Here we go again: another piece of legislation introduced in the name of Brexit, which we were repeatedly told was about restoring Parliament’s sovereignty and supremacy, and yet one that gives Ministers absolute control over whole swathes of legislation that impact upon our national life by cutting Members of Parliament out of the process almost altogether, and the public as well. This is what the Hansard Society had to say:
“The Bill…Sidelines Parliament because it proposes to let all REUL expire on the sunset deadline unless Ministers decide to save it, with no parliamentary input or oversight.”
This is a shocking Bill. As I see it, one of the main purposes of the Bill is presentational: it is trying to remove the words “Europe”, “European” and “EU” from the statute book. It is a form of linguistic and legislative purge, which may make those who argued to leave the EU feel better, but it does not add to the sum total of human happiness. The former Business Secretary, the right hon. Member for North East Somerset (Mr Rees-Mogg), who has just left the Chamber, made it crystal clear what the aim was when he wrote to me on 13 October and said that the Bill will require Departments
“to remove unnecessary or burdensome laws which encumber business and no longer meet the Government’s policy objectives.”
I remind the House that one person’s burdensome law is another person’s safe working conditions; it is their right to take parental leave.
At a time of great uncertainty and economic difficulty, what the Bill does is simply add to the uncertainty. This point was brilliantly made by my hon. Friend the Member for Stalybridge and Hyde (Jonathan Reynolds). What businesses want to know is what the rules are and what the framework is, because that knowledge provides them with certainty, on the basis of which they can invest and carry out their work. The Government are doing the absolute opposite with this Bill. They are saying to every one of those businesses and would-be investors, “We just need to point out that the laws, regulations and rules that are in place today may not be in place in the same form after Christmas 2023 if we don’t get round to saving them.” I cannot think of an approach more calculated to undermine confidence in the British economy and to deter would-be investors than the one in this Bill. I point out that we are not doing very well on inward investment—we have the lowest level of inward investment in the whole G7.
Part of the problem is that we have no idea, and I do not think the Government have any idea, which bits of EU law the Government want to scrap, which bits they want to amend and retain and which bits they want to keep in their entirety. We know that there is a list; reference has been made to it. It is not a little list—it is a jolly big list, and it is found on the famous dashboard. I echo the plea made by other Members: I really hope that the Government have counted everything. To paraphrase Lord Denning’s famous phrase, now that the incoming tide of EU law has ebbed away, have Ministers and civil servants searched every estuary, every river, every tributary and every salt marsh to make sure they have found all the bits of legislation that will be subject to this Bill? It is really important that they have done so, because if they have missed anything, that bit of legislation will fall in December next year—it will disappear from the statute book, whether Ministers want it to or not.
The next thing that is objectionable about the Bill is that, for the first time I can recall, it allows Ministers to change the law of this country by doing nothing—by simply watching the clock move and the pages of the calendar fall until December 2023 comes around. Even if Government Members agree with the aim of reviewing these laws—and there is an argument to be had for that—it is extraordinary that Ministers are asking the House to give them this power. The Under-Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, the hon. Member for Watford (Dean Russell), who is no longer in his place, did a good job of moving the Bill’s Second Reading having come to it very recently, but he had no answer to the point I put to him, and I have yet to hear one in the debate, about why Ministers should be allowed to get rid of law simply by sitting on their hands.