My Lords, perhaps I will be more positive about these regulations and make the Minister feel better. I very much welcome the tone of the Explanatory Memorandum and its emphasis on the benefits of energy efficiency, which is clearly one of the least costly and most effective ways to reduce our carbon footprint. In fact, energy efficiency is one of the reasons why although energy prices have gone up, energy bills for households have gone down. This time, the irony is on not the Government but the broader British media because the famous Brussels-regulations-related vacuum cleaner efficiency scandal foisted on British citizens by the tabloids will remain. I welcome those product standards coming across.
My question are quite practical. I think that the Minister went through this, but who will police or register this matter and what will the additional cost of that be? Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, who will hold the register? Is the IT for that complete? How will what is on the European Union register get on to the UK register? That covers a series of intellectual
property rights issues. We came across this with the REACH chemicals database: you cannot just copy this information across. How can we have a robust system that works in this regard? Without that, this scheme cannot work.
I understand the Minister’s point about continuing labels for a while but, more importantly, will it be legal to sell all the electric appliances covered by this SI in our home market from the point of our departure? I want to understand whether the preparation in those technical areas is right and things will work. Legislation is great but if it cannot work, even passing these regulations is not a lot of use.