Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (Waste Management Licensing) (England and Wales) Regulations 2006

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, on securing this debate on these regulations. They will not come into force until July this year; that is two years late, but this is a case of ““worse late than never””. Late as they are, these regulations remain fraught with potential problems, as the 7th Report of the Merits of Statutory Instruments Committee, to which the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, referred, makes clear. That report and evidence are studded with qualifications and useful words such as ““challenging””, which is Defra-speak meaning that not only will it not happen but there will be a giant cock-up. In his evidence, Mr Pedrotti, the spokesman for the DTI, made his frustration clear when he stated, "““the most difficult part was where people signed up to the Directive who did not understand what it actually means in practice””." I guess that if you do that it makes it quite challenging to implement. Mr Pedrotti went further: talking about individual producer responsibility (IPR) he said that it ““has proved technically impossible””. I will not go further into the shortcomings of these regulations, because the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, and my noble friend Lord Dixon-Smith have dealt with them well. Rather like my noble friend, I wish to examine the process, but from a different angle. What are we really doing in this House, passing this dog’s breakfast of legislation into law? We are obeying the diktat handed down by the Commission and the comitology process in Brussels. It is what Ministers like to call ““fulfilling our treaty obligations””. That is all too painfully true. I am sure that your Lordships do not need reminding that neither this House nor the elected Chamber has any standing whatever when it comes to dealing with EU legislation. Witness this evening’s debate: we may criticise, complain, make suggestions and pick holes in the whole process, as the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, has done tonight, but it will not make any difference at all, I am sorry to say. We must, in the immortal words of Sir Con O’Neill, "““swallow the lot, and swallow it now””." The noble Lord will not be able to call a vote on his Prayer, and I wonder whether we might all be better employed doing a crossword or a sudoku puzzle than standing here this evening. That applies to every single regulation and directive that comes out of Brussels, more than 100,000 pages of law in the past 10 years, all of which have been passed into British law without Parliament having any input whatever. Ninety per cent of those regulations and directives are nothing but an unnecessary burden on the UK economy, whether it is the horse passport directive, the water framework directive, the landfill directive, the working at height directive, the vibrations directive or—a matter on which I asked a Question the other day—the financial services action plan. They are all a burden on the British economy. They add unnecessary costs and complications to our national life. An excellent example of this were the curd cheese regulations, on which the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, was kind enough to support me about a month ago. It was manifestly unfair legislation, which bankrupted a successful small business. It would never have been railroaded through Parliament if Parliament had been responsible for introducing these sorts of regulations. But, as the noble Lord, Lord Warner, admitted, this was an EU competence; we had no choice but to swallow the lot and swallow it whole. The German Parliament has recognised that 84 per cent of its laws now emanate from Brussels. Its Leader has openly questioned whether German democratic government can be said to be functional if so much law is passed through the Parliament without it being able to do anything about it. If Germany admits to 84 per cent of its laws coming from Brussels, can we be very far behind? Let us say that 78 per cent of legislation enacted by Parliament here comes from Brussels, for which we are merely a rubber stamp. There seems to be a general passive acceptance of this frankly extraordinary situation, where a democratically elected House and its second Chamber can only wave through without amendment 70 per cent of the legislation that comes before it. I was interested to see in the report of the Merits of Statutory Instruments Committee that my noble friend Lord Jopling, who was a member of the committee, had a bit of a go at this, although from a different angle. He asked Mr Pedrotti of the DTI, who was giving evidence: "““Do you think it would be a good idea to tell the department that for future pieces of secondary legislation many people in Parliament resent orders which are laid on the brink of a recess to come into effect whilst Parliament is still in recess?””" Mr Pedrotti agreed that that was wrong; but I am afraid that I have news for my noble friend Lord Jopling: his point was purely procedural; it would not have made the slightest difference because it was EU legislation. Surely we are a grown-up country and should be capable of enacting all our legislation where it is necessary to do so. We are told that we are the oldest democracy and the fifth largest economy in the world. We should be capable of running our own show. We do not need the EU to tell us how to dispose of our electrical waste. If Japan, Switzerland, New Zealand, Australia and America can do so, why cannot we? I suggest that it is time to examine the role that Parliament plays and the way that it deals—or, rather, does not deal—with EU legislation. Parliament should have the right to amend or reject all EU legislation, or perhaps we should just stop signing the cheques.