Draft Market Measures (Marketing Standards) (Amendment) (EU Exit) Regulations 2019 Draft Market Measures Payment Schemes (Amendment) (EU Exit) Regulations 2019 Draft Market Measures (Miscellaneous Provisions) (Amendment) (EU Exit) Regulations 2019

Sandy Martin Excerpts

Monday 25th March 2019 General Committees

[Sandy Martin (Ipswich) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Stringer. I sympathise if Committee members feel that they are here for groundhog day, with yet another repetition of the complicated and technical details of statutory instruments designed to replicate in UK law the regulations that we currently enjoy with the EU.

I say enjoy advisedly, because if one good thing comes out of this process, it might be that we begin to realise just how many regulations it takes to create optimum trading relationships. The Minister and his hon. Friends have made much of the wish to reduce regulations—“red tape” they rather pejoratively call them—but when we joined the Common Market it was precisely regulations such as those that helped to bring about the single market which has been so beneficial to the British economy and which we are now so gratuitously throwing away.

The reason that we need market measures at all is that the market does not and cannot regulate itself to the satisfaction of society as a whole. The attempt to replicate those regulations and thereby to maintain what really only works properly as part of our membership of the EU is probably doomed to failure. Without the unanimity of purpose of a large organised bloc, and the role of equal sponsor of the market conditions in Europe that our membership has afforded us, I predict that many of the regulations will be either unworkable or superfluous.

In particular, the likelihood is that we will not be able or willing to adhere to the marketing standards element of the common organisation of markets, and our ability to trade freely with EU countries will therefore be hampered. Whether we have a soft Brexit or a hard Brexit, our agriculture will be seriously damaged. We will have no influence over changes in EU regulations on marketing agricultural produce, but we will have to adhere to them none the less if we are to continue to trade effectively into EU markets. The fundamental problem therefore is not with the wording of the draft SIs, but with the very idea that we can continue with our marketing and relationships with the EU simply by changing “EU” to “UK” and “Commission” to “Secretary of State”.

Is there anything in the draft SIs that I can pick out for particular criticism? No. Can I be sure that nothing in the SIs ought to be changed? No, I cannot be sure. It would not be at all obvious if mistakes had been made in these technical amendments to technical regulations. Normally, we rely on multiple stakeholders going over amendments to regulations such as these and alerting us to any possible dangers, but the absurd timeframe that we now face, having left all these SIs to the last possible moment, makes that impossible.

The Green Alliance, a grouping of most of the major environmental pressure groups for the purpose of engaging with Parliament and the political agenda, has stated:

“For the majority of environmental legislation that has been transferred in this way, there was no prior consultation or engagement with stakeholders.”

The SIs before the Committee are primarily about marketing agriculture and food, rather than environmental protection, but there are environmental consequences to our choices of which foods to eat and the promotion of more sustainable production methods. Did the Minister consult with any environmental stakeholders on the SIs? Did he receive a consultation response from the National Farmers Union on the SIs?

Like Members of Parliament, the independent stakeholders simply do not have the time or energy to scrutinise all the SIs, and that increases the danger of mistakes and omissions. Will the Minister commit to correcting any errors that do turn out to have been made inadvertently? Will there be some sort of “lessons learned” wash-up after this whole sorry episode is behind us, in order to maximise the participation of stakeholders in the setting of regulations in future?

We need regulations to make our society run smoothly and to maintain our agriculture and other production. The EU not only has transformed the fortunes of its member states through the standardisation of regulation, but is on the way to using its economic leverage to make its standards and regulations the standard for the whole world. It is no coincidence that the people who think that we can do without regulations are the people who tend to think that we can do without the EU. I believe that they are about to be proven spectacularly wrong, but there is nothing that we could do with the draft SIs to make any difference to that, so we will not be opposing them.