliament has approved. For those reasons, I ask the hon. Member to withdraw his amendment.

[Peter Grant]

The difference, of course, is that any secondary legislation—even if it is done by the affirmative procedure—goes through a Delegated Legislation Committee in which, at best, three or four of the parties in this House are represented. For the last seven and a half years, the Scottish National party has been represented in those Committees because of the exceptional level of support that it enjoys in our country, but there are Members of Parliament, who collectively represent the interests of a lot of constituents, who never get on to Delegated Legislation Committees. The only chance they get to question the Minister about secondary legislation is if the Minister makes an oral statement before the House. Publishing something is all very well, but Members of Parliament who are not in one of the big three or four parties do not get the automatic right to question Ministers on a written statement—they do get the automatic right to questions Ministers on an oral statement. It is quite clear which way this is going, so I will not detain the Committee by pushing the amendment to a vote. I beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.

[Brendan O’Hara (Argyll and Bute) (SNP)]

I beg to move amendment 51, in clause 10, page 11, line 18, leave out from “paragraph 3” to the end of line 23 and insert

“may not be so made, confirmed or approved unless a draft of the legislation has been laid before, and approved by resolution of, (as the case may be) both Houses of Parliament, the Scottish Parliament, Senedd Cymru or the Northern Ireland Assembly.”

The amendment is in my name and that of my hon. Friend the Member for Glenrothes. As we have argued since the date of publication, the Bill not only undermines the devolution settlement, but puts at risk workers’ rights, product safety, food labelling, the future of the agricultural sector, and the natural environment. Clause 10 allows for all that to happen with the bare minimum of parliamentary scrutiny, allowing everything to be dealt with via secondary legislation, and thereby conveniently avoiding the intense parliamentary scrutiny that these measures most certainly require. Clause 10 would make it easier for the Government to remove our rights and protections by using delegated powers, and therefore circumvent parliamentary scrutiny, avoid transparency and evade accountability to all Members of Parliament. This is the Executive power grab people have been talking about since the day the Bill was published.

When the Bill was published, the Government told everyone who would listen that this was all about the United Kingdom taking back control and asserting the sovereignty of this Parliament, as opposed to—in their words—shady deals being agreed in small committees in Brussels, but it does not feel like that. Who exactly is it that is taking back control here? It is not this Parliament, and it is not Members of this House, because the Government have already gleefully announced that when it comes to retained EU law,

“the amount of parliamentary time that is required has been dramatically reduced.”

It seems that for the Government taking back control means putting a group of hand-picked party loyalists on to a Delegated Legislation Committee—a Committee that, as we know, has a built-in Government majority—which will bulldoze through change after change after change, as instructed. The history of DL Committees is not particularly encouraging; in the past 65 years, only 17 statutory instruments have been voted down by a DL Committee—and that has not happened since 1979.

Although there is certainly a role for DL Committees, I do not believe that that extends to them making wholesale, fundamental changes to vast swathes of the law—on matters covering everything from the environment, nature and consumer protection through to workers’ rights, product safety and agriculture—just to help the Government avoid proper parliamentary scrutiny. The reason they are avoiding parliamentary scrutiny is that, in their fervour to get rid of any lingering European influence, the wide-eyed zealots at the heart of this dysfunctional Government have arbitrarily imposed a sunset clause for December next year. This is not just the view of the Opposition; it is a widely-held view. Professor Catherine Barnard warned against the lack of parliamentary scrutiny afforded, saying:

“Although there is a process for parliamentary oversight, it will be difficult in the timeframe to ensure that that oversight can be exercised in a manner that enables Parliament properly to scrutinise the measures as they come through.”––[Official Report, Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Public Bill Committee, 8 November 2022; c. 16, Q27.]

In his evidence, George Peretz KC warned,

“One of the problems with the effectiveness of parliamentary scrutiny is that although one hears that Parliament has powers… the background against which it is being asked to approve legislation means that if it votes against that legislation, the sunset clause will apply and regulations disappear completely, rather weakening Parliament’s ability to do anything.”––[Official Report, Retained EU Law Public Bill Committee, 8 November 2022; c. 32, Q61.]

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[Ms Ghani]

I ask hon. Members to reject the amendment. Clause 10 ensures that appropriate parliamentary scrutiny is applied to the use of existing delegated powers when they are used to amend retained direct EU legislation or section 4 of the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018 rights. It is this Government’s view that the appropriate procedure applied when amending retained direct EU legislation should be the same as the procedure applied to domestic secondary legislation. Any additional procedure, such as that proposed by the hon. Member, would be disproportionate given the type of legislation retained direct EU legislation is composed of.

It would be wholly inappropriate if, for example, updating individual provisions adding cheese and honey to the simplified active substance list required the approval of both Houses of Parliament, the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Parliament. Making it easier to use pre-existing powers to amend assimilated retained direct EU legislation, while ensuring it receives the most suitable level of parliamentary scrutiny, will ensure our regulations can be kept up to date, supporting growth across the whole UK.

[Peter Grant]

The Minister referred to domestic secondary legislation. Does she not understand that if a piece of secondary legislation relates exclusively to, for example, a devolved power of Senedd Cymru, as far as this place is concerned that is not domestic law—it is somebody else’s domestic law—and this Parliament should keep out of it?

[Ms Ghani]

I think we have covered the point of domestic law, law in Westminster and the role of Attorneys General. At the moment, we are forced to treat some retained direct EU legislation as equivalent to an Act of Parliament when amending it. It is no longer appropriate for retained direct EU legislation to keep the status of primary legislation when most of it has not had anywhere close to the same level of UK parliamentary scrutiny. I therefore ask the hon. Member for Argyll and Bute to withdraw the amendment.

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[Peter Grant]

I stand to speak in favour of the amendment, although, at best, all it seeks to do is take an entirely unacceptable clause and make it slightly less unacceptable. Clause 11 is about a Henry VIII power; it is about removing protections for this House that were, ironically, forced on the Government by Members of the other House. I am not a great fan of unelected legislatures anywhere—I certainly do not want my country even partly ruled by one—but I have to say to Conservative Members that when the House of Lords is keener on protecting the rights of this House than Government Back-Bench and Front-Bench Members are, the Government really do need to look at themselves in the mirror and ask themselves: are we a democratic Government or are we not?

I support the limited improvements to the clause, but if the amendment falls, I will seek to divide the Committee to exclude clause 11 in its entirety.

[Ms Ghani]

I ask hon. Members to reject the amendment. Unless I was in a different Committee Room, or on a different planet, I think Opposition Members have had every opportunity to raise their voices, because we have heard much from them today and on Tuesday, and we have had much scrutiny as well. Our constituents know exactly what we are doing because it is all noted in Hansard.

The amendment would render clause 11 without purpose. Subsections (1) and (2) ensure the removal of additional parliamentary scrutiny requirements, established in the EU withdrawal Act, in relation to the amendment or revocation of secondary legislation made under section 2(2) of the European Communities Act 1972. Subsections (1) and (2) will ensure that when secondary legislation made under section 2(2) ECA is being amended or revoked using other delegated powers, the only parliamentary scrutiny requirements that will apply are those attached to the power being used. These delegated powers have their own parliamentary scrutiny procedure attached, which has been approved by Parliament, ensuring suitable scrutiny will continue to occur.

It is imperative that additional scrutiny requirements are removed, because it is clearly inappropriate that legislation created solely to implement our obligations as a member of the EU enjoys this privileged status. What is more, no tangible benefit has been identified as a result of these scrutiny requirements; as was mentioned, that was referenced in the evidence session by Dr Ruth Fox of the Hansard Society. In practice, they add a layer of complexity that makes it difficult to make amendments to legislation containing section 2(2) ECA provisions.

Removing these requirements reflects the main purpose of this Bill, which is to take a new approach to retained EU law, removing the precedence given in UK law to law derived from the EU that is no longer considered fit for purpose.

[Ms Ghani]

The hon. Member is not being wholly honest. The level of scrutiny of any piece of legislation, not only in Committee but on the Floor of this House and the Floor of the other place, takes place for all items of legislation.

The hon. Member will be well aware of the evidence session we had just a few weeks ago, when we had a number of people from environmental agencies who previously had Green credentials or who were previously Green or Lib Dem candidates. So it is not as if those voices are not heard.

[Peter Grant]

rose—

[Brendan O'Hara]

rose—

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Question proposed, That the clause stand part of the Bill.

[Peter Grant]

I oppose the inclusion of clause 11, as I indicated earlier. I will give the Minister credit and assume that she just got confused. She has attempted to justify removing the requirement for full parliamentary consideration of a Bill to revoke European legislation and turning it all into secondary legislation. Not content with insisting on a sunset clause that means that if that secondary legislation does not get approved, nothing gets approved, she then attempted to justify removing the requirement to use the affirmative process for the vast majority of that legislation and instead use the negative process, which we all know is an even weaker form of parliamentary scrutiny. She completely missed the point. In fact, I think she confused the status of a Public Bill Committee such as this with that of a Delegated Legislation Committee, which she thinks is an adequate way for some of these important regulations to be considered.

The reason this Public Bill Committee exists is that the legislation was approved—not unanimously, by any means—by the House of Commons. The only requirement that anybody had to speak and vote on Second Reading was that the people of their constituency chose them to represent them in Parliament. Every member of the Committee is here because our party Whips chose to put us here. We were not elected to it by our people. We had to be elected to be in the Chamber of the House of Commons, but it is the Whips who decided who got to serve on this Committee. As my hon. Friend the Member for Argyll and Bute has said, Northern Ireland Members never get the opportunity to have their voice heard on a Delegated Legislation Committee, though they do have a voice on Second and Third Reading. There is also no automatic right for Wales to be represented. Wales is represented in this place by four political parties, but there is only one voice from Wales on this Committee. That did not have to happen; the Whips could easily have put someone else on it instead.

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[Dr Evans]

If Scotland were to be independent and part of the EU, the European Council uses majority voting so members have to like or lump whatever they are given at the end of the vote. At the end of the day, someone has to make a decision and Government have to decide. How would that fit if Scotland were independent?

[Peter Grant]

I cannot speak about what decisions the Scottish Parliament will take after we are independent, but I look forward to seeing that day before any of us are very much older. I am confident that it is a modern, democratic Parliament with much improved scrutiny procedures. For example, in the Scottish Parliament it would have been impossible for us to have two changes of Prime Minister without the explicit approval of the Parliament. Nobody can become a Minister of the Scottish Government without being approved by the Scottish Parliament. There is much greater parliamentary accountability for the Executive than there is ever going to be here.

My confident expectation is that when an independent Scotland goes back into the European Union, the Scottish Parliament will have a much greater role in scrutinising the actions of our Ministers, acting on our behalf, at the European Council than this Parliament has ever had. As I have said to the Committee before, the problem with lack of accountability and scrutiny of European legislation is not because the European Union’s processes are flawed, but because parliamentary accountability in this place is fundamentally flawed.

If I intended to be part of this establishment for much longer, I would be attempting to improve its processes in order to bring it into line with proper democratic Parliaments, such as the one in Scotland. Given that neither I nor any of my colleagues from Scotland are likely to be here for very much longer, I will have to leave it to those who remain to sort out the mess of a Parliament that they have created.

[Ms Ghani]

Our objective is not to remove power from Parliament. Our objective is to ensure that amendments or revocations made to subordinate legislation made under other existing powers receive the most appropriate level of parliamentary scrutiny. Fundamentally, people need to accept the Brexit vote and appreciate that we have to have sovereignty here. I do not think we are going to win that argument—we are too far apart.

When the European Union (Withdrawal Agreement) Act 2020 was agreed, additional parliamentary scrutiny requirements were agreed in relation to the amendment or revocation of secondary legislation made under section 2(2) of the European Communities Act 1972. It is clearly inappropriate that legislation created solely to implement our obligations as a member of the EU enjoys that privileged status. We therefore seek to remove those requirements. This reflects the main purpose of the Bill—removing the precedence given in UK law to EU-derived law—which is no longer fit for purpose now that the UK has left the EU. I recommend that the clause stand part of the Bill.

Question put, That the clause stand part of the Bill.

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[Ms Ghani]

The overarching aim of the Bill is to define retained EU law as a legal category, and the power to restate such law must be viewed with that in mind. The hon. Member for Argyll and Bute said that he wants to help the process, even though he is fundamentally trying to block it. The power to restate has been designed to allow the Government to restate domestic law where it is considered appropriate for the UK in a post-Brexit setting. However, the resulting legislation will no longer be retained EU law, as subsection (3) makes clear. The restated legislation will be ordinary domestic UK legislation that is subject to traditional domestic rules of interpretation. In particular, the supremacy of EU law will no longer apply, and section 4 rights and the general principles of EU law will cease to be read into the legislation.

[Peter Grant]

Will the Minister give way?

[Ms Ghani]

If I can make a bit of progress, I will give way later.

The power will enable the Government to clarify, consolidate, codify and restate REUL to preserve the effect of the current law, while removing it from the category of REUL. It will be used selectively and is not a way to simply continue the broad concepts of EU law. Retained EU law was never intended to sit on the statute book indefinitely, although I believe that hon. Members wish it did. It is both constitutionally anomalous and politically challenging. Subsection (3) is therefore a crucial part of clause 12, and is necessary to ensure that the Government can deliver on the overarching aims of the Bill.

Let me turn to amendment 54. The power in this clause will expire at the end of 2023, with good reason. The Bill will sunset the majority of retained EU law, so that it expires on 31 December 2023. Following that date, all retained EU law will have either sunsetted or been preserved and assimilated into the domestic statute book. It is therefore entirely appropriate that the power to restate REUL should expire at the same time as the sunset of retained EU law. Following that date, there will no longer be any secondary REUL for this power to operate on. The power in this clause will give way to the power outlined in clause 13, which will allow for the similar restatement of assimilated law up until 23 June 2026.

[Peter Grant]

Can the Minister explain the difference between restating and amending? At what point does a restatement of a piece of legislation become either an amendment or a completely new piece of legislation? Who will be the arbiter of that? Will the courts decide?

[Ms Ghani]

I did not hear the end of that question, but each Department will be in charge of the Bills in its portfolio. We have the Brexit opportunities department helping as well. I have already mentioned the processes in place to ensure that scrutiny happens, and how Ministers will work to ensure that we assimilate, amend or update.

[Peter Grant]

I am sorry if the Minister did not understand my question. I am talking not about the political, democratic scrutiny, but about the legal interpretation of restated legislation, which will fall to the courts. My question is: who decides whether what has been done under clause 12 is simply a restatement of EU retained law or an amendment to law, which requires a different process?

[Ms Ghani]

I hope I am not failing to understand the question. As I mentioned, each of the REUL Bills is assigned to a Department, and it will be for the Ministers responsible for the REUL Bill to make a decision on whether they need to assimilate, repeal or update.

I ask the hon. Member for Argyll and Bute to withdraw his amendment. I ask the Committee to accept the Government amendments. They are simple clarificatory amendments that ensure that the restatement powers in clauses 12 to 14 cannot be used to bring back EU law concepts, such as the principle of supremacy, or general principles that the Bill aims to sunset.

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[Stella Creasy]

Ronseal, that’s it; I am showing my age. This should be a Ronseal moment—it does what it says on the tin. I have a horrible feeling that the Minister will reject the amendment. I hope that she recognises that the concern comes in when the Government reject relatively benign proposals, such as the suggestion that they should simply say, “Yep, this legislation is like-for-like; it does not water down protections.”

As we saw on Tuesday, the Government have already started to decide, in private, which pieces of EU retained law they will not continue with, so we know that some things will change. Some legislation will fall, and we understand that; the whole point of leaving the European Union was to have the power to reject things. Knowing what will or will not be taken out is surely the epitome of taking back control. Each of us should be able, in our constituency surgeries, when we are inevitably asked about a piece of legislation and its impact, to say, “Ah, yes. Well, that is where this decision came from, and this is what we were told at the time.” Parliamentary scrutiny, done well—even done at all—is taking back control, so let us see some of it in this Bill, for a change.

[Peter Grant]

I rise to speak to amendments 55 and 56 in my name and that of my hon. Friend the Member for Argyll and Bute. This is an attempt to, once again, restrict the Executive’s power grab and to limit, to some small extent, the extent to which the Government are taking powers away from this Parliament and for themselves. It is an attempt to limit the use of Henry VIII powers.

First, the amendments seek to remove subsection (5) to clause 14. I make no apology for raising this point every time I see such a provision in any legislation. It is a bad idea to allow a Minister of the Crown to change any Act of Parliament that they fancy without having to present a Bill in the House of Commons that amends it. The whole House should need to approve the change, after giving it appropriate consideration, and after every single Member has had a chance to comment on it. Subsection (5) essentially seeks to do that. Interestingly, its text is now fairly standard in Bills featuring the Henry VIII powers that the Government are putting through. At some point, the Government spotted something that worries them. They have discovered a part of an Act of Parliament that they are terrified a Minister could ever change, so they have tabled Government amendment 14 to stop that happening.

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This amendment and Amendment 14 clarify that the powers under Clauses 12 and 13 may not be used so as to codify or reproduce the principle of supremacy of EU law or a retained general principle of EU law.

[Peter Grant]

Sorry, but have amendments 55 and 56 been disposed of?

[The Chair]

Does the hon. Gentleman want to press those amendments to a vote?

[Peter Grant]

I had intended to press both to a Division, Sir George, but to save time, and given that the Government Whip already has her great big no vote ready to hang up to make sure that Conservative Back Benchers know what they are supposed to do, there is clearly no point. We know the result already, so to save the Committee time, I will not press either amendment.

[The Chair]

I am very grateful to the hon. Gentleman. We would have been in a bit of muddle otherwise.

Clause 14, as amended, ordered to stand part of the Bill.

Clause 15

Powers to revoke or replace

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I know that Conservative Members want to be able to tell their constituents that they will bring in better standards now that we are free from the yoke of the European Union. If they vote for clause 15, as unamended, that would not be the right thing to say, because it would not be the truth about the Bill. I hope that even if amendments are not made to clause 15 now, they will be in the other place, to take away that push and that threat.

[Peter Grant]

A long time ago now, it seems, I was a member of my local planning authority for a number of years. We used to get dozens and dozens of planning applications for consideration, and there was often a lot of discussion about whether councillors who were uncomfortable with an application should attempt to draft conditions that had to be honoured before the application could be approved. A lot of those conditions were perfectly reasonable; we would put in conditions to ensure that housing development was road-safe, for example. An important piece of national guidance that certainly applied in Scotland—I do not know if there was an equivalent in England—was that if someone had to burden a planning application with a huge, complex set of conditions in order to make it acceptable, the application should be refused and the applicant invited to come back later with a better one. That is where we are with clause 15. The official Opposition clearly feel that the only way to make clause 15 even vaguely acceptable is to restrict it in so many ways, and with so many amendments, that it would effectively tear the heart out of the clause.

Although I certainly will not oppose any of the amendments that the hon. Member for Leeds North West wants to press to a vote, we will oppose clause 15 when the question on it is put, whether it is amended or not. It is an utterly dreadful piece of legislation. Can Members imagine any circumstance in which it could be considered good governance to give an individual or a national authority the right to repeal 4,000 pieces of legislation, knowing perfectly well that they have no intention of bringing anything forward to replace them? That is what clause 15 effectively aims to do.

As the hon. Member for Walthamstow pointed out earlier, subsection 5 of clause 15 gives the lie to the entire argument about why the Tories wanted to be allowed to regulate for themselves. It was never about being allowed to have better standards of employment law than the rest of Europe, and it was never about being allowed to apply better standards of environmental protection, consumer protection, animal welfare or anything else. It was always about pandering to what my hon. Friend the Member for Argyll and Bute has described as the wide-eyed enthusiasts of the European Research Group, and those who are so far to the right of the ERG they cannot even get elected to this place. In clause 15, and particularly in subsection (5), theirs is the agenda we are being asked to follow.

I am really interested to hear the Minister explain why she feels it is necessary to have an Act of Parliament that potentially allows a national authority to tear down 40 years of protective legislation, with the intention of replacing it with nothing, and with the extreme risk that we will run out of time to replace it with anything. We should remember that we have barely a year from now, never mind from when they start to tear apart the legislation.

When we look at the restriction in subsection (5) and then look over the page at what some of the terms in the subsection mean, we find that they are hair-raising. Legislation that imposes a burden that could include a financial cost is not allowed. There is no threshold and no limit on how many people would need to be affected by that financial cost. For example, the personal protective equipment non-provider PPE Medpro—it was slated in The Guardian this morning and in the Chamber earlier—made a profit of £76 million by supplying to the Government PPE that was not fit for use. If the Minister had been minded to bring in replacement legislation, it would have reduced PPE Medpro’s overnight profit from £76 million and tuppence to a mere £76 million. The Bill would say that was a financial burden. It would therefore be an increased regulatory burden, and it would not be allowed.

Subsection 10(b) refers to “an administrative inconvenience”. Well, good luck to the lawyers who want to decide what is an inconvenience and what is not. Again, there is no threshold and nothing about proportionality. There is nothing to say whether it imposes a disproportionate administrative inconvenience on a substantial section of the economy. That would be a reasonable protection to want to build in, but anybody who claims that that is inconvenient administratively could then challenge it in court. In fact, there is nothing written into the clause that says that the burden has to affect the private sector in order to make it unlawful.

If the burden applies to the civil servants that are trying to administer the new legislation, that is an administrative inconvenience to the civil service, especially if there will be 90,000 fewer of them than we had last year. I am talking about improving legislation that allows one person out of 60 million in these islands to say, “That’s a bit inconvenient for me”, and an entire piece of secondary legislation can be struck down. Despite some of the things I have seen from the Conservative party in my time, I genuinely do not believe that that is what it wants, but I know that that is what some people want.

My fear is that people who cannot get elected to this place are pulling the strings of those who did. Those people are looking to use the clause, and particularly subsection (5), to achieve their dream of a tiny bit of the world where all regulations can be struck down at the stroke of a pen, and once they are struck down it is impossible to replace them with anything. There are people who, at times, have been very close to the seat of power in this place—their donations have helped to change the course of political history in the last 10 years—who do not want there to be any workers’ rights whatever.

A former member of the Government, on whose watch this Bill was drafted, is on the record as saying that he does not think workers have an automatic right to paid holidays. That is the kind of ideology we are dealing with here.

Clause 15 is not about achieving a reasonable objective; it is about completely tearing down 40 years of legislation, some of which we might not welcome but much of which has helped to make the four nations of the United Kingdom more modern and democratic. For that reason, I can understand why some people would happily see all that legislation torn up and replaced with nothing. I genuinely do not believe that is what the Minister wants, I genuinely do not believe it is what the majority of Conservative party members want and I can say with absolute certainty that it is not what the people of Scotland want, and it is not something that the people of Scotland will accept.

I will support any amendments that the Opposition are minded to press to a vote but, amended or unamended, I will seek to divide the Committee on removing clause 15 from the Bill.

[Ms Ghani]

I beg that the Committee rejects amendment 84 and does not press new clause 9 or amendment 87.

It may surprise the Committee that English is not my first language—I was not born in this country—but it has never occurred to me that the words “regulation” and “standards” are the same. Members can look them up in a dictionary, but they are definitely not the same.

Clause 15 is about ensuring we have the right regulations in place, by removing those regulations that are unduly burdensome, outdated or not fit for purpose in the UK. How about swapping them for proportionate, high-quality and agile regulations that help the UK economy, and all of us who work in it, to be nimble and competitive?

I remind the Committee that Departments will be able to maintain the current level of regulation where it is considered appropriate. Only where existing regulations are considered to be unnecessarily burdensome and not fit for purpose may a lower level of regulation be introduced. I will validate that in a moment.

The concerns of hon. Members regarding the scope of the Bill’s powers are unfounded, as the powers to revoke or replace are important cost-cutting enablers of retained EU law reform. The dashboard has identified more than 2,500 pieces of retained EU law, and it is therefore right to have a power of this scope that is capable of acting on a wide range of REUL covering a variety of policy areas. The powers have several safeguards that mitigate their use, namely any legislation made under clause 15(2) that recreates a delegated power or a criminal offence present in REUL is subject to the affirmative procedure. Legislation made under clause 15(3) is specifically subject to the affirmative procedure, which will ensure that changes to policy objectives can be actively approved by Parliament. In addition, a sifting procedure will apply to legislation where Ministers choose to use the negative procedure.

The clause 16 power is intended to facilitate technical updates to retained EU law, to take account of changes in technology or developments in scientific understanding. This ongoing power is not intended to bring about significant policy change. It is instead designed to ensure the UK keeps pace with advances in science and technology over time.

The amendments would add a significant amount of time to the process and, ultimately, could risk Departments being unable to maximise the use of their powers to revoke or replace retained EU law across all policy areas, until such powers sunset. The Bill has been drafted to ensure that legislation made under these powers is subject to robust scrutiny procedures that are proportionate to the scope of the powers, as highlighted above.

I ask the Committee not to press amendments 85, 86 or 94. As I mentioned, the Bill is an enabling Act. Amendment 94 would place a number of environmental requirements on UK Ministers or devolved authorities when they intend to use the powers to revoke or replace, irrespective of the policy area. This amendment would therefore preclude Departments making reforms in policy areas unrelated to the environment, which would significantly impact the opportunity to use these powers.

On amendments 85 and 86, we have sought to ensure that the powers to revoke or replace cannot be used to add to the overall regulatory burden on this subject area. In her evidence to the Committee, Professor Alison Young noted that combining

“a number of earlier burdens, turn them into one burden with a higher standard, that is also not increasing the burden.”––[Official Report, Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill Public Bill Committee, 8 November 2022; c. 19, Q33.]

The requirement not to add to the overall regulatory burden has been drafted to allow the relevant national authority to determine how best to achieve the desired policy outcome. For example, removing regulations or administrative requirements that are deemed unnecessary or unsuitable will make it possible to add new regulations with a higher standard—shock, horror—where it is deemed necessary or desirable, provided that the overall regulatory burden is not increased. The reforms that these powers will enable are vital to allow the UK to drive genuine reform and seize the opportunities of Brexit.

We had a repeat of the debate about animal welfare. As I mentioned the other day, the Government remain focused on how best to deliver the “Action Plan for Animal Welfare” published in 2021, which builds on our existing high animal welfare standards. I therefore ask the hon. Member for Leeds North West to withdraw the amendment.