Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill

Stella Creasy Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 25th October 2022 Commons Chamber

[Dean Russell]

I will give way in a little while; I want to make some progress. The Bill will enable outdated and often undemocratic retained EU law to be amended, repealed and replaced more quickly and easily than before. That will remove burdens on business, and create a more agile and sustainable legislative framework to boost economic growth.

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

Will the Minister be honest with the House? He says that the Bill will allow us to have the highest standards, but clause 15 formally confirms that we can only go down, and we can only have a race to the bottom, because it talks explicitly about not increasing burdens. Will the Minister tell the House who voted to lower our environmental protections in the referendum?

[Dean Russell]

I can be very honest in saying that the Bill will ensure that we have the highest standards, and within the process of this framework we will ensure that the burdens of delivering the best possible regulatory scheme are removed, while ensuring that we have the highest standards across all we do.

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[Jonathan Reynolds]

I certainly can. I have always said, for instance, that Solvency II could be improved by having to do the regulation on a basis in this country. If we look at the Government’s approach to that area through the financial services and markets legislation, we see that they are taking exactly what might be termed a more sensible approach, going on a sector-by-sector basis, putting forward positive proposals, rather than following the sunset clause procedure, which is so reckless and uncertain. I say genuinely to the right hon. Gentleman: please have the humility to look at the damage done in the past four weeks, and the role of Government Members in that, and perhaps think, “What if we are wrong, and what are the consequences if we are?”

[Stella Creasy]

Might one of the reasons why businesses are so confused about the impact that the legislation will have be because the Minister is? He tried to claim to the House that all the laws affected are published on the dashboard and will have full transparency. However, 24 hours ago in answer to my written question, the Minister admitted that the dashboard provided an “authoritative, not comprehensive” list. Does my hon. Friend agree that, when businesses and consumers are already struggling with the cost of living crisis, the last thing that we need is to not even know what a piece of legislation is deleting?

[Jonathan Reynolds]

My hon. Friend is absolutely correct. The retained EU law dashboard, although useful, is not and never has been a comprehensive list of all the retained law that this Bill affects—[Interruption.] Government Members say that they never said it was. It does not clearly distinguish where retained EU law has been devolved, much to the frustration of the Welsh and Scottish Governments. However, it still lists more than 2,400 sources of law. If the Government want to put a blanket sunset clause on all of this, should they not be able to list exactly what is covered?

The practical case that the Government have put forward for the sunset clause is that they cannot find the time to use primary legislation to amend these laws. Why not? The Government have a majority of 70, at least for the time being. Where the law needs to be changed, what is preventing the Government from doing so? The fear is that what they really want to do is to reduce key regulations entirely, which brings me to my next point—that the Bill poses a threat to core British rights and protections.

There is no question but that the scale of the Bill is large. The policy areas affected cover not only employment law, but environmental protection, consumer protection, agriculture, fisheries, transport, data protection and much, much more. That is why a huge variety of organisations, from the TUC to the RSPB, have signalled their alarm. I am sure that Members on both sides of the House will raise their own worries about those issues during the debate.

The situation in relation to employment law is particularly alarming. Most of the UK’s core labour law protections are contained in regulations originally made under section 2 of the European Communities Act 1972, rather than in primary legislation. They are not cumbersome red tape; they are things that British workers expect, including the Working Time Regulations 1998, the Maternity and Parental Leave etc. Regulations 1999, the Transfer of Undertakings (Protection of Employment) Regulations 2006 and the Part-time Workers (Prevention of Less Favourable Treatment) Regulations 2000. On all of them, the Government are saying, “Trust us.” Why should we?

This is a Government who have not kept their promise of an employment Bill to ensure workers’ rights post Brexit and who do not keep their manifesto promises at all. This is a Government in which we do not know who will be in each job from one week to the next—and I wrote that bit before the right hon. Member for North East Somerset (Mr Rees-Mogg) resigned as Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy a few hours ago. I am afraid that we cannot in good conscience hand the Government powers to arbitrarily decide matters that are of fundamental importance to the lives of working people in this country, not least because we have no idea whether any Ministers will still be in position in 24 hours, let alone 12 months.

Under the terms of the Government’s trade and co-operation agreement, the UK must maintain a level playing field with the single market. Such provisions are important to the UK: they protect against a global race to the bottom in standards and protections. We can only guess how the Government will use these powers, but the powers in the Bill are clearly deregulatory in tone.

This goes to the heart of the Conservative party’s simplistic and inaccurate understanding of regulation. When I ask a business what attracts it to invest in the UK, good regulators are always on the list. Businesses simply do not want the fantasy deregulatory agenda that lives only in the mind of so many Tory MPs. After the events of the past month, in which the financial markets themselves rejected the Conservative party’s allegedly pro-market agenda, I would have hoped for a little more wisdom and insight from the Government, but unfortunately I doubt that that will be forthcoming.

Finally, there is the issue of how Parliament will go about changing the law in future. The Government have already been severely criticised for how little power they have returned to Parliament since we left the European Union, and the Bill continues that approach. The use of negative statutory instruments, so that MPs have to actively object to prevent something from becoming law, is very poor practice indeed. When it comes to future proposals, the use of a sunset clause to cover such a large and complex body of law effectively puts a gun to Parliament’s head. Anyone who wishes to scrutinise or object to any future legislation replacing retained law will be taking a gamble, because unless that legislation is passed in time, the current law in its entirety will simply fall away. That is not conducive to good laws being made.

The obvious question is “Why not proceed on a policy-by-policy basis or, if appropriate, a sector-by-sector basis?” As we have already discovered, the Financial Services and Markets Bill does exactly that. Why not bring forward positive replacement proposals where the law needs to change or where something can be done better?

The fact is that this Government are out of ideas. They are more intent on their own survival than on putting in place the positive changes that we need. At a time when the British people are crying out for stable, competent government by a Government who recognise that economic growth comes from working people and businesses and from stability and certainty, not from the fantasy economics of the Conservative party, the Bill is not just wide of the mark, but wantonly destructive.

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[Stella Creasy]

Does the right hon. Gentleman recognise that some of us may be a little bit sceptical about the definition of democratic engagement that he has just set out? He is arguing that, for example, taking away laws that require cosmetics not to contain cancer-causing chemicals or laws on illegal trading—as well as maternity rights and TUPE—is a matter that does not require the scrutiny of the House, but only that of statutory instrument Committees. If he had been so wedded to restoring democracy, might he not have at least written the affirmative resolution procedure into these statutory instruments? Why he is taking back control, not for this House and the great democratic institutions—and he is now joining us on the Back Benches—but to No. 10?

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

I do not accept that construction of what is actually happening. The House will have the ability to focus on issues on which it thinks the Government are going in the wrong direction. Let me pick at random one of the retained EU laws that may be reformed or become redundant:

“a common methodology for the calculation of annual sales of portable batteries and accumulators to end-users”.

Does the hon. Lady really think that deserves primary legislation—a count of batteries? That is what is in the 2,400 statutory instruments on the dashboard, and, as has been pointed out, that is not necessarily the full list.

There are all sorts of minor and unimportant things that need to be dealt with. As for those that are of major significance, it was said clearly at the Dispatch Box that environmental protections would be maintained. That is fundamentally important. It is a commitment from His Majesty’s Government to this House. The Bill will allow those protections to become UK law—which I use as shorthand to cover the three different types of law in the United Kingdom—to ensure that they can be enforced logically and sensibly by our courts in accordance with our legal maxims. That must be a right and certain means of proceeding.

It is interesting that people, having been told this, are still opposing the Bill. I come back to the conclusion that those who are opposing it actually do not like Brexit altogether.

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

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Taunton Deane (Rebecca Pow). I hope she will appreciate that I listened to what she said and responded in my comments.

We have all done it: we have all accidently hit “Delete”, broken something or not saved a document that we meant to save. Or, even worse, we have been in workplaces where somebody has done that and all that institutional memory and knowledge has gone. Then we face a choice: either come clean that all that information is lost, or try to pretend that it did not matter. In taking the latter option, the Government are putting at risk thousands of rights that have been the fabric of everyday life for all our constituents.

In opposing the Bill, let me be clear that that is not talking about Brexit. It is not talking about rerunning a referendum. It is not to argue that we must go back. I am sorry that the right hon. Member for North East Somerset (Mr Rees-Mogg) is not in his usual place—I am not sorry, really—because it is also not about supremacy. It is about sanity and the business of doing government. In the time that I have, I want to set out that I and Opposition Members will oppose the Bill because of both what it does and how it does it. I urge Government Members to look at how the Bill operates, because all the powers, promises and ambitions in the legislation cannot be achieved.

We do not really know what the Bill does, because we really do not know what it covers. I am sorry that the Under-Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, the hon. Member for Watford (Dean Russell), is not in his place—who knows whether he is still a Minister and whether, when he comes back, he will be on the Front Bench or the Back Benches—because being honest about the fact that we do not know the levels of European law is critical.

It is not just minor changes, as the former Secretary of State tried to suggest; there are serious, important pieces of legislation that many in the House, and especially those who care about environmental issues, have discovered are not on the retained EU law dashboard. The conservation of habitats and species regulation does not appear on the Government’s dashboard. Therefore, as a starting point, we have literally no idea which rules are being abolished by the Bill because the Government do not know—they have not found them all. That is what the parliamentary question admitted yesterday with its authoritative but not comprehensive list. Call me an old- fashioned democrat, but I would quite like to know what I was voting to abolish and be able to tell my constituents about that before being asked to do so.

It is also not clear how the legislation will operate in the devolved legislatures. Of course, that matters in making sure that laws are tenable if they are to cross borders, let alone for our colleagues in Northern Ireland who face multiple legislative processes—all that red tape that we were told we could get rid of by leaving the European Union.

Above all, the Bill asks us to play the worst game of “Snog, marry, avoid” that I have ever seen for any piece of Government legislation; in deciding whether something is kept, amended or simply abolished. Let us have a go at that and see whether our constituents really want to play when they see what is at stake.

Let us talk first, nice and simply, about those things that we probably want to keep. I presume—maybe I have misread things—that there will be general agreement across the House that it is a bad idea to have cancer-causing chemicals in cosmetics, so we should retain rules that keep those out. Again, we all think that insider trading is a bad idea, but the legislation will rip up all the rules on that. On airline safety—by that I mean literally the rules that require a plane to be worthy to go in the air—we probably agree across the House that having rules that ensure that planes are safe is a good thing, so we could take a bipartisan approach. Again, we probably all agree on preventing food manufacturers from making false claims about the nutritional content of their food, and on tackling illegal firearms smuggling. One question from many of us might be: when we have a cost of living crisis and a Government who are in chaos, why on earth are we spending time rewriting laws that, on the whole, we all agree with?

That is where the rub is in the legislation: what the Government want to avoid and abolish. They need to come clean to our constituents. They are asking us to approve powers that would let them get rid of the rules around a whole plethora of issues, including those that require major sporting events to be free to air. I was very troubled to discover at the weekend that the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport was trying to claim that was not the case. Clearly, Government Departments have not looked at the legislation on which they have depended. Disease control for bird flu is suddenly up for abolition, along with compensation rules for lost luggage and delayed trains. I guess if a Government are dealing with privatised rail industries and are unable to help them, they think that removing those basic consumer protections will somehow be good for them. However, they should be honest with our constituents if that is what they intend. The payout that comes if someone’s firm goes bust and the entitlement to 50% of their pension pot—let alone TUPE protections if their job is outsourced, paid holiday rights and maternity rights—are up for abolition through the Bill. I am sorry that the right hon. Member for North East Somerset is not in his place, because we could have a conversation about exactly how the EU protected women’s basic maternity rights against decisions by the UK Government.

On part-time workers’ rights, the hon. Member for Taunton Deane says she has had assurances from the Government. Well, I thought the Conservative manifesto was an assurance about what the Government were going to do, but that seems to have been ripped up. The Bill will give the Government carte blanche powers across 2,500 pieces of legislation and 300 policy areas. Can she really, hand on heart, be confident that all of those will be retained? She does not have in the Bill any recourse if those pledges come to nought, so she is taking a huge gamble.

Secondly, one might agree that all those things need to be up for grabs and that it no longer matters—I would love to see the referendum leaflet that said abolishing paid holiday leave would be a good thing; I will sit down if the Government can show me that—but the Bill hits delete through a sunset clause, abolishing everything all at once. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Leeds Central (Hilary Benn) says, that creates a power for Governments to abolish pieces of legislation just by doing nothing, with no judicial review powers if those rights are important.

I am sorry that the hon. Member for Stone (Sir William Cash) is not here. The Bill hands powers to those very Ministers who were in the Council meetings he objected to, to make those laws. In which case, we must all ask, “What help are they getting?” We have talked about 570 different pieces of legislation from DEFRA to be revised. At the moment, there are three DEFRA civil servants dealing with 570 pieces of legislation. It is the same across other Government Departments: two officials in the Department of Health and Social Care dealing with 137 regulations covering healthcare; nobody in the Department for Work and Pensions, which has 208 regulations to rewrite; and nobody in the Treasury, which has 602 regulations to review—snog, marry, avoid—in the next year and decide whether we will keep, or amend, them. The Department for Transport could not even confirm how many staff it had working on this issue. It does not even know who is responsible for it. That is not really a surprise. Of the 2,500 pieces of law that are being ripped up, on which we have been dependent for decades, 800 have no direct ministerial lead to even worry about whether we should keep them.

Ministers will decide what happens to those pieces of legislation—they can water down protections and any promises made to the hon. Member for Taunton Deane, or simply drop them without any form of scrutiny. I am disappointed that the right hon. Member for North East Somerset is not in his place, because those of us who are democrats believe passionately that the only people who are anti-democracy are those trying to take back control to Downing Street rather than to this place. It is simply not true to say to the British public that, through this Bill, Brexit is giving the House powers—let alone the trade war it could easily start, because we signed agreements in good faith with the European Union under the TCA that we would have a level playing field on areas such as food safety and employment rights. The Bill could lead to retaliatory tariffs.

What the hon. Member for Taunton Deane and her colleagues should reflect on most of all, perhaps, is clause 15, which enshrines deregulation. I would be with her in the Lobby on introducing higher environmental standards, but the Bill formally requires that that cannot happen. The direction of travel is only one way—to water down and reduce rights.

[Joanna Cherry]

The hon. Lady will have seen that I put that point to the Minister earlier and he said that clause 15(5) was just a minor detail. Does she agree that that is absolutely wrong and that it is absolutely central to the Bill?

[Stella Creasy]

Clause 15(5) is why the Bill is the anti- growth coalition. Businesses, consumers and environmental organisations alike are against no regulation. No regulation is a recipe for less competition. It is a recipe for a wild west. They want better regulation. Clause 15(5) rules that out and gives Ministers the responsibility not only of finding legislation, but then doing something with it without any scrutiny from this place. There are plenty of parliamentary mechanisms that could change that. There are many different ways that could work. It is not just about the sunset clause; it is about affirmative regulations. There are ways we could reduce red tape, but they are not written into the Bill.

The new Prime Minister says he will fix the mistakes of the past. He could do no better than to abandon the Bill and rethink it, because, as we all know, when we hit delete and do not save, it is a mess for all concerned.