Members of the House of Lords are preparing to delay attempts to repeal thousands of European Union pieces of legislation, with some warning there is no chance the bill will be passed by the end of the year as promised.
Ministers have pledged to review around 4,000 pieces of EU legislation that stem from Britain’s membership of the bloc, and set a deadline of the end of the year to decide which to keep.
Such a move could mark one of the biggest deregulatory drives in a generation, but colleagues and experts from business groups, unions and environmental campaigns have warned that such a deadline is impractical.
Chris Fox, Liberal Democrat business spokesman in the Lords, told the Guardian: “These regulations are about electrical safety, food standards, water purity. There are thousands of these laws and the government plans to blow them up.
“We just don’t have the legislative firepower to come close to meeting the government’s deadline on this.”
Robin Hodgson, the Conservative chairman of the Lords’ Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee, which will play an important role in reviewing the bill, said: “We are quite concerned about what this will mean in terms of workload and feasibility.”
Lord Hodgson added: “We are in danger of taking a lot of EU laws back to the UK and changing them without parliamentary control, which is not what most people understand as ‘taking back control’.”
Under the legislation, which was launched in September, the government must either rewrite thousands of individual provisions into UK law or see them end by the end of the year.
Ministers have been warned that reviewing each of these rules, which include everything from the right to 20 days’ holiday to the principles behind food safety regulations, will require hundreds of civil servants.
They are also likely to face protracted negotiations in the Lords, where Labor and Lib Dem peers are preparing to roll out a catalog of amendments. However, given that the government has the power to set the timetable for voting on the legislation, ministers can still force peers to decide whether or not to support the bill by the end of the year.
Departments have the option to delay the deadline until 2026 for all regulations they oversee. The Times reported earlier this week that three departments – the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, the Department for Transport and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs – were expected to use the power.
But Downing Street insisted on Tuesday it was sticking to the year-end deadline. A spokesman said: “There are no plans to change the 2023 deadline in the retained EU legislative bill.”
However, experts warn that the country faces disaster if the government goes ahead with its current plans, given how little scrutiny they have been given. The Financial Times revealed in November that ministers had discovered a further 1,400 pieces of legislation would be affected, instead of the 2,400 originally estimated.
Tim Sharp, senior policy officer for employment rights at the Congress of Trade Unions, said: “It’s not clear to me that the government actually knows all the legislation that could potentially be affected.
“We are concerned about maternity rights, holiday pay, health and safety legislation. It’s a huge job to figure out which regulations they want to keep, which they want to change and which they want to drop.”
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