It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair this morning, Dame Maria.
As Members know, the SNP group came close to voting against the Bill on Second Reading. In fact, we tabled a reasoned amendment, primarily because of our concern about how the clause intends to take matters forward, but it was not selected by Mr Speaker. A sad fact for many of us is that the United Kingdom is no longer part of the European Union and that, therefore, all European Union legislation needs to be reconsidered. My problem is that it has already been decided in the Bill that, on financial services, all European Union legislation needs to be thrown out.
We hope that someone in the Treasury will at the same time, or very quickly afterwards, replace that legislation with something at least as good, if not better. I mean no disrespect to anyone here, to any Member of Parliament, the Minister or anyone working in the Treasury, however, when I say that I can have no confidence that that process, on that scale and at that speed, will work—we need only look at the number of amendments that the Government have had to table to the Bill because of mistakes in it, as published. In Delegated Legislation Committees on which I have sat, there have been instances where we have had to correct the correction to the correction of an initial piece of secondary legislation arising from Brexit.
It is simply not realistic to believe that all the revocations and repeals proposed under the clause can be replaced with equally good regulation without mistakes being made. When mistakes are made in the regulation of financial services, people get scammed, companies that should survive go under and the United Kingdom’s reputation as a dodgy place to do financial services becomes even worse. For all that I am not a big fan of the United Kingdom, I do not want to see that happen. I am not a big fan of the United Kingdom Parliament either, but I do not want to see its right to scrutinise in detail any suggested changes to legislation undermined, simply because it suits the Government of the day.
While it may be that the right thing to do with all 200-plus pieces of legislation listed in schedule 1 is to revoke and repeal every single word, Parliament should be given a choice, at reasonable speed, to decide whether that is correct. Ideally, at the same time as Parliament is asked to revoke the legislation, we should be given the chance to consider what will be put in its place.