Product Regulation and Metrology Bill [Lords]

Sammy Wilson Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 1st April 2025 Commons Chamber

[Jonathan Reynolds]

The right hon. Gentleman will have heard me say just now that our intention is to cement the UK’s status as a world leader in product regulation and safety. I am sure we would all recognise the tremendous benefits for both consumers and businesses that come from being a jurisdiction whose consumer protections are widely recognised and where people have confidence that the goods and services they buy will be to the highest standard possible. Where we see gaps in our provision, because of the substantial change that has occurred with our leaving the European Union, we would surely want to fill those gaps so that we are in a position to continue our success in this area.

[Sammy Wilson (East Antrim) (DUP)]

The Minister gives the House the assurance that the idea is not to take us back to EU laws or to have EU laws imposed on the United Kingdom, and yet the Bill heavily references EU laws. How does he explain that?

[Jonathan Reynolds]

I can explain it very clearly. Colleagues who are interested in this legislation will have followed the proceedings in the other place and the discussions on this area. I put the case very straightforwardly: we do not have the ability without this Bill to regulate product standards in a whole range of areas. There are some cases where there will be a strong consumer or business demand for alignment with other jurisdictions; there will also be cases where we wish to diverge, because we see that as being in our economic interests.

However, we surely all accept that we cannot have a position where we do not have the ability to regulate key products, and in particular products that have come from the new technology that is available and the opportunities that come from that. Once again, I say politely to anyone on the Opposition Benches who is not quite reassured that the previous Conservative Government were planning a similar Bill to fill this exact gap in the statute book.

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[Andrew Griffith]

We are having the proper debate through these interventions that perhaps we should have had when the Secretary of State was introducing the Bill. That illustrates the point about putting a vast amount of ambiguity—even if it is well intentioned—into the law and how things will operate, and for a reason of which we know not. If there are instances of, for example, e-scooters catching fire in people’s halls, this House has the ability to legislate, and legislate fast where necessary, against those particular harms at that particular moment in time. My right hon. Friend, with his many years of experience in this House, understands that point, and I think that was what he was saying.

[Sammy Wilson]

Although Opposition Members will perhaps deliberately choose to believe that the words and assurances given are ambiguous, does the hon. Member accept that even Government Members in the House of Lords believe there is an ambiguity that needs to be cleared up? One comment was:

“The question of dynamic alignment with the EU remains unanswered yet ever more topical.”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 12 March 2025; Vol. 844, c. 712.]

[Andrew Griffith]

The hon. Member makes exactly the right point. This is a blank cheque Bill and a Trojan horse Bill. It is simply not clear under this Secretary of State, or any Secretary of State in the future once these powers have been ceded by this place, how they will be implemented. There is a real asymmetry in the constant litany of references to the European Union—a valued trading partners of ours, but only one valued trading partner of ours, as I hope the Secretary of State is about to reveal over the coming days. Tomorrow we understand that tariffs will be imposed by the United States on British exporters. If that is the case, that would be the worst failure of trade policy for a generation. It is businesses, jobs and our economy that will all pay the price. The Chancellor’s emergency Budget will not have lasted a single week because she made no provision for the imposition of tariffs—if that is indeed what is to come.

It is frankly outrageous that the Government have failed to make a statement about where we are, despite the Prime Minister’s official spokesman briefing the Lobby, and the Business and Trade Secretary himself finding time this morning to conduct a round of media interviews. If the Secretary of State would like to comment on the progress of US talks, I will happily give way.

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[Clive Jones]

Can I just carry on a bit? Thanks.

Online marketplaces are rapidly expanding in number and popularity, competing with high streets across the nation, but unfortunately, there is no level playing field on which those two competitors can battle it out for consumers’ cash. That is what the Bill should be addressing, because our high streets and our small businesses must contend with regulations that online marketplaces are not equally liable to. That is not a level playing field. For example, unsafe products are flooding online marketplaces. A study by Which? revealed that 90% of toys purchased from Amazon, eBay, AliExpress and Temu were illegal due to choking and strangulation hazards. Another study from the British Toy and Hobby Association found that 85% of toys from online marketplaces were unsafe, with 8% also illegal due to missing warnings. Do we want that situation to continue?

[Sammy Wilson]

I note that the hon. Member has described many of these toys as “illegal”. In other words, the law is there already. This Bill is therefore not necessary to deal with children choking on toys and all the other things he has outlined. The law is already there; the question is, do we actually implement the law?

[Clive Jones]

The law needs to be tightened up. We definitely need to be taking a lot more interest in the unsafe products that online companies are selling.

Do we want to allow unsafe toys to be sold to our precious children by some faceless online operation through an online market? I am sure the answer is no, but the Bill as it is written fails to address that. The problem is not just limited to toys, but extends to heaters, phone chargers and batteries. The Government have signalled an ambition to bring online marketplace liability in line with more traditional models of retail, but an ambition can be easily reversed by a different Government without parliamentary oversight. Without the measure being explicitly put into the Bill, consumers and the high street are not receiving the guarantees they deserve.

This is a serious issue for children and personal safety, and we therefore need explicit guarantees of minimum duties for online marketplaces in the Bill. What is the Minister’s view on whether a duty to notify consumers who have been sold unsafe or illegal products should be placed on online marketplaces? Such a duty could enhance consumers’ rights to seek a refund of the purchase price. Will a requirement to verify the identity and activities of sellers be established? If it is a yes to any of those questions, the Minister should do the right thing and amend the Bill so that those guarantees are enshrined in primary legislation.

I could go on. The Bill requires a tighter definition of an online marketplace to ensure that there are no loopholes for platforms to avoid appropriate regulations. That is especially the case for platforms that do not exist solely as an online marketplace, such as TikTok Shop and Facebook Marketplace.

Finally, the Bill does not make explicit reference to e-bikes, e-scooters or lithium-ion battery safety, despite safety being one of the explicit aims of the Bill. E-bike and e-scooter battery fires pose a uniquely high risk to consumers, with the London Fire Brigade estimating that it attends a fire incident caused by one of these devices once every two days. There need to be stronger regulations on these things. Can the Minister explain why they are not included in the Bill?

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[Joy Morrissey]

With exports, we can apply any kind of regulation we want to maximise our market advantage from leaving the EU. We could apply a statutory framework for Japan, or any country we want, to ensure we can export our products. The point of leaving the EU was so that we could remain globally competitive, and so that we could choose to adopt any regulatory framework we wanted if that market enabled us to export our products, support our businesses and help to grow our economy. I would support that, but nothing of that is mentioned in the Bill. If it mentioned realignment with market values in relation to Japan, so we could export things to Japan or to other markets, I would be interested in looking at the Bill holistically, but not once is any country or trade grouping mentioned except the EU. That gives me pause, and it makes me wonder whether this is an attempt to achieve a backdoor realignment with EU regulatory frameworks without the scrutiny of Parliament.

[Sammy Wilson]

Does the hon. Lady also accept that the Bill is not necessary to promote exports? If a company wants to export its products to Japan or Timbuktu, it will have to align with the regulations that exist in those countries anyway. It does not need a Government Bill, and—far worse—it does not need a Minister to have the power to make regulations without coming to this place.

[Joy Morrissey]

I agree completely with the right hon. Gentleman. I will leave it there, because that is an excellent point.

This is about free trade and expanding our global reach by making money, growing our economy and allowing everyone to benefit from a tax base that grows because our businesses can export freely. I am very supportive of that. If the Bill in any way addressed the concerns I have raised, I would be happy to support it, but it is vague and does not give us the insight we need into the kind of alignment that is intended. That vagueness presents a challenge that was mentioned repeatedly in the other place. In this House, we must address the Bill’s challenges with a similar rigour. It may look quite harmless on the outside, but under the surface it will deliver profound change and threaten our ability to scrutinise these regulatory changes. In the other place, the noble Lord Sandhurst described it as:

“a Henry VIII Bill par excellence”. —[Official Report, House of Lords, 20 November 2024; Vol. 841, c. GC44.]

We would do well to heed those words.

Where is the policy framework under which Ministers will decide to use these powers? On parliamentary sovereignty or Ministers’ decision to use the powers, there is no such framework.

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[Ms Creasy]

I will, if I may, continue with my speech, but I shall take an intervention a bit later.

Our colleagues in Northern Ireland know the practical consequences of divergence—the obsession with the concept that somehow we have always to be different, which is somehow believed to be sovereignty. They will know what the “not for EU labels” mean. They will know, too, the impact that that has had on them and their colleagues. Neil Johnston, director of the Northern Ireland Retail Consortium, recently told the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee about just that. He described how suppliers have to have separate print runs for labelling, and how the requirements in shops for posters and edge-of-shelf labelling are massively burdensome for small businesses. We end up with a sausage roll that we cannot take across the border between Castlederg and Castlefin simply because of the way that the previous Government undertook Brexit.

[Sammy Wilson]

I wonder whether the Member has read the schedule to the Bill. Agri-food products are not covered.

[Ms Creasy]

I hope the right hon. Member can understand that my point is about divergence—about what happens when we try to ask businesses to run two different regulatory regimes out of a mistaken ideology that somehow we cannot find a way forward. That is what this piece of legislation will do. The hon. Member for Beaconsfield wanted to tell us that British businesses were better off as a result of the “Brexit freedoms”. Well, the numbers and statistics tell us the exact opposite. I am talking about not just the fall in GDP or the fall in trade that is predicted, but the thousands of businesses—16,400 of them—which have given up exporting to the European Union because of the additional paperwork and the additional regulatory regime.

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[Gareth Snell]

The right hon. Gentleman is correct that there are existing protections for some of the things I have mentioned that, if enforced properly, could take those products off the market, but the enforcement of many of our regulatory frameworks in this country is quite weak. Funding for most enforcement agencies across this country was—not to make a party political point—reduced under the last Government. I hope this Government will reconsider that because a regulation is only ever as good as the enforcement regime sat behind it.

[Sammy Wilson]

Would the hon. Member accept that if Ministers got up at 9 o’clock in the morning and worked until 9 o’clock at night introducing regulations on the basis of this Bill every day, but there was no enforcement or the enforcement was as weak as he says it is on pottery, we would be no better off?

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[Sammy Wilson (East Antrim) (DUP)]

Anyone listening to the debate would think that it is all about saving children from choking on toys, buildings not burning down because of defective batteries in bicycles, saving lives, safe products, and even the internal market and safeguarding the Northern Ireland economy, but it is not about any of that. It is nice to dress it up like that, and I suppose using that kind of language is helpful to make the Bill relevant to constituents, but the Bill is nothing to do with that.

Time and again Members have spoken about those kinds of issues—batteries catching fire, defective toys and so on—but they can and have been dealt with already in law. Indeed, we have even heard Members talking about illegal products being sold, so we do not need some Minister to change the law; we need someone to ensure that the laws in place are enforced. We already have a mechanism to make things illegal, so if there are gaps in the law, we can just use that mechanism.

Let us not obscure what the debate is all about. It is not about gaps and the need to safeguard people. It is all about the Bill’s agenda, which is to give Ministers additional powers. The public see a Government with a majority of over 200 who have been able to drive through legislation that has frustrated and angered them, whether it is taking money off pensioners for winter fuel or the legislation that was driven through last week to meet the net zero agenda, which failed to prevent us from buying solar products from China that are made by slave labour. I could go through all the other things that have made people angry, but a Government with a majority of over 200 now want to take on additional powers to allow a Minister to avoid having to come to this House to ensure product safety.

I have no doubt that the real reason Ministers wish to retain that power is that the Government have already set their mind on resetting our relations with Europe. They know it is unpopular with many of their supporters. They do not want to have constant scrutiny in this House on a weekly or monthly basis of new regulations that align us with Europe, so it is far better to give Ministers the power to do that quietly, without consultation or a vote in this House. As a number of Members have said, the Bill gives Ministers the power to do that.

Indeed, some of the Government’s own supporters in the House of Lords made the point that the Bill contains the potential for dynamic alignment. The Government have been ambiguous about whether the powers will be used to do that, but I am fairly sure that is the main reason. There is little enough opportunity for this House to look at and challenge legislation, but I believe it is wrong for a Bill to allow Ministers, under the cover of darkness, to take us back into arrangements that we have escaped from.

Members have mentioned Northern Ireland. We know the impact of the EU general product safety regulations already, because they apply in Northern Ireland. Businesses in the rest of the United Kingdom that want to sell their products in Northern Ireland will have to have agents in Northern Ireland. The EU makes these laws to try to tie other countries and companies to its regulations. I suspect the excuse the Government will use for pursuing dynamic alignment will be, “We’re doing it for the good of businesses in GB as well as Northern Ireland, because if we’re aligned to EU rules, we escape some of the restrictions on trade that the EU has imposed.” But why did we leave the EU in the first place, and why did many businesses support leaving the EU? First, the EU introduced costly regulations that did not even need to apply to many businesses because they never traded with the EU, but they still had to adjust their products to meet the regulations, which incurred costs.

[Sir John Hayes]

I am listening with intent to the right hon. Gentleman’s contribution. It may be that the Government are more innocent than he suggests and that there is not this hidden agenda he is describing, but in the words of a Northern Irishman, C. S. Lewis,

“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.”

Even if there is not a hidden agenda, in the end, in the name of the victims—the customers—this will end up being regulatory, bureaucratic and costly.

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[Sammy Wilson]

The potential is there, and it has been put in the Bill. I suspect that clause 2(7) has been included in the Bill to give that opportunity, if not now, then at some future time.

The other reason why businesses have opposed the implementation of EU regulations and the other danger of dynamic alignment is that many of the laws and regulations made in Europe that we may be aligning ourselves with only get there in the first place because powerful lobby groups lobby the European Commission to get regulations imposed. Those regulations may well suit one particular industry, or even powerful firms within that industry, but they do not necessarily benefit all of business. Some have said of the Bill, “Oh, this will give certainty to business,” but it may well give businesses additional costs.

Given what has happened in Northern Ireland and the way that our market with the rest of the UK has been disrupted, some may think that I would welcome the measures, but I do not welcome them for two reasons. First, as I pointed out to the hon. Member for Walthamstow (Ms Creasy), many of the restrictions are on goods that are not even included in the Bill, as the schedule excludes them. Secondly, even if this problem is solved, it does not deal with the issue. We know that because Northern Ireland is subject to the EU single market regulations—300 areas of law, as the hon. and learned Member for North Antrim (Jim Allister) keeps reminding us on an almost weekly basis. The issue is that we have allowed the United Kingdom to be divided by the deal that was done with Europe. When the previous Government was in power, I warned that this would happen and that Northern Ireland would be the foot in the door. I believe that that will be used as one of the arguments for this legislation.

The DUP will oppose the legislation because we believe it is not in the interests of the United Kingdom and does not address the problems that are faced in Northern Ireland.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)]

Order. I thought it was remiss that the speech by the right hon. Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Sir John Hayes) did not have a literary person in it, but he managed to get C. S. Lewis into his intervention.