Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill

Lord Whitty Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 28th February 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Jolly (LD)]

My Lords, I start by apologising to the Committee for not speaking at Second Reading. I support Amendment 63, tabled in my name along with those of the noble Baronesses, Lady Finlay of Llandaff and Lady McIntosh of Pickering, and the noble Lord, Lord Hendy, and declare an interest as President of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents, RoSPA.

We tend to think of the United Kingdom as a global beacon for safety. Over the last 50 years, legally enshrined protections have saved more than 125,000 lives and prevented more than 1 million hospitalisations. This has not happened by luck; it has happened because of our role as pioneers in evidence-based research, alongside our international partners. Many of these vital measures are in retained EU law and are on track to be repealed at the end of this year. They include, quite alarmingly, rules on child and adult seat belts—my noble friend Lady Randerson touched on this—hazardous substances and chemical safety standards, and essential product safety.

I want to put flesh on the bones, as did the noble Baroness, Lady Young of Old Scone, and take the example of toys. On average, every year, 100 dangerous toy products are prevented from being supplied in the UK by trading standards. According to data from RoSPA, should the toy safety regulations be revoked, statistics tell us that the UK will go from zero recorded deaths caused by toys to two deaths and 5,000 children being seriously injured and needing to be admitted to hospital every year, the same as we experienced before regulations were put in place in 2002. This is just one example out of hundreds of laws that protect our citizens, including children, on a daily basis, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year.

I understand the need for this Government to uncouple themselves from the EU as part of Brexit, but this is a very important, very delicate exercise, which must be treated with the utmost care. It is no use “taking back control” if the way this Government choose to use their control is by bypassing proper parliamentary scrutiny and repealing thousands of laws, of which hundreds are life-saving safety laws, without any due process.

That is why I propose this amendment, which will require a health and safety impact assessment for each piece of EU-derived legislation set for revocation not less than 90 days prior to the intended date of revocation. Parliament deserves to see the truth about every law set to be repealed, so that we can make an informed decision about how to proceed. I am sure that plenty of revocations will pose no health and safety risk and that this House will be comfortable repealing many of these laws. However, just as there are things in this list that we do not need, there are also many that we do, and this House must be given the necessary information to be able to distinguish between the two.

The NHS is facing an unprecedented crisis. Hospital emergency departments are more stretched than ever and ambulances are queuing to offload their patients and go to their next emergency. Actively creating the conditions for thousands of people to suffer more accidents and emergencies at a time like this would be absurd. I hope that reason prevails and the Government back this essential amendment.

[Lord Whitty (Lab)]

My Lords, I came in this afternoon to join the environmental debate, because I knew of the anxieties among those concerned with the environment. They feel that there is a strong possibility that their area of concern will fall without proper consultation, involvement or debate 10 months from today.

Having sat through the environmental debate, I began to feel a strange emotion: I felt very sorry for the Government—for Ministers on the Front Bench and other Ministers here. The inadequate letter we received from the noble Baroness, Lady Bloomfield, shows that they are really not on top of this, and they will not get on top of this in the timescale they have set themselves. We can make all sorts of detailed amendments, but the Government’s main way out of this is to accept the two amendments from the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh, and extend the period of consideration for retained law so that stakeholders, business, consumers, et cetera, can consider the real implications of the laws and the alternatives, and so that the Government will have the ability to introduce a proper parliamentary process for reviewing the totality of this exercise.

I really think that Ministers will have to think again if they are going to attempt to meet the deadline that they have unnecessarily set themselves. If they give themselves more time, maybe something like this Bill will survive and the process that they started will succeed. If not, I am afraid that I can see nothing but the defeat of this Bill as a whole, and a lot of people continuing to feel great anxiety until that happens. So I appeal to Ministers to recognise reality, accept the amendments from the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh, and let us move on.

Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill

Lord Whitty Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 23rd February 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Howard of Rising (Con)]

Would the Minister agree that, as the United Kingdom has one of the best employment records in the entire world, which was never dependent upon the EU, these amendments are utterly pointless and could probably do more harm than good?

[Lord Whitty (Lab)]

My Lords, further to that point, even this discussion on the first amendment that we are faced with requires the Minister to withdraw some of the assertions he has made, and which his noble friend has just made again. The very fact that we are debating maternity rights which were brought in because of the European Union means that his statement that British workers do not depend on the European Union for their employment rights is made absurd. It is correct that successive British Governments have decided that they will go along with the European rights, but it was because of the European Union that we have those rights. Therefore, we need a specific exclusion from the fact that, by 31 December this year, these regulations, and many other workers’ rights regulations and related regulations, will fall automatically, without any parliamentary decision.

I would like the Minister to withdraw his assertion about European rights. He forgets his history. Why does he think that Mrs Thatcher fell out with Jacques Delors? Why does he think that John Major refused to sign the Social Chapter? Until the Labour Government came in, British workers’ rights were less than those of workers in Europe. This is an absurd assertion, as has been made clear by the debate on this very first amendment.

I have one more general point. I tried to table an early amendment which would give Parliament an alternative way of dealing with this, where we would have a Joint Committee to look in a reasoned way at the priority, the status and the need for action to change European laws. There is an amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Carlile, to do a similar thing, but we are not debating that today.

However, there must be a better way than leaving a whole tranche of European-derived law to an unknown process, ministerial decree—when they come in with their own version of the law—or simply leaving it until 31 December when the law will then disappear. This Parliament, this House, must assert a better way of dealing with this. That is clear from this amendment and from the complete absurdity of how we are dealing with the subject matter in this Bill.

[Lord Hacking (Lab)]

My Lords, my noble friend has done that in his Amendment 40, which is the sensible way forward.

Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill

Lord Whitty Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 23rd February 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Kerr of Kinlochard (CB)]

I too welcome the Minister to her role. I knew her first as a very distinguished civil servant in the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, so know that she will understand far better than I do what I am now going to touch on.

It seems to me that this Bill has flown under the radar so far, as far as public opinion is concerned. It came through the other place with very little public attention. I do not think many people realise how much of the statute book that is directly relevant to them is in play and will stay in play until some Minister has decided whether it is to be amended, replaced or die. When the public get to know that this is the case, I think they are going to react rather badly. I wonder about the politics of this, late in a Parliament, but that is not my business.

The issue arises first very clearly in relation to Amendment 4, and later in relation Amendment 20. Food safety is a real concern, right across public opinion. The idea that food labelling and safety rules could be in play will have considerable resonance, in a negative sense, across the country. When people were talking in an overexcited way about how we might have a free trade agreement with the United States, I was struck by the issues that really had public resonance, which were those concerning chlorinated chicken and the hormones in beef. As a member of the International Agreements Committee, I am struck that what is of most interest to the public in free trade agreements are food imports and whether their standards will be equivalent to ours.

I learn from the Consumers’ Association that 90% of our food law is retained EU law. Unless the Government accept amendments such as Amendments 4 and 20, in play will be a raft of legislation which is important to people. They take it seriously; they want to know what is in the food they are going to give the kids. It would be in the Government’s interest to look seriously at these amendments and at the sunset clause, which just does not work, as the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope, said earlier.

Particularly in relation to food safety, people think, “salus populi suprema lex”—I try that on the Minister because she is a great classical scholar—that is what they believe. Therefore, what the rest of us are doing now, along with singularly few on the Government Benches—

the boy stood on the burning deck,

Whence all but he had fled—

will have considerable resonance out there.

[Lord Whitty (Lab)]

My Lords, I want to follow the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, in intervening on this issue because this is the first consumer protection part of the Bill. I was once a consumer champion—I hope I continue to be so privately—and this amendment and many in the next group relate to food safety. The noble Lord is absolutely right: this is one of the most acutely difficult areas of consumer protection, and labelling in particular has caused a certain amount of controversy. But there is settled law here, and the bulk of it originates from Europe.

There are other areas of consumer law where UK law is better than EU law, but here, our scientists, our food industry and the Europeans have come up with an agreement which goes right across Europe. We have to remember that processed food and fresh food is a very well-traded commodity, probably the biggest trading commodity within the European continent, and we need some commonality. The threat of this being changed is surely a real difficulty for the food industry—although the Minister can answer that—and certainly for consumers. It is difficult enough to follow the labelling and consumer information currently required; if we have different labelling and requirements for things originating in France and in the UK—or for those originating in the Republic of Ireland and in Northern Ireland—we will have huge difficulties.

But there is something more behind this. When the Government presented the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018, I think we all accepted that whether we liked Brexit or not, we would have to have a process whereby government looked at whether some of these laws continued. The real difficulty with this legislation is that it does not provide for a steady look at what the highest priority is for government to intervene on over the next few years, in order to see in a broader context whether we ought to change it. There is the threat that every single regulation and law mentioned in these amendments and in subsequent groups will end on 31 December this year without any replacement, whether with consideration or not.

We are on Clause 1, which deals with the sunset. The noble Lord, Lord Kerr, has referred to the relatively sparsely populated Government Benches. I ask Ministers if during their lunch break they have taken note of the points made by the noble Baroness, Lady Altmann, and the noble Lord, Lord Lucas. If they are taken on board, that would reduce the anxiety here and in civil society about this approach. If the sunset clause disappears, and with it the threat of regulations entirely disappearing at the end of this year, we would give the Government credit for being able to make a proper assessment of whether those rules are needed.

Regarding the suggestion of the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, if we had an amendment to Clause 15 which, broadly speaking, said “no regression”, the level of anxiety would again be greatly relieved, at least in relation to some of the regulations we are talking about.

So I hope the Minister took the opportunity of the 50-minute adjournment to think about what his colleagues were saying, and that he will come back to us, either now or subsequently, with an assurance that there will not be the death of all these regulations as of 31 December, and that regression will not occur in relation to any of them, particularly those dealing with food labelling information and the protection of consumers whenever they go to the supermarket.

[Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)]

My Lords, I support all the amendments in this group. The noble Lords, Lord Fox and Lord Clement-Jones, and the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, in the way she introduced them, have done a very good job of bringing these important issues to our attention. I want to make a couple of points that have not yet been made about this process. We have had a lot of discussion on process, as we do on Bills that are all about enabling rather than substance. That is inevitably what our debates end up focusing on; we use these issues as a prism to look through. It helps us to realise just how dreadful an approach the Government are choosing to adopt.

As we all said at Second Reading, I do not think anybody objects to the Government looking at retained EU law and asking Parliament to make changes to it. That is what Governments are there to do: to improve the law of the land. We respect this Government’s right to do that. We might not like it, but that is what they are there to do. However, we feel that to do it in this way is just wrong in principle, and the usefulness of these three amendments is that they make that point very well.

When I was looking at Amendment 3, I noticed that in February last year the Government presented an SI dealing with health professional qualifications. They said that it was needed because the measures concerned had been dealt with in a hurry as we left the EU. At that point, in that SI, the word “pharmacist” had been used instead of “dentist”. That is quite an error. I raise this for a couple of reasons. The first, obviously, is to demonstrate that the Government can and do change regulations arising from our exit from the EU as a matter of course. It is a perfectly normal thing for both Houses to do. I myself, and I am sure everybody else in the Chamber today, have had the great honour, privilege and delight of taking part in many SI debates. It is what we do. Even when things are not done in a crazy rush, trying to get hundreds or thousands of these done by Christmas, significant errors are made and things are put into the law of this country that were never intended to be there and should not be there. I also raise this because I wanted to highlight that however brilliant our civil servants are—as I think they are—and however diligent and hard-working they definitely are, errors are made by civil servants too. I am not someone who has described our Civil Service as “broken”, “lazy” or “bloated”, but government Ministers have, very recently; yet they are asking civil servants to undertake this Herculean process. There is a tension there.

Amendment 4 and the issue of food labelling is important; I am not surprised that that is what the majority of the contributions on this group have focused on. There are multiple examples of deaths occurring as a consequence of food labelling not being right. I am very supportive of an examination of our food labelling laws. I am very happy that this could be done by the UK Government—ideally in consultation, at the very least, with the devolved Administrations.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Bloomfield of Hinton Waldrist (Con)]

I know that this is of concern to a number of Members in the Committee, but officials from the UK Government are working very closely with those from the devolved Governments in order to identify the REULs that cross over devolved competences. I know that there is a general concern within the devolved Governments that they simply do not have the manpower to look at all these EU laws themselves, so we are helping them in that process. That is an ongoing job of work being done from official to official.

[Lord Whitty (Lab)]

My Lords, the Minister has rather changed the rules on this. If the dashboard is almost complete and there is an intention to put something next to every thing on the dashboard—perhaps not using my noble friend Lady Young’s terminology but a slightly more bureaucratic one—we need to have that list before we move to any further stage of the Bill, otherwise we do not know what we are talking about. The noble Baroness has explained in relation to asbestos, rightly and thankfully, that those regulations will not be sunsetted. What happens to the other 4,700 regulations? We do not know. We need that list before we take any definitive decisions on the Bill. I hope that government Ministers and the business managers will go away and recognise that, and that we will not move until we know a lot more about where we are going.

[Baroness Bloomfield of Hinton Waldrist (Con)]

The dashboard is ongoing work. It does not put things into buckets, but just includes all the EU laws that are subject to review. That will be published but it will certainly not have the buckets that I think the noble Baroness, Lady Young, is asking for.

Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Bill

Lord Whitty Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 21st February 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Whitty (Lab)]

My Lords, I will try not to repeat and cite every speaker with whom I have agreed but I congratulate the previous two speakers: my BALPA colleague, the noble Lord, Lord Balfe, who sits on the Conservative Benches these days but nevertheless understands that industrial relations cannot be conducted through draconian government decrees, as the Henry VIII powers in this Bill envisage; and my noble friend Lady Blower, who explained the difficulties with the Bill. I speak as the son of a former branch secretary of the NUT.

In a debate a few months ago, I asked the Minister whether the Government believe in the right to strike. He rather sheepishly proclaimed that they do. I think he should have added in the small print, “As long as they’re not effective”. In other words, the Government have the right to have draconian interventions—often at the last minute, as the powers in this skeletal Bill would allow—and lay down what service will be delivered and which workers will work. That is a recipe for disaster.

I was going to congratulate the Minister on two things: first, the shortness of this Bill, although others have pointed to the disadvantages of that; and, secondly, his sudden conversion to all things European in citing his apparent understanding of what goes on in Germany, Spain and elsewhere. I hope that he shows the same enthusiasm when we return to the retained European legislation Bill later in the week.

The reality is that the Bill exists because, as the noble Lord, Lord Balfe—I nearly called him “my noble friend”—said, this is a panic measure. We are in a period with a lot of strikes happening, for different reasons but at the same time. They appear to be cumulative and the Government are panicking. They want to be seen to be doing something, so they have come up with this Bill, which originated as part of a more balanced Bill of employment rights—that seems to have disappeared—then as part of a transport Bill, from which this provision has been greatly expanded. This is not the way to make legislation, or how the House of Lords should allow legislation to be made. A large part of the Bill should be rejected by this House, if not the whole of it.

I should have said that in addition to my declared interests, I am a veteran of the previous so-called winter of discontent. I was one of those crypto-Marxist officials with one of the unions involved at the time. I disagree with the noble Lord, Lord Dobbs, who is no longer in his place, on the history of that and the subsequent period. My recollection is somewhat different. Yes, the unions made a lot of mistakes in that period. For example, we did not include gravediggers in the areas which were to be immune from strike action. That lost us a lot of public support. However, by and large there was no threat to life or limb.

I see that my noble friend Lord Donoughue, who has experience from the other side, is no longer here but I say to your Lordships that the Callaghan Government stopped talking. I recollect, two or three days before Christmas, going with a bit of paper that was drawn up by myself and my friend Lord Gladwin, a future Member of this House, to give to the then Government. It set out possible terms which had been agreed with the general secretaries of the other unions concerned. That was rejected by the Callaghan Government. A month later, the strikes began. We obeyed notice of strikes even then, though it was not at that time compulsory in law. A month or so later, the Government had to settle with the unions on almost identical terms to those that we had presented two months earlier.

When Margaret Thatcher’s Tory Government took over, she learned some of those lessons. She is wrongly depicted in some ways as the equivalent of Ronald Reagan, as the noble Lord, Lord Greenhalgh, said. She did not negotiate herself, of course, but she did allow her officials to negotiate. There was continued industrial unrest in the early years of the Thatcher regime but she kept the door open. Agreements were reached, sometimes after strikes. I recall that she even agreed after the water strike that there would be compulsory arbitration through ACAS and that the Government would agree to its terms. We have none of that in this Bill—there is no ACAS involvement, as my noble friend Lady Donaghy said. There are better ways of operating. There are better ways of conducting industrial relations than threatening long-standing arrangements between employers and unions or imposing new ones when a strike is threatened.

I do not like to compare the Minister with his late Majesty Richard III, but at the beginning of the play that King says,

“Now is the winter of our discontent

Made glorious summer”.

It did not work out too well for him, and I am afraid that this Bill will not work out too well for the Minister either. There is an alternative and he should learn from history. The alternative is to sit down now and negotiate. For as long as the Government refuse to do that, we will have a winter of discontent.