Draft Withdrawal Agreement (Windsor Framework and Governance) (Amendment) Regulations 2026

Mike Wood Excerpts

Wednesday 14th October 2026 General Committees

[Mike Wood (Kingswinford and South Staffordshire) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Efford. I want to make it clear from the outset that while His Majesty’s Opposition do not object to every provision within these draft regulations, we cannot support them today.

We have no quarrel with the purely technical updates to statutory terminology, nor do we oppose implementing the practical recommendations of Lord Murphy’s review to strengthen the hand of the Northern Ireland Assembly’s Democratic Scrutiny Committee. Giving the committee 10 working days rather than five to decide whether to hold an inquiry and clarifying that Northern Ireland Departments must comply with reasonable requests for information are sensible steps. However, statutory instruments are unamendable and the Government have chosen to package these modest Stormont reforms alongside regulation 2(6), a measure that points in the exact opposite constitutional direction by deleting section 15C of the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018.

We oppose that approach for three fundamental reasons. First, we resist the use of Henry VIII powers to weaken governance and strip away primary legislation safeguards in this area. Section 15C was not a drafting oversight. When Parliament inserted it via section 35 of the European Union (Withdrawal Agreement) Act, paragraph 325 of the explanatory notes stated explicitly that its purpose was to preclude a Minister of the Crown from using the written procedure to adopt Joint Committee decisions or recommendations. That lock was enacted by primary legislation to ensure that decisions are taken by a Minister in person, and that there is full ministerial accountability, including to Parliament, for all decisions made in the Joint Committee. Using delegated powers in secondary legislation to reach back into an Act of Parliament and delete a deliberate accountability safeguard placed upon the Executive is a misuse of Henry VIII powers, and it is a particularly concerning precedent ahead of the Government’s EU reset Bill.

Secondly, we strongly oppose removing the prohibition on the Joint Committee making decisions between meetings. We have great sympathy for the submission made by the hon. and learned Member for North Antrim to the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee. As he rightly exposed, paragraph 5.7 of the Government’s explanatory memorandum merely states the mechanical effect of deleting section 15C, without offering a single word of explanation as to why a safeguard that was once deemed essential is no longer required.

Worse still, there has been no meaningful consultation on removing that safeguard. Section 7 of the explanatory memorandum relies on the Murphy review as its consultation basis, yet Lord Murphy never recommended repealing section 15C. In fact, Lord Murphy noted that the Joint Committee meets at ministerial level alongside the First Minister and Deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland, and he specifically recommended broadening the inclusion of stakeholders into these meetings to bring greater transparency and openness, not less.

Under section 15C, formal Joint Committee meeting dates are announced well in advance, giving Parliament and the public a clear focal point to track decisions. By repealing section 15C, decisions and recommendations can be signed off on paper between meetings and slipped through at any time without notice. Only when pressed by the Scrutiny Committee in July did the Cabinet Office finally admit that the real driver behind this change is facilitating decision making between meetings for the point when future UK-EU agreements are in force.

[Sir Christopher Chope]

My hon. Friend is making some excellent points. Does he agree that his points are compounded by the fact that the Minister has refused, or expressed himself unable, to respond to any of these issues?

[Mike Wood]

My hon. Friend obviously has a long and strong record of promoting accountability in Government. That was not always to the pleasure of the Whips Office when we were in government, but it is particularly important that he continues that function when measures like this are being implemented through secondary legislation. If the Government want new governance mechanisms for future EU reset deals, they should make that case openly in primary legislation rather than stripping away statutory locks by stealth today.

Thirdly, we need better oversight of the Windsor framework regulation-making process, not weaker scrutiny. As the House of Lords Northern Ireland Scrutiny Committee highlighted, we are currently in the extraordinary position of not even having a complete public list of all the EU laws to which Northern Ireland is subject under dynamic alignment. That Committee rightly called on the Cabinet Office to establish a dedicated regulatory divergence unit to maintain an up-to-date public database on the National Archives website, alongside more detailed statements after joint meetings.

Yet in its July responses to the Scrutiny Committee, the Cabinet Office admitted that section 15C provides no statutory notification mechanism and that Westminster scrutiny relies on explanatory memorandums triggered by EU Council decisions establishing the EU’s position, not the UK’s position, which are then followed by publication on the gov.uk website after the fact. Relying on Brussels paperwork to alert the UK Parliament to decisions our own Ministers are taking by written correspondence, and publishing those decisions on gov.uk only after they have been signed, is no substitute for proper parliamentary oversight.

Until the Government bring forward proper transparency and scrutiny over the Windsor framework regulation-making process and stop using inappropriate Henry VIII powers to dismantle primary legislation safeguards on Joint Committee decision making between meetings, His Majesty’s Opposition cannot support these regulations.