Draft Product Safety and Metrology etc. (Amendment) Regulations 2024

Stella Creasy Excerpts

Monday 13th May 2024 General Committees

[Stella Creasy (Walthamstow) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is a pleasure to serve under you in the Chair, Ms Rees, and to be in this room. My hon. Friend the Member for Bethnal Green and Bow on the Front Bench was incredibly polite, whereas I shall not be. What a mess! What an absolute mess this is for British business, and what a symbol of the failures of Brexit.

Over the past year, while serving on bodies such as the Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill Committee, I had the pleasure, shall we call it, of looking at the great powers and freedoms that Brexit offered us to set our own standards on toy safety. But what today tells us is that it is through collaboration that we keep our children safe and our standards high. This mess, this uncertainty and all the money that businesses have had to spend over the past couple of years amount to an honest admission—and this is what I hope the Minister will give us later—that trying to set our own regulatory regime in an international global economy when our businesses want to compete and to sell across the world is completely counterproductive to the British interest and to British businesses. A smarter regulatory regime? We all knew that Brexit ultimately was just about more paperwork.

[George Eustice (Camborne and Redruth) (Con)]

Of course, the European Union does not represent the entire world and not every country in the world is a member of the European Union, so is the hon. Lady saying that the European Union should also forgo its right to set its regulations and should perhaps accept Codex as a standard to abide by?

[Stella Creasy]

I am not quite sure why the right hon. Member came up with that analysis. I am trying to make the point that we as a country, having left—[Interruption.] I would love to answer his question. I know that he has to chunter from a sedentary position because today is an embarrassment for him as somebody who also promoted the idea that, somehow, if we left the regulatory regime of the European Union, our country’s businesses would benefit. They have not, and this instrument today proves why, because it is about how people can trade together and how regulatory regimes interact with each other. The point about CE marking is one that any business could have told him before we left the European Union. This is not an argument for us to rejoin; it is an argument for some honesty about why having common frameworks and common standards matters.

The right hon. Member would do well to look at the explanatory memorandum and what it means when it says on page 4:

“This EU recognition is implemented in GB legislation”.

What it is actually saying is that our standards are lower than the standards that the EU has set, because through this statutory instrument the Minister is admitting that GB standards will already be being met if EU standards are met. The tail is not wagging the dog; the dog is fully in the doghouse, because the reality is that it is better for British business to have one set of regulations to comply with. There is less paperwork, not more.

The paperwork that came from Brexit shows the fallacy of the idea—the fantasy—that somehow we, a country of 70 million consumers, could set a separate regulatory regime and tell British businesses that they could still trade across the world without incurring additional costs or facing additional barriers, including additional non-tariff barriers, and friction. That is the reality of this SI. My hon. Friend the Member for Bethnal Green and Bow was being kind about it. It is an admission of failure when it comes to the freedoms that British businesses were promised.

In that sense, I have a number of questions for the Minister, because I think British business deserves some honesty about the lessons that can be learned from the mess created over the charter mark in the last couple of years. Will he be honest? Given that the explanatory memorandum says that if EU standards are met, GB standards will have been judged to be met automatically, is that dynamic alignment? Are we saying that if, for example, new toy standards are set by the European Union, we will expect British business to follow them in order to meet the standards set out in this SI? Are we dynamically aligning? If we are not, the Minister needs to tell British business what will happen if British businesses do not meet those standards. Is there a cut-off point? At what point do these standards fall away?

Will the Minister be honest? We have talked about a figure of £583 million in terms of the cost. Of course, that is the cost of not implementing a British standards charter, so this is not actually some great benefit to British businesses. This is an admission that all the time, effort and energy that went into trying to make the Brexit fallacy work in relation to British paperwork has cost them money, so actually, if we do not do this, we can save them money by not implementing the Brexit standards. But the impact assessment says that the total net impact for British business is actually £1.6 billion. Can the Minister clarify what the other £1 billion-worth of impact might be? Is it all that extra paperwork, the time, the cost and the business lost from trying to come up with two different charter marks to meet two different standards?

At what point did the Government recognise that this was in the British interest? How many stakeholder meetings were there? How loud did British business have to shout about the impossibility of trying to run two regulatory regimes at the same time? Why have we not learned the lesson from Northern Ireland on this? The Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Act was about a bonfire of 4,000 regulations. To date, only a handful have been deleted. There is a good reason why that is the case. That is why it is important that we support this SI today. It is better for British businesses to have stability and to have less paperwork if they want to sell both in the UK and to Europe. It is better to be part of a standards regime that, through this SI, we are saying is a high-standards regime, because we are saying that we want to meet those standards.

What else will the Minister admit we have learned? The retained EU law Act gives his Department multiple pieces of legislation to review. Right now, across Parliament, in rooms like this, there are people looking at retained EU law legislation and whether we should have variation, and finding, oddly enough, when we look at it, that we should not. As my hon. Friend the Member for Bethnal Green and Bow says, it falls apart on hard contact with reality. It is better for British business to be able to share one set of regulatory regimes. What lessons have the Government learned from that experience, from all those stakeholder meetings and from all the money, effort and time that has been spent trying to come up with our own set of standards, when it was better for British business, toy safety and British consumers to share EU standards and be part of the CE mark? What will happen if those standards are not met?

The Minister will suggest that I am making an argument for remain, but this is not an argument for remain; it is an argument for sanity. That is what the British people deserve, given the damage being done by the hard Tory Brexit that is now being implemented in this country, and it is what this meeting needs.

--- Later in debate ---

[Kevin Hollinrake]

That is slightly above my pay grade, but I acknowledge what the hon. Lady said about my role. I have been here 18 months, and I am pleased to have been in the job, but I also have great respect for my predecessors.

The hon. Member for Walthamstow described what has happened as an unmitigated disaster for businesses. I would point out that the UK is now fifth in the global league table for trade; it was sixth, but we have just gone past France. We are the fourth largest exporter in the world; we were seventh, and we have again gone past France. We are third in terms of GDP growth, whether we look at the period since 2010, since the pandemic or indeed since Brexit. We are the second largest exporter in the world of financial services. We have the largest number of unicorns in Europe—businesses that have gone from start-up to a $1 billion valuation—and twice as many as France and Germany combined. So there are many, many positive things that the hon. Lady might reflect on rather than looking at the difficulties she describes for businesses.

I think the hon. Lady said that we should dynamically align with everything the European Union does and that that would be helpful for business. Let me point out some of the things that she would forgo if she took that approach: the move to digital labelling on a voluntary basis, which businesses greatly welcome; the changes we have made to things such as the working time directive, holiday pay and GDPR, and to the product safety regulations, which will make it easier for businesses to comply with those regulations; the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Bill, which will hold big tech companies to account to help small and medium-sized enterprises, in a completely different and we think much better way than the EU; free trade agreements with 73 countries, including Australia and New Zealand; and accession to the comprehensive and progressive agreement for trans-Pacific partnership and thus one of the largest growing markets in the world. None of those things would have been possible had we stuck in the European Union, as the hon. Lady wanted, or continued with dynamic alignment with European Union rules. She asked whether we will continue to dynamically align. We will take that on a case-by-case basis. The UKCA mark is still there where we decide to diverge from the European Union.

I did not get the hon. Lady’s point about the net benefit. The net benefit is set out quite clearly in the impact assessment: £64.8 million in the first year and £558 million over a 10-year period. I am happy to write to her if she wants to write to me—

[Stella Creasy]

rose—

[Kevin Hollinrake]

Or she can come in now.

[Stella Creasy]

I thank the Minister. I am merely pointing out that the reason why those net benefits exist is about the option of keeping the existing CE mark, as opposed to moving wholly to the UKCE mark that the Government originally put out. The Minister’s own impact assessment suggests that for British business to have done that would have cost them £1.6 billion. That is why this is a fantasy, and that is why the question what happens if businesses diverge from these requirements comes into play. I hope the Minister will answer that, because it would be helpful to understand what the Government think will happen if businesses do, after all that, still want to follow his UKCE mark and pay that cost.

[Kevin Hollinrake]

I thank the hon. Lady for her intervention. It is the UKCA mark, by the way. The reality is that we will take this on a case-by-case basis. Where there are good reasons to diverge for a product or sector, we could use the UKCA mark and diverge from the European Union. We are not going to diverge right across the piece; we can have the best of both worlds. We can make it easier for businesses that want to trade across borders in the European Union and the UK, but we can diverge where necessary using the UKCA mark.

Before I conclude, I will give way to my right hon. Friend.