Question to the Department for Exiting the European Union :

To ask Her Majesty's Government whether they intend to maintain regulatory alignment with the EU after Brexit; and if so, what progress they have made towards achieving this.

The PM set out in her Mansion House speech the UK’s ambition for a future relationship with the EU that allows for a high level of reciprocal market access.

For goods, the UK will need to make a strong commitment that its regulatory standards will remain as high as the EU’s. UK law may not necessarily be identical to EU law, but it should achieve the same outcomes. In some cases Parliament might choose to pass an identical law – businesses who export to the EU state it is strongly in their interest to have a single set of regulatory standards which means they can sell into the UK and EU markets.

If the Parliament of the day decided not to achieve the same outcomes as EU law, it would be in the knowledge that there may be consequences for market access.

There will need to be an independent mechanism to oversee these arrangements.