If you do not mind, Mr Deputy Speaker, I am not going to take any more interventions for a while, because I appreciate a lot of people wish to speak.
Just for a minute, I ask hon. Members to imagine they are a business trying to plan for the next year and having to navigate a dashboard that is not complete, but might be updated at some point. That business is looking at the dashboard just to understand what rules might be changed under the auspices of the Bill, never mind whether they should be changed or whether those changes will affect the business.
If the Government do not even know what the Bill covers, how can they expect anyone looking to invest to do so? That is an absurd way to proceed. No wonder groups as diverse as the TUC and the Institute of Directors oppose this Bill. We do not legislate in this place by website; we legislate by legislation, and the intention of that legislation should be clear.
There is a solution in sight to this rather unsatisfactory state of affairs, in the shape of amendment 36 in the name of my hon. Friend the Member for Walthamstow (Stella Creasy), which would at least enable us to see what laws Ministers want to revoke and allow Parliament—yes, Parliament—to express a view on whether it wishes to see those laws taken off the statute book, in
the true spirit of taking back control. Crucially, the amendment would require Ministers, at least three months before the cliff edge, to set out which laws they intend to revoke.
One would hope that, by September this year, Ministers would have formed a view on which laws they wanted to keep and which they did not. It would be nice if they had done so by then—it would be even nicer if they let Parliament know, and nicer still if they afforded that courtesy to the rest of the country, so that people were able to plan.
We cannot have the Government changing the law on a whim. There must be proper accountability and scrutiny. We cannot have unaccountable Ministers changing the rules without reference to anyone else—that is not what taking back control was supposed to look like. When this Bill was first mooted and Lord Frost was still a Government Minister, he said that the policy intention behind the Bill was
“to amend, replace or repeal all retained EU law that is not right for the UK.”
I think we need something a bit more detailed than a general feeling that something is not right for the UK. This centuries-old Parliament, having taken a historic decision to wrestle back control from those unelected Brussels bureaucrats, finds itself in the ludicrous position of having another unelected person telling us that laws will be changed if they are “not right”. What that phrase gains in brevity it loses in clarity. It can mean absolutely anything, and of course—crucially for this place—it puts all the power in the hands of Ministers. Surely, as a Parliament, we can do better than that; surely we want to hold ourselves to a higher standard when we change legislation. We should not legislate on a whim, and Parliament should not hand powers to Ministers enabling them to do just that. The Regulatory Policy Committee described the Bill’s impact assessment as either “weak” or “very weak” in every aspect, so any Member who is thinking of handing over those powers should, in the light of that warning, think very carefully before doing so.
2.30 pm
I know that many of those who support the Bill do not think that any level of parliamentary scrutiny is necessary to revoke EU laws because—they claim—accountability and scrutiny were lacking in the first place when the laws were brought in. I say to those people that two wrongs do not make a right. Is taking back control not about us, in this Parliament, having a fuller say in the legislative process?