REUL by ministers
REUL by ministers
What should peers do with this dangerous bill?
On Monday, the House of Lords will debate a bill that its progenitor described last month as a “tidying-up law” and of “great constitutional importance”. It cannot be both and is almost certainly neither.
Why is this bill so dangerous? And what should peers do with it? That’s the subject of my latest column for the Law Society Gazette, published in today’s online edition.
A total of 63 peers have put their names down to speak in the debate on Jacob Rees-Mogg’s Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill, better known the REUL bill. The acronym rhymes with gruel and is pronounced “rule” – not as in “rule of law” but in “rule by ministers”.
Update 1.40 pm: the House of Lords secondary legislation scrutiny committee has published a report called Losing Control?: The Implications for Parliament of the Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill. It’s unusual for this committee to publish a report so early in a bill’s passage. But it has done so because it believes the bill is “an extreme example of a skeleton bill and, as such, would lead to a significant shift of power not to parliament but to ministers”.
It says:
Amending the bill so that the shift in power between parliament and the executive is reversed will require a great deal of thought and creativity, and commitment to the overarching aim of redressing the current imbalance of power. And addressing these concerns upstream in the bill will enable us to give the house better help downstream, when the bill is passed, and the statutory instruments begin to flow.
Commenting on the bill, the barristers’ leader Nick Vineall KC said:
The Bar Council is deeply concerned about the REUL bill which, in its present form, will damage the UK’s reputation for regulatory stability, predictability, and competence on which growth-promoting investment in critical sectors of our economy depends.
The Lords scrutiny committee has rightly identified the need for the bill to be amended to address the imbalance of power.
There is a great deal to be said for taking advantage of the opportunity to review EU-derived secondary legislation and consider whether these rules should be adopted, adapted, or rejected. But there is no sense in squandering this opportunity by attempting to do so at breakneck speed, and it is anti-democratic to do so without proper parliamentary scrutiny.
The Bar Council recommends that the bill should be withdrawn or amended.
A report by the Lords delegated powers and regulatory reform committee by the Lords delegated powers and regulatory reform committee goes even further:
The bill is sufficiently lacking in substance not even to be described as “skeletal”. It is a mechanism that gives ministers the power to decide what becomes of whole swathes of UK law deriving from our membership of the EU. Ministers, not parliament, will be responsible for determining what stays, what goes and what, if anything, is to replace what goes.
The committee recommends that of the six most important provisions containing delegated powers in this Bill, five should be removed from the bill altogether. “The shortcomings of this hyper-skeletal Bill justify our approach.”