European Union (Withdrawal) Bill — House of Commons, 2017-12-12
Topic: Mixed Topics
Mary Helen Creagh (Labour, Centre-left): My hon. Friend raises an excellent point, which has also been raised by the European Chemicals Agency. Those registrations, which will have cost our businesses £250 million, will fall on exit day. I know that that particular agency does allow third countries to participate, but when I tabled a parliamentary question to various Departments about the work they had done to prepare to duplicate the work of those regulatory agencies, I got a series of flannel-type replies that essentially said, "We don’t know how much it is going to cost, we don’t know what the system is going to be and we haven’t really started the work." That is simply not good enough. Businesses and citizens deserve certainty. We are going to need between 800 and 1,000 statutory instruments before exit day to correct retained law. In a letter to the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee in September, the Environment Secretary said that there were 850 pieces of legislation relating to his Department that would no longer work after exit day unless they were corrected. That is an absolutely huge body of law Clause 7, as we have heard, gives Ministers powers to make regulations that they believe are appropriate—again, I dispute what "appropriate" might be—to "prevent, remedy or mitigate…any failure of EU retained law to operate effectively"— again, how do we know what the full scope of this clause will cover? This is a huge amount of law— "or…any other deficiency in retained EU law" where this arises from exit. The Bill’s explanatory notes contain a worrying and rather brazen example of what this means. They use the example of the UK having to obtain an opinion from the EU Commission, stating: "In this instance the power to correct the law would allow the Government to amend UK domestic legislation to either replace the reference to the Commission with a UK body"— should the Government decide to have one— "or remove this requirement completely." Once we start to see the removal of reporting and enforcement requirements, we get to the heart of the Bill, which is that Brexit is a deregulators’ charter. This is about taking rights away and about ensuring that environmental and social rights are lost to our citizens. I do not want to see Ministers making those sweeping changes with no scrutiny in this place In part 1 of schedule 7, paragraph 3(2) waives the affirmative procedure for regulations where the Minister is of the opinion that "by reason of urgency, it is necessary to make the regulations without a draft being so laid and approved." That basically says that the Government will not consult this House if the matter is urgent. They have said that they will accept the amendments tabled by the Procedure Committee Chair, the hon. Member for Broxbourne (Mr Walker), but those provisions could be waived if a Minister was of the opinion that the regulations were urgent. The Government want to pass 800 to 1,000 statutory instruments, 850 of which are in the environment sphere. Can anyone tell me which of those regulations will not be urgent, given that they need to be passed before exit day?