My Lords, I had not intended to intervene at all—it has been a fascinating debate, and excellent amendments have been put down—but I am just curious. As I have mentioned before, a number of us were in the European Parliament for many years. We left the European Union—Brexit occurred—in 2016. We are seven years on from that. The Civil Service knew after the vote that we were going to leave the European Union. Clearly, this was massively complex, as we had had 50 years of regulations and directives, but here we are in 2023.
The points that noble Lords have raised on particular issues are extremely important, and I fully support their concerns. However, the way I read it, I would have thought, going back at least four or five years, that civil servants in these vast government departments would have been sitting down at that time, without being told, and looking at the legislation that was pertinent in their departments, and looking at what would be okay or what we intended to keep hold of, which would not be a priority or need to be changed. They would then have been able to see what might be a priority or concern and flag up that legislation to the Ministers concerned. I do not know whether anything like that has happened. I am listening to these debates, and it seems not to have happened at all, because we are now in 2023 and discussing, as we say, critical legislation which we are concerned about. It appears that this is being highlighted only because we are talking about the Bill.
I say to my noble friend: I am concerned about whether this will be carried through efficiently and whether the right amount of scrutiny will take place. We are in an extremely concerning situation. We should think of the number of hours that your Lordships debated this issue in this House—I was not here; I was actually in Brussels—and the fact that people knew about it. It is not a state secret, yet we still do not know which pieces of legislation we really need to keep or not. That was the work of the civil servants, and perhaps the lawyers too, in those departments, but we are in this situation now.
I hope my noble friend the Minister can reassure us about the point raised in the amendment about scrutiny now and how transparency regarding this legislation will evolve in future. There will be some that we will retain. I dealt with aviation and aerospace, and a lot of the legislation I dealt with—which was primary—had an international dimension. We complied with the international treaties, and that sort of legislation, and that in areas such as maritime, would not need to be changed. However, there are others which need to be brought into line with the situation the UK is now in, where Parliament is sovereign in determining what we must do. We in this House and the other place are responsible for making sure that any changes or updates that are made, or any sunset clauses that are brought in, are relevant, because the whole job now is to work for the benefit of the citizens of this country and for businesses—for everyone—and to make sure that this is done as efficiently as possible.
As I say, I had not intended to say very much, but this is important. All departments and everyone working in them—not just the Ministers—need to get behind
all this and get moving. The people of the United Kingdom are in a very difficult position: we are post Covid, there is Ukraine, we have great challenges, and we need everything done as efficiently as possible.
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