My Lords, I will pick up where I left off. I was about to note that my six amendments in this group have a substantive purpose and, I guess, a probing, clarificatory purpose. I will begin with the substantive. My amendments are separate, but they all stem from the same broad thought, and they are designed to deal with the fact that the powers in the Bill give Ministers the ability to make regulations for products in the UK, or GB, in a range of areas defined by simple reference to existing EU laws; and, beyond that, to provide for those regulations to evolve dynamically —that is, when the EU changes its law, that change feeds through into our regulations.
Personally, I am not and have never been a purist in this area. I do not think it is necessary for GB to have its own defined sets of rules on every single thing, with the UKCA designation that covers everything—unless, of course, we were to drop the current approach to regulation entirely, which was, after all, developed in the last few decades under an EU law framework, and revert to a more traditional, common-law, objectives-based framework. That is possibly a step too far for the time being. Given that, it makes sense to look at other standards and whether they work for us. In practice, that is what happens now, in a limited way. For example, we recognise the CE marking for the EU while sometimes having the UKCA marking or our own rules in parallel, but there are two problems with this.
First, I do not see why that possibility of recognising other standards should be limited to EU law only. Of course, I do not really agree with the thrust of Amendment 17 in this group, which we are about to discuss, which would require alignment with EU law. We may want to use other standards from other territories with less prescriptive regulatory frameworks, and we may want to allow goods with different standards from more than one place to compete on our market to make the country open to the best standards globally. That is the first problem the Bill presents.
Secondly, I do not really think it is right for us in this Parliament to subcontract our lawmaking to another body. It must be clear what the law of this country is at any given moment; it must be properly on our books. It is not good enough to say to the question “What is the law on product X?” that the answer is whatever EU regulation number whatever says it is today. My amendments are designed to deal with these points, and I take them in logical, not numerical, order.
Amendment 4 deletes Clause 1(2). I propose this really to explore why it is necessary, in a Bill specifically on product regulation, to include the ability to import large areas of EU environmental law. I can see that it might be convenient, but the same could be said of lots of other areas too. If there is a more specific and persuasive explanation, I would be interested to hear it from the Minister.
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Amendment 15 is a core amendment. It would drop the definition of “relevant EU law” from the Bill and replace it with a broader definition, one that I have called “relevant foreign law”. This enables what I described just now: it allows us to use regulations that allow the best available sets of rules from a range of countries with high regulatory standards, not just from the European Union.
Amendments 4 and 36 insert that definition at the relevant places in the Bill, Clauses 1(2) and 2(7). Amendment 42 would require the Government to explain, if they nevertheless planned to base a UK standard on the rules of just one other jurisdiction, why they had chosen to do so and why it was not possible to have regulatory competition, or for high-standard goods of more than one country to circulate on the UK market.
Finally, Amendment 37 would prevent dynamic importation of other laws. It would make clear that references to other laws must be to the law as it applies in that foreign country or jurisdiction on a specific date. If the EU or whoever changes their laws, we in this legislature must make a conscious decision to follow that or not. It is important to think that the default is that we set our rules, not that we follow others automatically and without consideration.
Those are the substantive points for the Bill. I will just cover a couple of more probing clarificatory aspects to what I propose. There are two main areas. I have had exchanges with the Minister on both, but we have not got to the bottom of either. I will explain them briefly and look forward to considering the Minister’s answer.
The first of those is on the interaction of the Windsor Framework in Northern Ireland and the United Kingdom Internal Market Act. Our current intra-UK trading arrangements are governed inter alia by the mutual recognition principle in that Act. I quote from Section 2 of that Act, which states that goods that
“have been produced in, or imported into, one part of the United Kingdom … and … can be sold there without contravening any relevant requirements that would apply to their sale, … should be able to be sold in any other part of the United Kingdom, free from any relevant requirements that would otherwise apply to the sale”.
This provision provides that, since EU regulated goods may legally be sold in Northern Ireland already and, therefore, under the internal market Act may be sold legally anywhere else in the UK already. I still do not entirely understand. Perhaps the Minister can explain why it is at all necessary to have these further provisions to recognise EU standards, given that the relevant legal basis already seems to exist, arguably in a wider way than envisaged in the Bill.
My second area of concern relates to the way in which the Government intend to use Clause 2(7) in particular, as well as Clause 1(2) if it survives in practice. It is best understood if we take an example. Suppose that we and the EU are operating on the basis of a common standard on, say, plastic bottle tops. The EU then changes its regulations to require those tethered bottle tops that we all dislike. When and if this Bill is enforced, the Government would have to decide whether to make that new EU standard the law in the UK, too, under Clause 2(7), and perhaps make a linkage to the EU regulation. If the Government do that, is it their intention that that new EU standard would, if you like, squeeze out the old UK standard or that the two standards would run in parallel with each other? Or would it be a case-by-case judgment?
It is an important point and it has implications. If it is the latter, whereby the two standards run in parallel, I would be happy, but it is difficult to see why there would be any gains in reduced trade friction, which is, after all, one of the arguments used to justify the Bill. Since the EU will be well aware that non-EU standard bottles would be circulating in the UK and would still need to subject all such UK exports to some sort of process, one does not gain on the trade side.
If it is the former, and there is only one standard and it is the EU standard, we are reintroducing the situation that applied when we were an EU member. All companies, whether they export to the EU or not, would have to take on the burdens of EU law. It would actually be worse in some ways because we would not get the benefits of friction-free trade either. That would be a very significant and problematic step.
It would be helpful to understand from the Minister what is really meant by the power in Clause 2(7). Is it a power that means that the EU legislation squeezes out UK laws, or can they run in parallel, or does it depend on a case-by-case basis? Are references to EU law exclusionary and exclusive, or supplementary and non-exclusive to existing standards? I beg to move.