The UK is party to many international legal arrangements, many of which do not enjoy a great deal of scrutiny in this House. Having heard several Members raise points about scrutiny in respect of EU law, I think it is important for us to acknowledge that there are a number of Members here with direct experience of that scrutiny process. We have heard about the Council of Ministers, in which UK Ministers signed EU law into the laws of all the member states. We have heard from former Members of the European Parliament, where the directly elected representatives scrutinise that law during the law-making process. I can speak as a former member of the Committee of the Regions, where the indirectly elected representatives of the United Kingdom authorities, including the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Government, scrutinised those laws in that law-making process.
I can also speak as having chaired one of the employer organisations in the social dialogue, which were part of the cross-industrial sector process of working up the detail of what those laws and regulations should contain. So while it is absolutely the case that that law, once it was signed into the law of the United Kingdom by our
Ministers, did not enjoy further scrutiny here, the UK was well known as a leader in designing good regulation across the European Union. I recall my experiences in the education sector, where in neighbouring conference rooms organisations such as chemical engineers, veterinarians, pharmacists, clinicians and representatives of the aviation sector were having similar discussions seeking to design better law and regulation, which sits in this retained body of EU law today as part of Margaret Thatcher’s single market.
A weakness of that process that we must acknowledge is that it was easy for big industrial organisations and corporates to engage with, but in a country where around 70% of our workforce are in enterprises with fewer than five employees, it was challenging for those types of organisations to have a voice. They will not have had the input that the UK industrial sector had in the designing of these regulations. This should remind us of the importance of our scrutinising the detail of what this Bill means when it comes to deciding what pieces of law we might wish to keep and which we might not. Ministers and Members across the House have acknowledged this.
For example, it is easy to dismiss the value of regulations around batteries, but those pieces of regulation were designed to ensure that the ambition set out in this House by British Governments that all batteries would be recycled was achieved. We will wish to ensure that if we continue to support that ambition, which we clearly do, we will have an equivalent form of UK regulation, appropriate for our market, that will ensure that that outcome can be achieved, as was the intention of those European Union rules.
This seems to be a good moment to take stock of what is in this wide body of legislation. I welcome the fact that our former Prime Minister but one made a number of clear public statements that the Government’s ambition would be to go beyond what was set out in the EU legislation, especially in respect of environmental protections and animal welfare, and that it was the aspiration of the United Kingdom, just as we encouraged higher standards in the EU when we were a member of it, that we would use the freedom from those standards to seek to have still have higher welfare standards and higher levels of environment protections than those that previously legally applied. I hope we are going to hear that this is not simply a matter of maintaining a minimum, or indeed of going back, and that it is going to be a considered process of looking at where we can go beyond what we have, because that is good for our economy, good for our environment and good for our people.
It is positive that several Members have recognised that there are opportunities to make this legislation better. We know that the European Union, much criticised sometimes for the slowness of its law making, would have been unlikely to be able to implement changes to the financial market legislation, for example. I have to acknowledge, having been involved in some of the EU discussions about online safety, that the UK’s Online Safety Bill goes well beyond what was envisaged as part of the EU law-making process. It sets a higher standard for online protection in the United Kingdom than was likely to have been achievable across that greater body of member states. There are opportunities for us to do things better as a result of these changes.
That said, like my right hon. Friend the Member for Chipping Barnet (Theresa Villiers), I welcome the fact that there is scope within this Bill, as we go through the process of looking line by line at what the implications of those legal changes would be, to extend the life of those protections, indefinitely if necessary. I suspect the right hon. Member for Leeds Central (Hilary Benn) is correct that there will be a number of areas where we will decide that the regulations work just fine as they are, thank you very much, and we will consider them to be implemented at UK level. However, we will undoubtedly wish to change or reshape some elements in the light of our UK circumstances.
I have had a clear message from constituents, especially those with an interest in the environment and animal welfare. They recognise that some of those pieces of EU legislation have been cumbersome and that they have not always been as helpful, as sharp and as enforceable as we would like to see when it comes to things such as habitat protection; but they note that we have had the highest level of wildlife loss of any nation in the G7. There are reasons for that, and it happened under EU regulation, so there is a need to ensure that within this context of “taking back control”, the promise of higher and better standards and more flexible legislation that was made to the British people is met in full.
I urge colleagues on the Government Benches to keep that at the forefront of their minds. This Bill is not about deregulation; it is about showing that we in the United Kingdom will have the ambition to have the highest possible standards and the best possible regulation as a country outside the European Union.
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