Question to the Department for Business and Trade:

To ask the Secretary of State for Business and Trade, if she will make an assessment of the potential merits of providing additional time for parliamentary scrutiny before automatically revoking certain retained EU law.

Retained EU law (REUL) will automatically cease to exist after 31 December 2023 unless the Government takes steps to keep it as “assimilated law” under the Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill. This provides the most effective way to remove unnecessary or outdated EU laws, without taking up resources and parliamentary time to revoke every such law individually, and additional time for parliamentary scrutiny is not necessary.

We will continue to update a published REUL dashboard which lists over 3,700 pieces of REUL to provide transparency about affected legislation. We will also be bringing forward an extensive programme of secondary legislation, subject to parliamentary scrutiny, to preserve, restate, or reform REUL where it is in the United Kingdom’s interests to do so. This includes powers to extend the sunset date, or revoke legislation proactively, in specific instances where this is more appropriate than a 31 December 2023 sunset.