European Union (Withdrawal) Bill — House of Commons, 2017-11-21
Topic: Mixed Topics
Mary Helen Creagh (Labour, Centre-left): It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Dover (Charlie Elphicke). I voted against this Bill on Second Reading due to the powers that it puts into Ministers’ hands and the fact that it sidelines Parliament in many of these moments of incorporation. We have heard Government Members waxing lyrical about putting things back into the hands of this sovereign Parliament, but the Bill puts into the hands of Ministers the power to pass or strike out almost any law, and that point has been missed in this debate I am not a legal expert. I am not a barrister. I do not have a law degree. What I have is a semester spent studying Government law and policy at the London School of Economics as part of my master’s in European studies, and I have a massive book by Craig and de Búrca, which is still on the shelf in my office. As I was reading through the Bill, I noticed "Francovich" and that rang a little bell in the reptilian core of my brain. I thought to myself, "Ooh, that is one of those really important cases that I learned about 20 years ago," and it turns out that that master’s has been the best money that I ever spent Francovich is one of the areas where the Government break their promise to cut and paste the whole body of EU law into UK law. Schedule 1 is their get-out-of-jail-free card and includes the things that they do not like and are not going to incorporate. There are a lot of words about why things will be difficult, why judges will be confused and why everyone will be getting themselves into a twist, but it is a rights grab and it must not be allowed to stand. We must not allow schedule 1, which is essentially a list of the ways in which the Government are curtailing legal rights and remedies that we have enjoyed as a result of our membership of the EU. Admittedly, however, some of those rights and remedies did not exist when we joined and have evolved over time through European Court of Justice jurisprudence and through the treaties For the last 25 years as EU citizens, we have enjoyed the right to state compensation when the Government fail to implement EU law correctly and an individual suffers a serious loss as a result—that goes back to my big green textbook. The rule was established after Andrea Francovich took his Government to court for failing to protect his rights at work. He worked for an electronics company in Italy, but he was paid only sporadically, and he was still owed pay when his employer went bust. The insolvency protection directive gives workers the right to be paid if their employer goes bust and they are owed wages, but Italy had failed to implement the directive, and the European Court of Justice ruled in 1991 that the Italian Government must make good the pay owed to Mr Francovich and, presumably, his colleagues. Since then, if an EU member state has failed to fulfil its obligations that come with membership of the EU, citizens can obtain compensation if they suffer damages as a result. I think the reason why that stuck in my mind was that the EU case law was relatively fresh 25 years ago How did the ruling apply in the UK? There is a particularly sad case that any one of us could have had as constituency MPs: the case of Ben Byrne. Since 1984, the second motor insurance directive has required member states to provide compensation arrangements for victims of untraced drivers and that the protection must be equivalent to that which is available for victims of insured drivers whose identities are known. In 1993 the then three-year-old Ben Byrne was hit by a car while crossing the road with his father. The driver sped off and was never found. Ben’s parents were not aware of his right to claim compensation until eight years after the accident We get such difficult, knotty cases in our constituency surgeries, with people being unaware of their rights and remedies under the law. Many of us will have held the hand of a constituent in terrible cases to ensure that they get justice.