Civil Jurisdiction and Judgments (Civil and Family) (Amendment) (EU Exit) Regulations 2019

Yasmin Qureshi Excerpts

Monday 28th October 2019 General Committees

[Yasmin Qureshi (Bolton South East) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Paisley. I thank the Minister for outlining the proposed changes. The fact is that we would not be in this mess if the Government had anticipated and made allowances for those rules.

As a current European Union member state, the United Kingdom applies the Brussels I regulation to legal disputes of a civil or commercial nature. That set of rules has made proceedings much easier, be they domestic or disputes in other European Union countries. The current system creates an affordable and effective process for the recognition and enforcement of intra-European Union judgments. Small traders or consumers can easily take their cases to their domestic courts using local lawyers, and the domestic judgment is then recognised across the whole of the European Union. That is a considerable and useful advantage to many people of limited means.

Big companies can fight litigations, but small businesses, employers and those fighting family dispute matters will have to go to different courts to exercise their rights, which will make things much more complicated for them. We believe that the Government should have anticipated those matters and put in place a mechanism to deal with them. The Opposition will abstain in a vote on the provisions because we believe that the Government have not done enough to protect people’s rights—the provisions have been introduced at the last minute, but they are not good enough.

The Government should have worked much harder to anticipate and deal with this matter to ensure that people’s civil rights are protected, be they for employees against employers, in family disputes or in small-business and commercial disputes. The Government are introducing legislation at the last minute to avoid the inevitable chaos of exiting the EU without a deal. Essentially, the Government should have anticipated this and done more to protect workers’ rights and the rights of the individual, to make life easier for everyone. On that basis, we will abstain.