Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill

Baroness Bloomfield of Hinton Waldrist Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 6th February 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

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:

“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 They say they want to remove outdated regulation that may be hampering growth. What does “outdated” mean?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—

[Baroness Bloomfield of Hinton Waldrist (Con)]

I suggest that the noble Baroness brings her comments to a close.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

How can you make a law when you do not know what it covers?

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I have a lot of sympathy with the furious frustration expressed today at being asked to grant an Executive a licence to legislate on thousands of legal instruments, all without accountability to Parliament or the public. I empathise because that anger at a democratic deficit was exactly what prompted me to vote to leave the EU. These very EU retained laws started life as secondary legislation impositions on the UK Parliament: they were directions from and obligations to the EU Executive. They were products of a supranational institution whose very design is to ring-fence swathes of lawmaking from national electorates and to delegate sovereign powers to unaccountable European Commissioners, the European bank, et cetera.

Do not get me wrong: there are problems with this Bill. The Government may have missed an opportunity to use the retained law issue as a spur for democratic renewal. They could have launched nationwide town-hall meetings and debates to guide decisions on what laws to keep or delete. But, to note, whatever the anti-democratic dangers of this skeleton Bill, there is a popular mandate behind the Bill’s intent: to fulfil a promise of taking back control of our legal system by abolishing EU supremacy. We do indeed need to give domestic courts more discretion to depart from retained EU case law—they can take it into account but should not be required to follow it. Also, the real constitutional outrage before us is not the Bill so much as the fact that some domestic primary legislation remains subordinate to EU law. I am not sure that complaints that the sunset clause means changes are rushed will cut it with the public. For many millions who voted to leave in the largest democratic vote in UK history, the impression is of sloth, prevarication and obstruction. They deserve a sense of urgency to finish what voters started in 2016.

Many of the core objections we have heard today seem to be driven by a failure of imagination. Many noble Lords have cited professional bodies, NGOs, employers organisations, trade union leaders and lawyers—all who appear unable to imagine social and economic progress happening without retained EU laws. Nowhere is this more gallingly illustrated than in accusations that the Bill will create a bonfire of workers’ rights. Surely this legalistic presumption is insulting to decades of self-organisation by working-class people who fought tooth and nail to win those gains. Maybe tell the RMT rank and file members—many of whom I campaigned alongside for Brexit—that their rights are safer in EU retained law than on their picket lines. Do I trust the Tory Government with workers’ rights? Of course not. But I do not trust EU law either. The first time I heard of the model strike-breaking legislation in the form of minimum service requirements was when it was being eulogised in the European Parliament. And, yes, I will be opposing it when it comes to this House.

The TUC briefing warns that this Bill jeopardises the agency workers directive, but we might note that this very directive is a device used to avoid paying agency staff at the same rate as employed staff. It has been used by the ECJ to break collective bargaining agreements via the 2007 rulings in the Viking Line and Laval cases. Other briefings warn us this Bill will drive a wrecking ball through women’s employment rights and equality legislation. Actually, a far greater threat to equality law in 2023 is not this Bill but the Scottish Government’s Gender Recognition Act. How disappointing that all those condemning this so-called dodgy legislation today have not been clamouring to oppose this material assault on women’s sex-based rights that threatens the UK-wide Equality Act.

The 4,000 retained EU laws were put on the UK statute books without Members of this unelected House crying democracy. Earlier, we were assured that it was all okay because, as one noble Lord explained, there were special behind-closed-door committees that scrutinised them. There was no mind that, no matter how many British voters might object to any one of those laws, there was nothing—zilch—they could do. The lack of outrage at that democratic deficit—

[Baroness Bloomfield of Hinton Waldrist (Con)]

The noble Baroness has exceeded her time limit. Perhaps she could bring her comments to an end.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

Well, noble Lords get the gist.