Brexit: UK drops plan for EU-era laws to expire

The government has abandoned its proposal to have tens of thousands of legislation from the EU expire on their own at year end.

Unless they were specifically preserved or replaced, laws transferred to the UK after Brexit would be destroyed under the plan, known as a post-Brexit bonfire.

The bill’s opponents have expressed fear that it would cause significant laws to disappear accidentally.

The climb down, though, will infuriate Conservative MPs and House of Lords supporters of Brexit.

The administration will replace the cut-off point with a list of 600 rules by the end of the year, according to Business Secretary Kemi Badenoch.

When the Retained EU Law Bill came to Parliament the following week, she said that the modification would be made through an amendment.

A Tory Brexiteer who presented the measure while in office, Jacob Rees-Mogg dubbed it a “admittance of administrative failure.”

He continued that it demonstrated “Whitehall’s inability to do the necessary work and a minister’s inability to push this through their own departments.”

He said that the decision to eliminate the deadline marked the victory of “the blob,” a nickname some Tory MPs used to refer to the Whitehall establishment.

To minimize the impact on businesses when the UK had formally left EU in 2020, UK incorporated thousands of EU legislation into UK law; a continuing assessment by civil servants has found 4,800.

It has been examining this body of law since September 2021 to find ways to offer British businesses an advantage over European rivals.

Most of these regulations would have expired on December 31 unless ministers replaced them or elected to keep them, according to the Retained EU Law Bill, which was tabled into Parliament during Liz Truss’s tenure as premier.

However, considering the enormous workload of evaluating the law, opposition parties, labour unions, and advocacy organizations questioned whether the timetable was practical.

Business Secretary Kemi Badenoch said the deadline had given firms “legal uncertainty” in a statement on Wednesday.

She said the administration was still dedicated to “lightening the regulatory burden on businesses” despite having already repealed, modified, or replaced about 1,000 pieces of legislation from the EU.

She did, however, warn that “meaningful reform” was hampered by the “growing volume” of EU legislation discovered during the ongoing assessment.

“Getting rid of EU law in the UK should be about more than a race to a deadline,” she wrote in the media.

On the other hand, Labour blasted the action as a “humiliating U-turn” and charged that ministers were attempting to “rescue this sinking ship of a bill.”

According to Jenny Chapman, Labour’s shadow cabinet office minister, “the Tories have conceded that this widely unpopular bill will harm the economy after wasting months of parliamentary time.”

The Conservatives “dug themselves into a hole” with the bill, according to Liberal Democrat peer Lord Fox, who continued, “While they may have stopped digging, they’re still in the hole.”

Although MPs approved the law in January, it was anticipated that it would face fierce opposition when the House of Lords further examines it.

The law was supposed to be debated by peers last month, but according to reports, the government delayed it until after last week’s local elections in England.

Peers are still anticipated to oppose the government’s new powers to change or replace EU regulations through secondary legislation, a quick process that receives less scrutiny in Parliament.

MPs from the opposition and several Conservatives claim that this would deny Parliament any real influence over the changes made.

Approximately 500 EU legislation governing financial services had been exempted from the deadline because a separate bill is expected to remove them as it moves through the Commons. The same is anticipated for EU regulations that impact customs and VAT.

However, regarding environmental regulation, the legislative legacy of the EU era is disproportionately significant.

Campaign organizations have warned about losing legal rights and protections in areas such as water quality, air pollution limits, and wildlife protections.

The decision to eliminate the deadline may be pragmatic. Still, it is sure to displease Conservative Party members on the right and expose Prime Minister Rishi Sunak to accusations that he is failing to deliver the benefits of Brexit that he promised.

Within 100 days of gaining government, Mr Sunak had pledged to publish a list of the EU regulations that would be kept or repealed, as he had done during his unsuccessful leadership campaign last summer.

But after gaining office in October and being selected by Conservative MPs to succeed Liz Truss as prime minister, he broke his promise.