My Lords, the overarching objective of this Bill is a timely and important opportunity to review, rationalise and update a wide-ranging tranche of legislation, and that I warmly welcome and strongly support. However, I have grave reservations about how the Bill proposes that it is done. My concerns are therefore about process, not purpose, and fall into two broad areas. The first is the role allotted to Parliament; the second is the uncertainties for, and potential impact on, consumers and businesses.
I will cover the first area with brevity. Having been a member of the SLSC when it signed off its report on this Bill and having become a member of DPRRC before it signed off its report, I fully endorse the concerns and recommendations set out in both those reports. They deal largely with concerns about parliamentary sovereignty, the need for greater parliamentary oversight, and the extent to which it is intended that secondary legislation will be used. I will not repeat those important concerns in detail, as they have been well articulated by others and not least by my noble friends Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts and Lord McLoughlin, respectively the former and current chairs of those two committees.
I turn to a range of more practical concerns. In doing so, I declare my interest as president of the Chartered Trading Standards Institute, the CTSI, which is the professional body for trading standards. In expressing its concerns, I am raising concerns that have equally been raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Crawley, who was my predecessor as president of the CTSI.
CTSI and the coalition of partner organisations see considerable merit in the opportunity to reappraise and update the legislation and regulations that underpin trading standards and consumer safety. However, they are deeply concerned about the practicability of doing this comprehensively, with due process and to good effect, across such a vast swathe of legislation, given the proposed sunset deadline at the end of the year and the minimalist approach to consultation and parliamentary scrutiny.
CTSI, alongside organisations such as the Chartered Institute of Environmental Health, the Child Accident Prevention Trust and Electrical Safety First, are therefore calling for the proposed sunset deadline of 31 December 2023 to be revisited. Their understandable fear is that, with thousands of pieces of vitally important but often complex legislation needing to be reviewed, rewritten or sunsetted, mistakes, omissions and contradictions are inevitable. This in turn could result in key protections for consumers and businesses being undermined or lost.
More specifically, CTSI and its partners are concerned that the Bill creates a lack of clarity around trading standards’ duties to enforce laws vital to ensuring the safety of products such as toys, electrical appliances and cosmetics; could weaken fair trading rules that protect consumers and law-abiding businesses; could undermine rules that ensure the welfare of animals and the UK’s ability to export animal products to EU member states; could result in diminished information requirements for food provenance, allergens and use-by dates; could make convictions for consumer rights offences unsafe if the laws that underpin them are not clear and coherent; and poses a threat to life due to differences in technical metrology definitions in the healthcare sector on the road and at sea. These are very real uncertainties and concerns, as are those that relate to the role of Parliament and parliamentary procedure.
I said at the start that the Bill is a rare and, I believe, welcome opportunity to review and update a lot of important legislation. We therefore need to ensure that the processes that the Bill is proposing are made fit for purpose and command greater confidence inside and outside Parliament.
My Lords, the arguments against this undemocratic Bill are well understood by both Houses and, indeed, beyond. Unfortunately, there is not enough time today for me to do justice to these arguments, so I will attempt to highlight only my gravest concerns with the Bill—as many others have, in fairness.
Most of the most important employment rights, such as the protection of pregnant workers, maternity and parental leave, guaranteed rest breaks, equal treatment for part-time works, and especially TUPE protections, are derived from EU law, as the Minister knows. All these rights are now under serious threat, despite the Tory manifesto promising to
“legislate to ensure high standards of workers’ rights”.
I have asked the Minister twice, as the noble Lord, Lord Hendy, said earlier, to confirm that no existing employment rights would be weakened or scrapped, but he point-blank refused to answer. When I asked him specifically whether he would allow TUPE protections to fall off the statute books, the Minister would only say that he
“will look at that and see whether it is appropriate for the UK economy”.—[Official Report, 1/2/23; col. 658.]
I find this answer totally unacceptable. How on earth can there be any debate about whether these vital protections are appropriate for our economy? What kind of economy do this Government want? One where workers see their pay and conditions slashed after takeovers; a race to the bottom? That is what we are left with without these protections. It is a far cry from the high standards we were promised.
Last week, my noble friend Lord Watts made the excellent point that Ministers were well fond of rolling over trade deals, and he asked why we could not roll over the protections that workers have now, to stop them worrying about their futures. Unfortunately—but, once again, not surprisingly—the Minister did not answer. Perhaps he might like to address this point today.
My Lords, last week I hosted a meeting with Zsuzsanna Szelényi, the brave Hungarian former MP, a member of Fidesz and the author of Tainted Democracy: Viktor Orbán and the Subversion of Hungary.I reflected that this Bill, especially in the light of the reports from the DPRRC and the SLSC, is a government land grab of powers over Parliament, fully worthy of Viktor Orbán himself and his cronies. This is no less than an attempt to achieve a tawdry version of Singapore-on-Thames in the UK without proper democratic scrutiny, to the vast detriment of consumers, workers and creatives. It is no surprise that the Regulatory Policy Committee has stated that the Bill’s impact assessment is not fit for purpose.
It is not only important regulations that are being potentially swept away, but principles of interpretation and case law, built up over nearly 50 years of membership of the EU. This Government are knocking down the pillars of certainty of application of our laws. My noble friend Lord Fox rightly quoted the Bar Council in this respect. Clause 5 would rip out the fundamental right to the protection of personal data from the UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018. This is a direct threat to the UK’s data adequacy, with all the consequences that that entails. Is that really the Government’s intention?
As regards consumers, Which?has demonstrated the threat to basic food hygiene requirements for all types of food businesses: controls over meat safety, maximum pesticide levels, food additive regulations, controls over allergens in foods and requirements for baby foods. Product safety rights at risk include those affecting child safety and regulations surrounding transport safety. Civil aviation services could be sunsetted, along with airlines’ liability requirements in the event of airline accidents. Consumer rights on cancellation and information, protection against aggressive selling practices and redress for consumer law breaches across many sectors could all be impacted. Are any of these rights dispensable—mere parking tickets?
My Lords, we recently celebrated the third anniversary of Brexit and it is indeed the gift that keeps on taking: taking control and scrutiny away from Parliament, effectively passing it to unelected officials in the Civil Service, and taking certainty, confidence and competitiveness away from businesses. The whole thrust of the debate today is what assurance is there that key protections that we have achieved will remain on the statute book and that there will be no gold-plating. I play tribute to my noble friend Lord Heseltine, who single-handedly eradicated gold-plating from the transposition of a very innocuous directive, such as the toy directive, into the home-spun rules of our home civil servants.
The dashboard is very difficult to navigate. It is a moving feast, but we know that there are some 1,780 Defra proposals. I pay tribute to the Defra officials who spent the best part of two years transposing farming, environment and other regulations into UK law at some considerable speed and therefore had to return with corrections. I do not blame them for that, but that shows us what the expectations will be with an even more limited timetable before us in the Bill.
As others have mentioned in the debate, the dashboard does not cover all retained EU laws agreed by the devolved Administrations, so it is no wonder that the Welsh and Scottish Administrations have withheld their consent from the Bill. Now, with a sweep of the pen, all that we have achieved over years of transposing and passing into UK law these protections is going to be rolled away purely as a result of a political decision to achieve this arbitrary timetable before the next election.
I would like to judge the Bill before us this evening by the extent to which at the end of this process we will still be able to export and import, which we were told would not be jeopardised as we would have frictionless trade through the trade and co-operation agreement. I have been contacted by businesses I worked with 30 years ago and longer as a Member of the European Parliament in the food and drink sector, chemicals and, in particular, the cars and vehicle sector. We have identified a change in policy direction moving away from a functioning statute book to a period of tremendous uncertainty. No one in the debate this evening disagrees that the statute book should be kept under constant review. I think that all who have spoken expressing caution about the Bill are concerned about the manner in which the statute book is to be maintained. Parliament will not be in the driving seat; it will nominally be Ministers, but I would say unelected officials. What evidence is there that there has even been a proper consultation of all the interested parties affected, many of whom have been represented in their concerns being voiced today? I urge my noble friend and the Government to be prudent, drop any arbitrary deadline and seek to give a measured response where we can pay tribute to those who have expressed their concerns.
Doctrinaire, ideological, subversive of Parliament, a headlong rush, an arbitrary timetable, a blank cheque for government by diktat—this Bill is coming in for a bit of criticism from Conservatives. I am not surprised, because the presumption that change is needed and the proposed method of change do not strike me as terribly Conservative. Lord Salisbury in 1892 defined Conservatism as delaying changes until they become harmless. I have always believed that he also said: “Change? Why should we change? Things are bad enough as they are.” I can get away with that as the noble Lord, Lord Lexden, the real expert on this, is not here; he says it is apocryphal. Here are Lord Salisbury’s successors running a rushed, in-house review of some 4,000 laws with a presumption that change is required because of the laws’ origins, not their effects.
I was there in Brussels during a period of peak legislation with the single market programme. I was there when the European Union was dancing to the tune of a British Conservative initiative, inspired by Margaret Thatcher, prescribed by Arthur Cockfield, pressed by John Major, driven through by Commissioner Leon Brittan. Were they all wrong? Is their legacy now suspect simply because they succeeded in getting the EU to buy their prescriptions for appropriate regulation?
Of course, some of the 4,000 laws could well be overtaken; I do not know. There could be sense in a sift done bottom-up, sector by sector, consulting those affected, balancing the consumer interest with the interests of producers and traders—but not this way; not top-down, in-house, with no consultation, minimal scrutiny, an end-year guillotine and new rules by decree cutting out Parliament.
Business hates this Bill. Business likes certainty. Business wants regulatory predictability. The perception of change for change’s sake is anathema to business. The chemical industry and Defra confirm that the cost of replacing the EU REACH regulations will be about £2 billion. That is just one industry. This Bill and the uncertainty that it creates will affect them all. No wonder the CBI opposes it so strongly.
My Lords, people watching these proceedings will be astonished that this House seems minded to obstruct this Bill and to fail to fully engage with the difficult and messy process of self-government as an independent, sovereign parliamentary democracy, arising from the largest plebiscite in British history in 2016.
The Bill should be seen in the wider context of what went before and what is proposed, a wider historical context—what I might call the Benn challenge. In his valedictory speech to the House of Commons in March 2001, Tony Benn asked of those tasked with exercising power:
“What power have you got? Where did you get it from? In whose interests do you exercise it? To whom are you accountable? And how can we get rid of you?”—[Official Report, Commons, 22/3/01; col. 510.]
Is that not the fundamental question at hand in considering the Bill today? The fact that the EU failed to answer that question is why Brexit happened.
The Bill’s opponents are mostly well-meaning and sincere, and I accept that, but many observers will see an effort to thwart Brexit and render it a failure. Some noble Lords pray in aid the need for scrutiny and oversight, but they were silent when 265,490 EU laws, judgments, directives, regulations and decisions—the mythical EU acquis—mostly taken behind closed doors and rubber-stamped by the European Council of Ministers, were forced on our sovereign Parliament between 1973 and 2020 by virtue of one Act of Parliament: the European Communities Act 1972, Section 2. No one voted for that, unlike Brexit and the Conservative Party manifesto in 2019, and the elected House just last month, which gave this Bill a healthy Third Reading majority.
The withdrawal Act 2020 specifically and formally recognises in Section 38 the right of the UK to exercise—in its own way, within its autonomy and independence through a sovereign Parliament—its own legal regime. It was also well understood in 2018 that the withdrawal Act was iterative and transitional legislation, so a sunset clause is both logical and inevitable, although perhaps arbitrary, and any attempt to extend it beyond either 2023 or 2026 will be viewed as lacking democratic legitimacy.
My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow my noble friend Lord Jackson of Peterborough and to congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady O’Grady, and my noble friend Lady Bray on their impressive maiden speeches.
I am sure I am not the only one in this Chamber who longs for the day when we are united in holding the Executive to account for decisions and policies made here at home. But I cannot see how we can get to that point unless and until retained EU legislation no longer takes priority over domestic UK legislation. Surely that is a prerequisite for parliamentary sovereignty to be restored—and with it the fate of the people in Parliament and the Government’s ability to deliver—and indeed for the opportunities and benefits of Brexit to be realised. It is, as my noble friend Lord Frost said, the logic of delivering Brexit.
Now I recognise that some noble Lords are absolutely determined that this should not happen, and that the consideration of this Bill should be used as a chance to delay, in the hope that Brexit will never be enacted. I completely respect their right to hold such a position and to articulate it—if only they would. But I fear that instead we are in for another bout of Brexit-bashing amid the familiar and disdainful refrain that “they”—the people who voted leave—did not know what they were doing. As someone who knew exactly what he was doing when he voted leave, I fear that continued skirmishing simply delays the healing we so desperately need.
Like my noble friend Lady Bray, I have faith in our parliamentary democracy and in the people—as my noble friend Lord Jackson of Peterborough just reminded us—to ensure that, once accountability is brought home, as this Bill provides for in the medium to longer term, “they”, the voters, will decide at a general election whom to hire and fire on the basis of policies decided and delivered in the UK for the UK. They will have the final word. But for that to happen, this Bill—however uncomfortable we may find it—must pass first. I thank my noble friend the Minister for his tireless tenacity in ensuring that it does. He deserves our support.
My Lords, noble Lords have already heard from my noble friend Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, a former Brexiteer who has seen the chaos we have already, before this Bill is enacted, and has said that she has had enough and wants to rejoin the EU, as the whole Green Party does. I was initially going to have a list—a chart—of all the practical problems but so many people have done such a great job on that already: the noble Lord, Lord Hendy, on labour rights, the noble Baroness, Lady Young of Old Scone, on all the Defra issues and Defra’s incapacity to deal with them, and the noble Lord, Lord Trees, on the issues being raised for the devolved Administrations, whom the Government so often seem to ignore.
That the Government lack the capacity to deliver the fantasy they are setting out in any kind of orderly way is clearly not stopping them, or perhaps not being orderly is the intention of at least some parts of the Government. In the financial sector there is a lot of money to be made from chaos, as Naomi Klein showed us so clearly two decades ago in her explanation of the shock doctrine of disaster capitalism.
It is very clear that this Bill, should your Lordships’ House not oppose it, will be a complete working out of the hashtag #ToryChaos. I urge all sides of your Lordships’ House to oppose the Bill—to vote it down. We have heard from a barrage of Cross Benchers and more than a few Conservatives how dreadful it is. The responsibility is in our hands. How bad does a swathe of Henry VIII clauses have to be before your Lordships’ House takes responsibility? I direct that remark particularly to the Benches to my right.
As I am speaker number 46, much has already been covered and I aim not to go over old ground. Instead, I am going to take a different approach and interrogate the Government’s own stated intentions with the Bill and see how lacking a base in realism they are. In the Government’s own words on the retained EU law dashboard, the justification is:
How can you make a law when you do not know what it covers?
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As parliamentarians, it is our duty to stand up for our constitutional role of holding the Government to account. It was highlighted by various committees of this House, including the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee and the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee, that this Bill would lead to a “significant shift of power”—not to Parliament, but to Ministers. This Bill, therefore, runs counter to the principles of parliamentary democracy and is a blank cheque placed in the hands of Ministers, according to these committees. Is that what the Government really meant by “taking back control”? It certainly looks like it to me. Is it really what people voted for in 2019? I do not think so: they did not vote for that.
In its report, the delegated powers committee said:
“The Bill is sufficiently lacking in substance not even to be described as ‘skeletal’.”
It is outrageous; it is an abuse of the democratic process.
This Bill, and the Minister’s refusal to rule out a bonfire of employment rights, is completely the opposite of what the Government promised voters. It is therefore nothing less than the duty of this House to defeat it or, at the very least, to delay it until the next election, when the voters can decide for themselves whether workers’ rights are worth defending after all. I think I know what the voters will say.
Many noble Lords—in particular the noble Baroness, Lady O’Grady, in her excellent maiden speech—the TUC and many others have pointed out the employment rights that could be lost, and health and safety requirements too. Without so much as a by-your-leave, the Government could damage the employment conditions of every single employee in this country.
For creative workers in particular, the outlook as a result of this Bill is bleak. The impact of any change on the protection of part-time and fixed-term workers is particularly important for freelance workers in the creative industries. Fixed-term workers currently have the right to be treated no less favourably than a comparable permanent employee unless the employer can justify the different treatment. Are these rights dispensable? Are they mere parking tickets?
Then there is potentially the massive change to intellectual property rights, including CJEU case law on which rights holders rely. If these fall away, it creates huge uncertainty and incentive for litigation. The IP regulations and case law on the dashboard which could be sunsetted encompass a whole range, from databases, computer programs and performing rights to protections for medicines. At particular risk are artists’ resale rights, which give visual artists and their heirs a right to a royalty on secondary sales of the artist’s original works when sold on the art market. Visual artists are some of the lowest-earning creators, earning between £5,000 and £10,000 a year. Are these rights dispensable? Have the Government formed any view at all yet?
This Bill has created a fog of uncertainty over all these areas—a blank sheet of paper, per my noble friend Lord Beith; a giant question mark, per the noble Lord, Lord Heseltine—and the impact could be disastrous. I hope this House ensures it does not see the light of day in its current form.
To the extent that we can still export and import, I have been contacted by those in the car sector who are concerned that we have only recently agreed type approval regulations. For chemicals, we have only recently agreed the UK REACH regime, and for the food and farming sector, animal health safety and welfare have featured largely this evening.
In conclusion, while my noble friend and I are on different sides of the argument regarding Brexit, throughout our careers we have held business dear to our hearts. Will he say which part of the Bill promotes business and will help to facilitate exports and imports?
Lord Salisbury also said in 1879:
“Whatever happens will be for the worse, and therefore it is in our interest that as little should happen as possible”.
As regards this Bill, that seems to be exactly right. It is malign, misconceived, damaging, undemocratic, un-Conservative—and we should throw it out.
There is no evidence—this is the Chicken Licken argument—that the Bill will inevitably lead to a weakening of our own domestic legal rights and protections. In any case, no Government can bind the hands of their successors. Any policy development that is against the interests of working people in this country will be judged harshly, and the efficacy of those policies will be judged at a general election. That is the basis of democracy. It is not our place to second-guess the views of the electorate at a forthcoming general election.
We now have opportunities to develop new policies and make our own laws on animal welfare, on vaccine rollout, on freeports and on diverging from EU solvency rules. The Bill honours the commitment made to the British people in 2016 and 2019. I regret that I have not been able to rebut the findings of the committee report published last Thursday, but in due course we will do that in Committee and on Report. Essentially, EU legal and political supremacy has no place in a mature, independent, self-governing democracy.
“This will allow us to create a new pro-growth, high standards regulatory framework that gives businesses the confidence to innovate, invest and create jobs.”
I want to unpack that. They say they want to remove outdated regulation that may be hampering growth. What does “outdated” mean? Is a protection for nature, for workers’ rights, for consumer rights outdated? Who is going to judge? What kind of growth? Surely your Lordships’ House will agree that we do not want growth in water pollution, air pollution or exploitation of workers. All-out growth, of course, is the ideology of the cancer cell.
On creating a high standards framework, I go back to our earlier discussion of the environmental improvement plan and the issue of plastics, highlighted by the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville. We do not have a bottle deposit scheme in England, but many EU countries have one, so it is not EU rules that have stopped that. The French are racing towards getting rid of single-use containers in fast food stores—that is within EU rules.
On confidence to invest, I will quote an Institute for Government report from last year on business investment:
“The UK has persistently lagged other comparable countries.”
It is well behind Germany, France and Italy; it is not EU rules that are holding them back.
The Minister used the phrase “create … jobs” again. That is curious, when the lack of people for jobs is currently one of the UK’s great problems. We have 47,000 nurse vacancies, an 11% vacancy rate in the care sector and an overall vacancy rate of 1.3 million. Do we not need to find a way to use the human resources that we have now? EU rules are not stopping us doing that.
Finally, in introducing the Bill, the Minister spoke of “countless opportunities”. I assume he meant that rhetorically, but of course it is literally true: the Government are still trying to count the number of regulations and rules that the Bill covers—