European Union (Withdrawal) Bill — House of Lords, 2018-02-28
Topic: Civil Rights
Richard Keen (Conservative, Centre-right): My Lords, as may have been observed during the passage of the Investigatory Powers Bill, the Government are always listening. I am most obliged to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, for his observations, because they go to the very heart of the point I want to make. We are, in a sense, having the wrong debate in the wrong place, but I am also relieved to hear from my friend the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, that he does not understand paragraph 3 of Schedule 8, because I was rather concerned about his earlier interpretation of it under reference to the opinion of Pushpinder Saini, QC—I will come back to that in a moment, if I may The areas that these amendments seek to protect, such as employment rights and environmental standards, are issues that are important to every Government, and in particular this Government. Of course, we are anxious to ensure that rights and standards such as these are maintained—indeed, where possible, increased —after we leave the EU. It might be observed that UK protections in many of these areas—for example, parental leave—in fact go beyond the level of protection provided for in EU law, so let us keep this in context It is important, however, that we are able to address deficiencies to ensure that the protection of these rights and the standards that they reflect continue to function effectively and that the Government are able to amend legislation in line with our history of leading in these areas of protection. When people voted to bring back power to our Parliament and to bring back control of our laws, they did not vote to put them in the deep freeze for any number of years. We have to see this in context: we are talking about thousands of regulations—somewhere in the order of 12,000 regulations —which were of course not the subject of parliamentary scrutiny; and we are talking about thousands of SIs implementing directives, which were of course not the subject of parliamentary scrutiny, which have come into our law and will be part of our law on exit day, because they will form part of the area of retained EU law The noble Baroness, in her amendment, proposes a schedule of "technical provisions" in an area where we are dealing with enormous quantities of law, by way of regulation and by way of implemented directives. The first point that would arise is: where is the line to be drawn between what is a technical and a non-technical provision? The noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer, alluded to this as one of the three criteria he had in mind. You have to be able to define these criteria, otherwise you immediately run into a further issue. That is in itself a very real challenge: how would we define or class a technical issue in the context of seeking to update retained EU law Perhaps the more important point, however, is that much of what has been said here anticipates the issues that we will debate in the context of Clause 5, on the classification of retained EU law, and, more particularly, Clause 7, in relation to the exercise of certain powers by government in dealing with the body of retained EU law. Again, it is important to try to put this in context. We have had references to the suggestion that the Government are taking untrammelled, unlimited powers to do virtually anything with the statute book. Let us not, even if we think we have a good case, overstate it because, in doing so, we rather spoil our argument. That is not at all what the Government seek to do. Clause 7 is concerned with how we deal with deficiencies arising from our withdrawal from the EU. It is therefore concerned, as it says, about the making of regulations which are, "appropriate to prevent, remedy or mitigate— (a) any failure of retained EU law to operate effectively" We are not talking about wholesale policy changes to our employment or environment laws, our standards for consumers or anything of that kind. The noble Lord, Lord Pannick, referred to—