The Great Repeal Bill, otherwise known as the retained EU law (revocation and reform) bill 2022 (REUL bill) has become a millstone for the Conservative Party. A few days ago, the business secretary Kemi Badenoch reportedly briefed senior Eurosceptic MPs that the bill will fall well short of its target of ditching 4,000 EU laws before the end of this year.
Badenoch apparently said the actual figure will be a more modest 800 or so. This is according to credible leaks in The Telegraph (Tories to leave thousands of EU laws intact in latest Brexit betrayal) and the Financial Times (UK government set to U-turn on plan to scrap or revise all EU law).
It must have been like telling children that Santa Claus didn’t exist and Christmas had been canceled. She blamed civil servants. The news went down badly. One MP said: “This blows her leadership chances. She will lose a third of the party.”
We next learned her department has awarded a £4mn contract to the law firm Hogan Lovells for “external legal support to build on existing capacity in the Government Legal Department to assist with delivery of the REUL Reform programme”. The government legal department employs nearly 2,000 solicitors and barristers but apparently can’t cope with the REUL bill and needs a sub-contractor.
The Telegraph has now ‘learned’ that ministers are “considering major reforms” to the EU working time directive, said to be an attempt to save businesses £1bn a year. Even this is just a fraction of the £4.2bn we were told in 2016 the UK could save by scrapping the working time directive altogether. I’ll believe it when I see it.
Finally, despite earlier insisting ministers are sticking to the original 2023 target, the government is apparently on the verge of a complete U-turn. None of this comes as surprise.
The Lords are waiting to ambush the REUL bill
The REUL bill itself is due to begin its report stage in the House of Lords on 15 May where cross-party peers are waiting to ambush the controversial legislation, mainly on the grounds that it deprives parliament of its vital scrutinising role.
Reports by the delegated powers and regulatory reform committee (DPRRC) in February describe the REUL bill as entirely “lacking in substance” and conclude it is, in effect, “all powers, no policy” and a mechanism whereby “Ministers, not Parliament will be responsible for determining what stays, what goes, and what, if anything, is to replace what goes”.
Peers are not unhappy with the actual principle behind the legislation, although business is. The Institute of Directors is just the latest. A poll of 949 company executives asking which policy area offered the greatest opportunity for the UK to “reduce the regulatory burden” of EU law found there was no such policy area at all. Half preferred “regulatory stability in the current framework”.
The new ‘target’ seems close to being met already
In her meeting, Badenoch reportedly challenged the Tory MPs to say exactly which laws they would scrap by the end of 2023. An impartial observer might be forgiven for thinking this is the sort of question that should have been asked on 24 June 2016. One government insider claimed they had suggested “product safety standards and the emissions trading scheme”.
An ally of the business secretary is quoted saying, “We want to streamline regulation, but we are not getting rid of stuff for its own sake. We want to do it properly. It has to be done line by line. These things need proper thought and consideration, not blanket scrapping”. At least one penny can be heard dropping in Admiralty Place, SW1A.
Assuming the 800 laws Badenoch mentioned aren’t in addition to those reviewed so far, the new target seems eminently achievable. The government’s ‘dashboard‘ shows 671 have already been repealed (292), amended (347) or replaced (31).
Another 130 or so and Bob’s your uncle.
However, Eurosceptic Tory MPs would do well to treat the 800 figure with some caution, since even that doesn’t reveal the extent to which Britain will still be using retained EU law in 2024 and probably well beyond that.
Repealed and amended
Repealing 292 EU laws can’t have been all that hard when you look at what the list includes. Many of them could have been repealed by the EU since they all seem long out of date. Others have been amended although they hardly seemed consequential in the first place:
In the case of EU 2015/2097, the amending was obviously done in such a hurry that the description contains a glaring typo (twice) unless “regonised” is a word I haven’t come across before.
What has been ‘replaced’ so far?
Some 31 pieces of EU law have been replaced “with new legislation that substantially changes the policy intent and effect. No further changes to this legislation are required ahead of the 2023 sunset clause” proposed by the REUL Bill 2022. Substantially, may be an exaggeration.
Intrigued, I had a look at just one of these EU laws to check what it was being replaced by. I chose EU regulation 2019/2023 (28 pages) which sets out eco-design requirements for household washing machines and washer-dryers.
This has now been rolled into one new monster 149-page British law, The Ecodesign for Energy-Related Products and Energy Information Regulations 2021, covering several items of electrical and electronic equipment including televisions, fridges, dishwashers, electric motors, electronic displays, etc.
Washing machines come under Regulation 22 with their eco-design requirements set out in schedule 9. The explanatory memorandum says the requirements are “intended to mirror the technical requirements in the equivalent EU regulations”.
Just how closely they ‘mirror’ the EU regulations can be seen in these two short extracts:
In fact the ‘new’ regulations are identical to the old one, except for using slightly different language (‘must’ rather than ‘shall’; ‘schedule 10’ rather than ‘annex III’). This makes perfect sense when you realise that, apart from one small company in Durham (EBAC) the vast majority of washing machines sold in the UK are made overseas. Hotpoint, the last major domestic manufacturer, closed their Bodelwyddan plant, which once employed 1,000 people, in 2009. It would appear that all of the machines listed by Currys or Appliances Online are imports.
Nevertheless, Britain now has its very own eco-design requirements for washing machines, but even these insist that manufacturers supply technical documentation and apply a label which complies with an EU regulation (Annex 6 of 2019/2014 supplementing regulation 2017/1369 for energy labelling of household washing machines and household washer-dryers):
To gain approval, EU makers must submit units for test by the UK market surveillance authority according to Regulation 24, Schedule 11 of the new law, thus needlessly adding time and costs to the marketing of washing machines in Britain, which will already have passed exactly the same tests in the EU.
Having our own regulations looks pathetic
Creating wholly different regulations specifically for the UK market would presumably be disastrous – raising costs even further while reducing consumer choice – so we have ‘mirrored’ EU regulations simply to allow us to say we have our own. It all looks a bit pathetic.
Something similar will presumably apply to televisions, fridges and dishwashers. And to complicate matters further, much of this will not affect Northern Ireland where the original EU regulations still apply.
One gets the impression the entire REUL bill is a waste of time. Repealing EU laws which are past their use by date anyway, making tiny amendments to others while copying and pasting into UK law regulations that mimic the EU originals, and claiming they ‘substantially change the policy intent and effect’. What is the point?
The bill has become a millstone around the government’s neck. It cannot admit there are no savings to be made, or worse, that costs are being added. The ERG and plenty of leave voters are still expecting vast swathes of ‘burdensome’ EU law, most of which they can’t identify by name, to be repealed or replaced. Meanwhile, Brexitfacts4EU.org (Brexit ‘facts’ being different to ordinary facts) are left asking: Why do we still have thousands of EU laws, SEVEN YEARS after we voted to leave? The Great Repeal Bill has been so oversold, one almost sympathises with them
The legal profession is concerned that the government doesn’t seem to understand the effect of its own bill in creating “a new, uncertain employment law landscape on 1 January 2024, where employment law is stripped of its settled understanding and becomes uncertain”.
Badenoch is now looking for a way out. What we are seeing is the start of a smoke and mirrors exercise to convince her colleagues that the REUL bill is the key to unlocking Britain’s potential while not actually making any changes of substance for fear of adding to our economic problems.
An article, again in The Telegraph, warns ‘Post-Brexit Britain could soon be more bureaucratic than Brussels‘ and this echoes another in The Economist recently that suggested Boris Johnson’s “cakeist” approach to Europe, claiming Britain could have it all – ditching EU laws while keeping deep market access – has ended up with the reverse: terrible market access and all the EU laws anyway.
The bonfire of EU regulations was never going to happen, certainly not in the time frame envisaged by Jacob Rees-Mogg last September when he introduced the bill to parliament. It was rather wet to begin with and Badenoch is now damping down what’s left, along with ERG expectations.
