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

Peter Grant Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 8th November 2022 Public Bill Committees

[Ms Ghani]

Q You have already talked about the conflict between domestic law and laws made to harmonise across Europe, but, for the record, does not the fact that the EU legislates in a very different way from the UK create tensions between retained EU law and other domestic law?

Sir Stephen Laws: Yes, it does. The major difference between the way the UK traditionally legislates and the way the EU—and indeed lots of other countries—legislate is that under a parliamentary system the Government take responsibility for the effect and quality of the law. That means that when law is made, it is made to do something that people have agreed on. Very often, law made in Europe—in different languages as well—was a matter of agreeing words, irrespective of what the words achieved. If you could agree on the words, that was the best that you could hope for; that may happen very occasionally in my experience, and very rarely indeed in the UK. In the UK people agree on the substance, so you know what the law does. Retaining all this law that was there because it was a compromise on words is making life difficult for those people who have to use it.

[Peter Grant (Glenrothes) (SNP)]

Q Good morning, Sir Stephen. One of the things that we were told about leaving the European Union was that it would return powers to Parliament. What does this Bill do to the balance of powers between Parliament and Ministers?

Sir Stephen Laws: Well, most of the law that this relates to—certainly the early clauses about subordinate legislation—is not law that Parliament made; it is law that Parliament enacted or approved because it had to. The law that will be made under the Bill will be made by a Government accountable to Parliament. The powers in the Bill are equivalent in some ways to the power under section 2(2) of the European Communities Act 1972, but in that case there was no choice about the substance of how you exercised the power; the argument was all about the means. Under this Bill, Parliament will have an opportunity to look at the substance as well as the means.

[Peter Grant]

Q You said that Parliament enacted all this legislation because it had to. Is it not the case that, for every single piece of legislation that we are talking about in the Bill, a United Kingdom Government Minister was present at the time that the legislation was agreed in Europe?

Sir Stephen Laws: Yes, but that does not mean that Parliament agreed to the substance of the legislation—nor, in some cases, did the Minister. They are all part of compromises. In the end, the European law had to be enacted because it was European law.

[Peter Grant]

Q You say that Parliament did not agree. Is not it the case that the European Scrutiny Committee, which existed throughout the time that we were members of the European Union, had the power to call in Ministers and put a stop on ministerial approval of European Council decisions until the Committee, and therefore Parliament, were satisfied that it was the right thing to do? Whether or not Parliament exercised that authority, is it not the fact that there was a Committee of Parliament that could prevent Ministers from acting against the will of Parliament?

Sir Stephen Laws: There were mechanisms to feed in the UK view, but the UK view did not necessarily have to prevail.

[Peter Grant]

Q If enacted as drafted, what difference will the Bill have on the application of EU law in Northern Ireland, in particular in relation to the Northern Ireland protocol and the Good Friday agreement?

Sir Stephen Laws: Frankly, that is not a question that I have prepared for, so I cannot say much. What I can say about the Good Friday agreement is that I am not sure that the protocol is relevant, because the law by which the protocol applies is the law of the things that are not retained just because we were carrying over the old law, which is what this Bill is mainly about. I am sorry; I have not looked specifically at the Northern Ireland aspects of the Bill.

[Mr David Jones (Clwyd West) (Con)]

Q Good morning, Sir Stephen. The Bill abolishes the principle of the supremacy of retained EU law. Do you think that that is the right course?

Sir Stephen Laws: Yes, I do. I think that that is part of the confusion. If we are going to work out what the law means, it is important that the system for retained EU law should fit the system that we have for all other law, which is that the latest views of Parliament should count.

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[Ms Ghani]

Q Professor Young, when you gave oral evidence to the European Scrutiny Committee in its inquiry on retained EU law, you explained that EU law is drafted differently from UK law, and needs to be interpreted in the light of what type of retained EU law it is. What challenges do these drafting differences pose to both amending and interpreting retained EU law?

Professor Young: Thank you, Minister. It is a matter of recognising that EU law tends to be drafted by setting out the purposes that it is meant to achieve in certain circumstances. Directives have a different format from regulations; they set out the aims and purposes, and allow member states discretion in how to implement them, which is why so much of retained EU law is secondary legislation that was enacted by the UK to implement particular provisions of directives. In that sense, it tends to be drafted in a slightly different style. You also have to recognise that its main aim was harmonisation, so that might influence how it was drafted.

While the UK was a member of the European Union, we got used to understanding how EU law was drafted, and to interpreting it in line with background EU law principles, including the general principles of EU law. Obviously, one of the things this Bill will do is switch that off. You then have to think about how, without those general principles, we will interpret any of the retained EU law that becomes assimilated or is retained by regulations. We might have to think about not just retaining particular provisions through regulations, but whether we need to add elements to amend them or make them clear, so that we have a fuller understanding of how they are meant to apply in certain circumstances.

[Peter Grant]

Q Good morning to both witnesses. Professor Barnard, as we heard, this Bill sets an automatic date by which several thousand pieces of legislation will disappear off the statute book unless they are specifically left on. The number of such pieces of legislation, as we have just heard, is about 1,400 more than we thought this morning. Are you aware of any previous incident, either in the UK or elsewhere, where that approach has been taken successfully with such a large amount of legislation at once?

Professor Barnard: The simple answer is no; I am completely unaware of any precedent for this. Of course, that does not mean that we cannot try to adopt this approach, but we need to be extremely mindful of the associated risks. That is one of the reasons why we have proposed carving out areas, such as environment and social policy, that are already subject to obligations under the trade and co-operation agreement. That will ensure that we do not accidently turn them off but not turn them back on again through the powers in clauses 1(2), 2 or 12 to 15, and so will ensure that we are not subject to the trade and co-operation agreement’s dispute resolution mechanisms, which may result in tariffs being imposed on us.

[Peter Grant]

Professor Young, I saw you nodding. Is there anything you want to add? Do you agree with Professor Barnard?

Professor Young: I agree. I too am unaware of any process that has tried to make such a big change to so many laws in such a short period. That is why it could impose so many practical problems. In most systems, when you have a change of legal system or regime, there is this element of what we did originally, which maintains legal certainty by retaining the old provisions. Then, step by step, in what we often call a sector-specific approach, there is a detailed assessment of whether we should keep those laws or change them. As far as I am aware, this is quite a novel way of doing this with such a large amount of law.

[Peter Grant]

Q Thank you. I do not know whether you heard Sir Stephen Laws’s evidence immediately before you came on screen. He suggested that the concerns raised about the uncertainty that the Bill might create can be partly explained by the traditional resistance of the legal profession to change of any kind. He said it is wrong to assume that changing the law makes it less certain. Professor Young, how do you respond to that?

Professor Young: It is not necessarily that I am reluctant to change or am concerned about change. We need to think about what this is asking against the backdrop of what we are aiming for in the Bill. You have to recognise that the difficulties of uncertainty will be not for lawyers, but for those trying to carry out business. Those carrying out business and trade need legal certainty, so that they have an understanding of the rules, now and going forward. As for the elements and problems of uncertainty, we do not necessarily think that things will be uncertain because they are changing; the issue is that those carrying out business will not necessarily be 100% sure whether things will be retained in the long term. If so, how they will be retained? Has everything that might be revoked been listed? They are not 100% sure whether it has been revoked or not.

Other provisions in the Bill might further that uncertainty. For example, under the Bill, legal officers can refer an issue to the court if they think that a decision should have changed the interpretation of a particular piece of retained or assimilated EU law but did not. That can happen after the agreement has been included and the decision has been made by the parties. You might think, “Well, the Bill says that is not a problem because it won’t affect the result between the parties,” but you have to recognise that others in the legal system will have seen that case, and that interpretation of the law, and will have perhaps planned their business on that basis. They will suddenly find that there is a reference to the court that might change how the law is interpreted or what it means.

That is why we are concerned about certainty. We are concerned about the consequences for those carrying out trade, because they need legal certainty to plan their business activities.

[Peter Grant]

Q Thank you. Professor Barnard, the concern about uncertainty was a significant element of your written submission to the Committee. Is there anything that you want to add?

Professor Barnard: I would just say that the business of legal academia is forever to be making proposals to change the law, to try and improve it in some way. The idea that lawyers are hostile to change is just not correct. The way in which the legal system has worked and has run successfully over the decades is on the basis of incremental change rather than this really quite remarkable slash and burn approach proposed by the sunset clause.

[Peter Grant]

Thank you.

[Stella Creasy]

Q We have talked a little bit about the content, but could we talk a little about the process? You have just highlighted that there are actually another 1,400 pieces of legislation affected. The process then gives ministerial—not parliamentary—control about what happens next. Could you give us your reflections on that process and the scrutiny of it, and some of the practicalities? For example, which Ministers will retain responsibility for which pieces of legislation?

It would be quite helpful to know, with the extra 1,400, who has drawn the short straw? Are they all in one particular Department or across the Departments? A previous witness claimed that there would be adequate parliamentary scrutiny, and if Parliament did not like what Ministers were doing, it would intervene. What would this process mean for our ability to influence the content produced as a result of the Bill?

Professor Barnard: On the first point, as you rightly point out, there are provisions in the Bill to allow Ministers, by regulations, to keep retained EU law, which will eventually be called assimilated law, but what is not at all clear is the process by which the Minister decides to engage in that process. Remember, if the Minister decides to sit on his or her hands, the default kicks in, which is that those all those provisions will go. In reality, we understand that Government Departments have a reasonable idea of the law in their area, and civil servants will need to go through that law statutory instrument by statutory instrument.

There is a real issue about capacity in Government Departments. Jacob Rees-Mogg himself said that his own Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy had identified that it needed 400 civil servants to be working on the 300 or so pieces of legislation that had then been identified. Presumably, now they have discovered an extra 1,400 that number will increase. It is a huge amount of civil service time. The issue is even more acute in the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, which is the Department most affected by retained EU law. The question is, what is the internal process? Even if the Secretary of State in DEFRA decides that he or she wants to retain all the legislation because it is so important in different forms, what happens? Does it go to the Cabinet? Is there some sort of star chamber that looks at what is being proposed by the Departments? We know none of that, and we know none of the detail about whether there will be any consultation with external stakeholders, which is particularly important in the field of agriculture, where a large number of stakeholders are affected.

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[Ms Ghani]

Q Thank you. Returning to Mr Sharpe, does the Bill, as drafted, strike the right balance between providing safeguards and enabling the removal of outdated retained EU law from our statute books?

Tom Sharpe: I see the Bill as a framework Bill. Of course, it gives Ministers and Departments very considerable powers—powers of proposal, as you know, to amend, revoke or replace existing legislation.

As Martin has just said, an Act of Parliament, which was probably passed—if I may say so respectfully—before many of you were born, provided an enabling power to enact legislation of some quite sweeping character. Despite all the things that law students learned about how Parliament needed to approve legislation, not one single regulation—this is one of the bits we are discussing—has ever been debated, approved or amended by the House of Commons or Parliament. That is a striking statement, but it is absolutely true. We were forbidden, in law, to debate or amend such legislation. I suspect you all know that, but it does not hurt to be reminded.

As for the directives, of course they, too, were approved by Parliament—or, more accurately, not disapproved—but the power of Parliament was utterly residual because the objective of a directive had to be observed. If it was not, the UK would be subject to proceedings from Brussels—and it was, on occasion, but not as often as many other countries.

We are now debating a system of revocation, amendment and replacement, and giving it far more formality than we gave the creation of the laws themselves. That ought to give us pause for thought. That is the background. As far as parliamentary scrutiny is concerned, yes, most of it will be subject to negative resolution, and it is easy to make what I will disrespectfully call a good debating point about the times when statutory instruments have fallen under the negative procedure. But here, we are dealing with a sea change. We are dealing with masses of legislation, as we know, all of which will be subject to significant scrutiny within the House of Commons by parliamentarians and by the press. It seems to me that those issues have to be given notice. There is also the sifting procedure that we adverted to earlier, which I think could be quite a powerful brake on Ministers’ discretion.

[Peter Grant]

Q The evidence submitted by the Bar Council, which I assume you are familiar with, says very firmly that it has profound concerns about the Bill, and that its preference would be for the Bill to be withdrawn in its present form. Why has the Bar Council got it so wrong?

Tom Sharpe: Where do we start?

Martin Howe: I am concerned by the attitude taken by the Bar Council. As a subscribing member, I fear that it is trespassing rather too far into political issues. Unfortunately, I think there is a sort of small “c” conservative lawyer’s mentality, which has led over time to various things, such as counsel saying in the “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” trial, “Members of the jury, would you allow your wives or your servants to read this book?” Since so many members of the Bar are imbued with the system of working with European Union law—it is all part of their practice and the way they operate—there is a natural mental attitude towards keeping it. I do not think that reflects the necessities of the democratic process following the referendum result.

[Peter Grant]

Q Mr Sharpe, do you have anything to add?

Tom Sharpe: It is our trade union, and it does not speak on my behalf on this political matter, very obviously, and it should not have done that. I think there is a broad issue here. If you look at the criticism of the Bill by the Bar Council and by members working with it—the Hansard Society, which got a mention, and various leading members of the Bar whom I know very well; they are my friends and I respect them—the dominant theme is one of extreme pessimism. That is to say that if we have a mendacious Government, a supine Parliament and a lazy and ignorant press, all sorts of things can happen. Now, I do not think that is true. I have far more respect for this House, and even for Ministers and the press. If Ministers are getting out of hand, they will be put in check. If they are not, the judiciary has a role in reviewing the exercise of these powers. We can ignore the judiciary in this context, but it has an important residual role.

We can call it benign or naive, but I do not think that is right. I think that by and large the House of Commons does a pretty good job, and I see no reason at all why it will not continue to do so in relation to this important Bill.

[Peter Grant]

Q You suggested that if a Minister gets out of hand, Parliament can act. You will recall, though, that quite recently a Secretary of State was found by an inquiry to have been guilty of severe bullying of civil servants, and nothing happened to her because a Prime Minister did not want her to lose her job.

To go back to the comments you made earlier about the difference between primary and secondary legislation, when was the last time Parliament amended a piece of secondary legislation?

Martin Howe: It does not. The procedure is a yes/no procedure either by affirmative resolution, in which case there has to be a positive vote or it fails; or by negative resolution, in which case, unless it is prayed against and there is a vote against it, it stands.

[Peter Grant]

Q Does that not mean there is significantly less opportunity for parliamentary scrutiny if all that Parliament is allowed is: we do this or we do not do it? Does that not mean that, almost by definition, there is less opportunity for parliamentary scrutiny with secondary legislation than there would be with a Bill?

Martin Howe: Indeed. By its nature, there is much less opportunity than with a Bill, which you go through line by line, but all the legislation that is within the scope of the Bill to be potentially corrected, changed or left out by secondary legislation was introduced by secondary legislation. The primary legislation is not covered by the powers.

Tom Sharpe: Remember what we are discussing. I think it is very unlikely that there will be a wholesale slash and burn—to use the academic term that we heard earlier—of all EU retained legislation or assimilated legislation; a good deal of it will remain. I do not recognise the gloomy picture of businesspeople clawing their way to the bottom. I understand the theory, but in the course of a year I advise dozens of CEOs and chairmen, and not one has said: “We have a terrific opportunity to make extra money out of the consumer.”

What is missing here is public scrutiny and reputation, and we have to be balanced and less shrill about this: not everything will change; not everything will change at once; and some things will be changed—in particular under clause 15(3) where, respectfully, the real issues arise for parliamentary scrutiny. There, as you heard, some will be determined by affirmative resolution and others will go through the sifting procedure, which requires the Minister to come to Parliament to justify the choice of a negative procedure. You will have an opportunity to deal with that.

[Stella Creasy]

Q Martin, I was interested to hear you talk about how you were happy with the scrutiny mechanism in the Bill, because I note that in your evidence to the European Scrutiny Committee you argued for the need to have a delegated power to revise retained law and then suggested a commission to propose what should be done. That would be much more scrutiny than you are talking about now. What made you change your mind about the requirement for scrutiny that you previously advocated? I thought that the argument you made before was compelling.

Martin Howe: The argument I was putting forward was for a practical way to speed up the process. Frankly, it was a suggestion that I floated, a possible—

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[Ms Ghani]

Mr Fenhalls, you said you are not hostile to change, but you have been nothing but negative about the Bill. You also mentioned a democratic process. There was another democratic process in 2016—just for the record.

[Peter Grant]

Q Good morning. In your submission from the Bar Council, Mr Fenhalls, you suggested that the Bill should be withdrawn. You have also accepted that we need to do something about the huge volume of retained EU law that we still have. What would be a better way to deal with all that law, rather than the way it is being dealt with in the Bill?

Mark Fenhalls: I am not a parliamentarian or a politician. The short answer to that is that I do not know, but I do know that every single stakeholder and lawyer I have spoken to—who are simply thinking about their clients’ business interests and the rights of the people involved—wants to know what the alternative proposals are before they take a view. The difficulty with this Bill is not change, because change in itself is fine; it is the fact that we do not know what the proposals will be. We have suggested what we suggested in our submission and we have put in fall-back positions saying that if the Bill is to proceed, we should put in place scrutiny measures or duties on Ministers to come to the House and say, “This is what we propose to do,” and not run the risk, for example, of the sunset causing us to crash into the wall at the end of next year.

[Peter Grant]

For the record, there are two lawyers sitting behind you who quite clearly do not share the view that you just expressed about the various lawyers you have spoken to. Some of us think that lawyers argue with lawyers all of the time; that is what they are there for.

[The Chair]

Before we continue, I think Mr Peretz wanted to come in on that point.

George Peretz: I wanted to come in in response to the Minister’s question about section 2(2) of the European Communities Act 1972. There are two points here. One is the point, developed by Martin Howe, that it considerably underestimates the degree of democratic scrutiny that EU law actually had, particularly in the European Parliament and on the reform of EU law. It also understates the mechanisms that Parliament had to scrutinise how Ministers acted in the Council of Ministers.

I suppose one is getting slightly political here, but perhaps the more important point is that one of the arguments for Brexit, as I understood it, was that it would strengthen democratic accountability for legislation. It is slightly disappointing that the argument put forward for the Bill is sometimes, “Well, the EU was undemocratic in this, so you cannot complain that this is equally undemocratic.” We can do rather better than that.

[Peter Grant]

Q This question is for all three witnesses. Would the Bill be less of a concern if there was not a sunset clause, or if the sunset clause was later than the end of 2023? Are your concerns partly about how little time there is for the process to be completed?

Eleonor Duhs: I would still have some concerns, because the end of 2026 is not far away and that is what people are saying would perhaps be the revised timeframe.

There are some really significant things in this Bill in terms of changing the way in which the law works. I will give an example from data protection law. Clause 4 would change the relationship between retained EU law and domestic law. To show what that might mean in practice, I will give the example of a conflict between the UK general data protection regulations and the Data Protection Act 2018. This is not addressed by the provisions that Mr Madders asked about; that is simply about how data protection legislation as a whole interacts with the domestic statute book and is not overridden by it. In a conflict between the UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018, if we remove the principle of supremacy, for example—which is what the Bill seeks to do—we could end up reducing data protection standards in the UK. That could cost UK businesses up to £1.6 billion and significantly increase red tape, so this is really important.

Last year there was a case called the Open Rights Group case, which was to do with exemptions in the 2018 Act that were overly broad. The Court of Appeal said that the UK GDPR had precedence—so this was decided under the retained principle of the supremacy of EU law—and that the provision in the 2018 Act was unlawful. If we had not had that retention of the principle of supremacy of EU law, and had had this new section 5(A2), the 2018 Act would have had precedence and the broader exemption would have applied, which would have reduced rights in the UK.

Why is it helpful for rights in the UK to remain as they were before? Because our current standard of protection of personal data has been deemed by the EU to be essentially equivalent to their standards of protection. That allows a data adequacy decision and, at the moment, the free flow of data between the EU and the UK. If we did not have that—if we lost data adequacy, which could happen under proposed new section 5(A2) in clause 4—UK businesses would have to spend time putting in place contracts and would have to do transfer risk assessments.

The New Economics Foundation and University College London wrote a paper entitled “The cost of data inadequacy”, which they published in November 2020. It stated that losing the free flow of data could cost UK businesses up to £1.6 billion in extra red tape, and it would have other economic implications, including a reduction in UK-EU trade, especially digital trade; reduced domestic and international investment in the UK; and the relocation of business functions, infrastructure and personnel outside the UK. So the Bill could have really significant implications for trade.

[Peter Grant]

Q Mr Peretz, do you want to comment on my previous question? How much of the concern about the Bill is simply down to the very short time provided by the sunset clause? If we moved that clause further back, would it ease your concerns?

George Peretz: The short time is clearly a concern given the enormous work that will need to be done both in Whitehall and by Parliament if it intends to scrutinise any of this properly within a very short timeframe. A lot of this law is very important, a lot is very complicated, and quite a lot of it is both, so one should not underestimate the resource implications. Obviously, if you have a longer timeframe—until 2026, say—that resource could be spread over a longer period, and perhaps more efficiently.

There are other, wider concerns about the Bill and how it amends the application of some EU rules to retained EU law as it continues to operate, and about Ministers’ power to revoke and replace. Those are separate from the sunset clause concerns, but the sunset clause does interrelate with the question of Minister’s powers. One of the problems with the effectiveness of parliamentary scrutiny is that although one hears that Parliament has powers—in some cases via the negative or affirmative resolution procedures—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.

To take an example, if Ministers decided to keep the working time rules but rewrite them to make them less favourable to employees, and came up with the new regulations in November 2023, those rewritten regulations would probably be introduced under the affirmative procedure. However, when the House of Commons voted on them, Ministers would say, “You may not like these revised regulations very much, but if you do not vote for them, the alternative is that we will not have any regulations at all.” That weakens Parliament’s ability to control the exercise of ministerial power.

[Alex Sobel]

Q I will put this question to you, George, as it is something of a follow-up. You just gave a qualitative response about the sunset-clausing, but this is more of a quantitative question. I was not aware until Catherine Barnard and Professor Young pointed it out earlier that 1,400 additional pieces of legislation have been found. I have now found the article in the Financial Times, which states that

“A plan…to review or repeal all EU laws on the UK statute book by the end of 2023 has suffered another setback after the discovery of 1,400 additional pieces of legislation.”

We were aware of 2,100 pieces of legislation, but that is another 1,400, so we are now seemingly aware of 3,500, with a sunset clause at the end of 2023. Is that the end of it? Will it be 3,500 pieces of legislation or could there be more? How are we going to find and define all these pieces of legislation so that we know what law we are acting under? You have just described qualitatively how pieces of legislation will fall under the negative resolution procedure because they are going to be sunset-claused out. Quantitively, where do you think we are going to end up by December 2023?

George Peretz: One does not know. On your point about the legislation being discovered, like you I have read the story in the Financial Times. I do not know the background to it, but we drew attention in the Bar Council paper to the risk of things simply being forgotten. As that story shows, that is not a hypothetical risk. That is one reason why we suggested as a possible amendment to the Bill that the Government add a schedule that simply lists all the regulations that are going to be affected and if it is not on the list, it does not fall. It is very difficult to see the argument against that. Presumably, the Government want to know what is being repealed. One does not want to repeal things one does not know about. What would be the good of not evaluating the risk? It is very difficult to see why there would be an objection to listing everything out. Then everyone would know precisely what goes and what stays. That was one suggestion we put forward.

It is very undesirable to have the sunset clause—for all the work that is going to have to be done to be done effectively with a gun pointed at everybody’s head saying, “Unless you’ve done all this analysis within a very restricted time period, the rules will fall.” There is just endless room for mistakes.

One of the points we discovered when we were rewriting a lot of EU rules for the purposes of the withdrawal Act—which Eleanor knows very well about and can speak about in more detail—was that, as the legislation was being rewritten, it was discovered that there were problems with it. If we look down any of the lists of amended rules, as one might experience in practice, one normally finds that over the 2018 and 2019 period there were frequent amendments. As one version was done, it was found that there was a problem with it or something needed to be added, and another amendment was made. There just is not time within the process of this Bill for that amendment process.

There is also a technical problem. It is not clear that there is the power once a regulation has been rewritten for Ministers then to say, “Oh dear—we realise that this regulation contains the following defects; we would quite like to amend it now.” I am not actually sure that the Bill contains a power for Ministers to do that. That is a bit of a problem.

Mark Fenhalls: I agree with what George just said. You will know far better than we do the stresses and strains on you as individual constituency MPs attempting to deal with those issues, and what in truth MPs can do as individuals scrutinising material like this. Ministers will know how pressured their civil servants are. I know from my dealings with civil servants how afraid they are of the possible forthcoming cuts. It is very difficult as an outsider to contemplate how the civil service can begin to cope with an assessment of what all this law involves.

The concluding point would be that if you have the list that George spoke to, that is a foundation for a proper ministerial division of responsibility as to who is doing what—which regulations affect which ministries and therefore what should our plan be? By the time we get through the end of next year, we might have dealt with financial services, perhaps, and with regeneration and levelling up, perhaps, because that covers environment and habitat and planning, but with that list and that firm foundation, you can make sensible evidence-based decisions about what to do. The frightening thing about the FT story—again, I know nothing about where it has come from—is the thought as to the unintended consequences, which nobody can possibly want, of not knowing what is out there. That is why, in a sense, a framework Bill is so flawed in its approach, because we do not know what we are dealing with.