My Lords, I rise to introduce my Amendment 37. I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell, for her excellent introduction to her amendments and for leading our debate on this important subject.
Amendment 37 sets out a list of the most significant environmental and animal welfare laws that the Bill currently covers. The regulations listed in the 21 proposed new paragraphs (a) to (u) demonstrate the wide range of environmental and animal welfare protection legislation that comes within the scope of the Bill. The noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell, mentioned the habitats directive, the Bathing Waters Regulations and the water framework directive in particular. We support her amendment.
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Some of the regulations included in my long list are concerned with topics that may not automatically be perceived as environmental—perhaps the regulation of pesticides would come into this—but they are nevertheless critical for the environment, as well as for the health of workers and the wider public. There are more than 1,000 items, I think—hundreds, anyway—of retained environmental and animal welfare law, in a complex web, some of which have significant case law attached to them. This amendment should therefore be seen as a non-exhaustive list of key examples of laws which are vital to maintain high standards. Many important but less well-known protections also remain at risk. A definitive list of environmentally important measures does not actually exist, as the noble Baroness said, and that is another reason why this Bill is so harmful, given the risk of important environmental protections being revoked by mistake.
My Amendment 37 would ensure that the important laws it lists do not accidentally fall at the end of this year. Let us look at some examples. First, let us look at pesticides. If existing regulations fall away at the end of the year, that could mean the reversal of all existing bans on specific pesticides. The Minister may well say that this is just not going to happen, but since we have left the EU the UK has failed to establish a transparent or robust regulatory body that can deal with pesticide approvals, as was previously done at EU level. I can see no clear plans for what will replace the EU system. If this leads to decisions being placed solely in the hands of a government Minister, we will have even weaker protections from pesticide-related harms.
Let us look now at the REACH regulations. These provide a comprehensive legal framework to regulate the use of chemicals, enabling assessment of the risks posed by different products and the implementation of control measures. This includes chemicals linked to cancer or other adverse health effects found in products from sofas to paint, cosmetics and toys.
Look at the Marine Strategy Regulations, which place obligations on the UK Government to take steps towards achieving good environmental status and to
monitor and report on this urgently needed progress. The Marine Conservation Society is deeply concerned and has said that:
“The Retained EU Law Bill poses a huge threat to marine life and environmental protections. At a time of climate, nature and ocean crises, we need to invest in our ocean and the important role it fulfils for our very survival, not remove protections and undermine its functions.”
The environmental impact assessment regulations require that those progressing development projects need to provide evidence of environmental impact to inform decision-making and to mitigate harmful effects, including harm to wildlife and people. The National Farmers’ Union has raised its concerns about the huge potential impact on farming and believes that the Government should either extend the sunset deadline or just remove the legislative cliff edge altogether. The NFU also has significant concerns about the Bill’s transfer of powers to Ministers to modify or revoke regulations, potentially reducing the amount of scrutiny that any new legislation would receive and leading to policy changes being pushed through without proper parliamentary scrutiny.
I now turn to animal welfare. Around 80% of all major animal welfare laws in the UK were agreed when the UK was a member of the EU. That gives us 44 animal welfare laws that have come across under the EU withdrawal Act. These all need to be filtered and assessed or else they will no longer apply. These regulations set standards for the accommodation and care of animals used for research, stipulate basic welfare conditions for the live transportation of animals, outlaw the importation of wild-caught birds for the pet trade, and include the battery hen ban, cosmetic testing on animals and the banning of growth promoters in farm animals. The Conservative Animal Welfare Foundation got in touch with me because it was so concerned. I hope the Minister is listening to it. It said:
“There is a real risk that significant farmed animal protection laws will be revoked on the enactment of the REUL Bill as drafted, unless they are specifically preserved by statutory instrument.”
We have heard the concerns about things being put through on SIs. It also said:
“There is serious concern that even the additional protections which go further than the EU directives would fall away, as there is no saving provision for non-EU-derived provisions in the sunset clause.”
The sunset clause, with its deadline at the end of this year, will put considerable resource pressures on Defra, as there is such a huge number of pieces of legislation to consider. Defra has, as we are aware at the moment, more than 1,781 different laws caught up in this process. There are only around seven parliamentary sitting weeks in the autumn, assuming that the Bill has Royal Assent by them. This would require Parliament to consider more than 15 pieces of legislation a day to meet that deadline. That is clearly not feasible and could result in relevant legislation being lost due to time constraints and a lack of proper scrutiny.
The noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell, referred to this as “a mammoth task”. Senior civil servants in departments that have large amounts of retained EU law, such as Defra and BEIS, say that reviewing or revoking so many laws is a Herculean labour. BEIS recently admitted that, in just two months last year, it spent £600,000 reviewing EU retained law. Is that a good use of department money?
On a number of occasions, I have raised with the Minister the fact that we keep having to redo SIs because they are incorrect. My understanding from the Minister is that one of the reasons for this—the reason that Defra has made mistakes in drafting SIs—is the sheer volume of them following Brexit. How can that give us any confidence in Defra’s resources to manage this even greater workload, given the timescales it has to work within? How on earth does the Minister expect the Government to be able to meet the deadline at the end of this year without making some dreadful mistakes or omissions?
There are also constitutional concerns about the impact of this Bill. ClientEarth, the RSPB and WWF instructed Sir Jeffrey Jowell KC from Blackstone Chambers and Jack Williams from Monckton Chambers to give an opinion on the likely constitutional, legal and practical effects of the Bill. Their findings are damning. They conclude that the Bill threatens vast swathes of environmental, workers’ and citizens’ protections, and risks undermining fundamental principles of the UK’s constitution, the rule of law and the supremacy of Parliament, with the overriding conclusion being that this Bill would, if passed in its current form, violate those significant principles.
The Government must categorically state to Parliament that the critical regulations listed in my Amendment 37 will be preserved in full and will not be sunsetted at the end of this year, and that any future reform will not be pursued through the powers of the REUL Bill because of its deregulatory intent. I look forward to the debate.