The news that the government has admitted it will fail to meet its own target of EU laws to be ditched by the end of this year comes as no surprise. Business secretary Kemi Badenoch is said to have told Eurosceptics on Monday that it was impossible to remove all the rulings despite Rishi Sunak’s pledge in August last year to abolish more than 4,000 of them. It seems just a fraction are going to be axed or amended by then.
The Telegraph reported:
"However, in a briefing to senior Tory Eurosceptic MPs on Monday, Kemi Badenoch, the Trade Secretary, said that only 20 percent of those laws - just 800 - were likely to be scrapped by Dec 31."
The article goes on:
"The hope now is that the remaining EU laws might be removed over time, however, that risks a future Labour government reversing the plans.
"Conservative MPs told The Telegraph they were furious at the apparent hollowing out of the legislation which they see as a surrender to civil servants who they see as being unwilling to strip away EU red tape.
"Mrs. Badenoch is understood to have drawn up a list of the 800 EU laws she wants to drop.
"One Tory MP said: 'She wants to persuade Rishi to reverse and keep the vast bulk of EU law. This blows her leadership chances’
"The meeting with the ERG’s grandees on Monday soon descended into acrimony. One MP told the Telegraph: 'It was a really bad meeting.'
"A second Conservative MP pinned the blame on Mrs Badenoch personally, saying: 'You need a tough minister but she is a lame minister who is having rings run around her by ‘Remainer’ officials. We needed a tough minister. Kemi is proving to be a huge disappointment.”
She reportedly told the MPs that civil servants had said it was impossible to remove the 4,000 EU laws, the vast bulk of which sit in the environment department. Only extremely deluded Brexiteers like Longworth, Gardiner, Campbell-Bannerman, et al thought it was still possible and they are already crying betrayal. It’s hard to know what’s going on in their heads.
Scrapping 4,000 laws in six months is ridiculous anyway but industry is vehemently opposed to it and I’m not sure it would be an election winner among ordinary voters to announce parental leave or key employment protections are going to be binned. It’s madness.
The 800 figure looks achievable since 671 have already been repealed, replaced or amended, mostly irrelevant ones that never affected Britain anyway, or ones that have expired or that simply set up committees and which nobody will miss. Here’s a sample:
So, just another 130 or so and that's it. The bonfire of EU rules turns out to be a damp squib. Firemen are damping down the bit that caught fire just as Badenoch and Sunak are damping ERG expectations down.
On the REUL Bill ‘dashboard,’ I can see the 31 EU regulations that have been ‘replaced’ and won’t be reviewed again by the REUL Bill.
I had a quick look at one of these at random and picked the old EU 1015/2010 on eco-design requirements for household washing machines. This has been replaced by The Ecodesign for Energy-Related Products and Energy Information Regulations 2021/745, which bundles about a dozen or more eco-design regulations into one document. Annex 6 sets out our very own standards for washing machines, the vast majority of which are imported - or used to be.
I looked at both versions to see if they were the same or similar. I should say here, I’ve never designed a washing machine so can’t comment on how good (clear, comprehensive, appropriate, etc) the two are but they're certainly different.
The EU version (Annex 1) is 488 words long while ours (Annex 6) is 2,721, about five times as many. Both deal with just ordinary domestic washing machines. The idea of scrapping EU rules was apparently to reduce the regulatory 'burden' but as far as I can see it has only increased it, and by a considerable amount.
I honestly think the whole exercise is going to end in utter chaos. We will have more onerous and probably unnecessarily different regulations in some areas and none at all in others.
The UKCA marking doesn't become mandatory until the end of 2024 - to give manufacturers time to 'adjust' but I am quite sure this will either have to be relaxed, with the UK still recognising the old CE marking, or scrapped altogether. That, or a lot of EU manufacturers will just stop supplying the UK market with some products, seriously limiting consumer choice.
In UK Regulations 2021/745, Schedule 29 gives a list of all the 'revoked' EU rules which includes electric motors, televisions, washer-dryers, pumps, fridges, and electronic displays. If they too are markedly different you can expect to see a lot fewer EU products in Britain.
