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European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

I thought for a minute, Mrs Laing, that you were going to read out all the amendments grouped today, which might have taken up some considerable time.

Today’s debate is about taking back control—about Parliament and the powers of the House of Commons to hold the Executive to account and to overrule it if we wish to do so. New clause 18 essentially says that it is time for the Government to be honest about the extensive and wide-ranging powers they want to take away from Parliament, which essentially is what the Bill proposes to do. Some might say that my new clause does not go far enough, that it is a little tepid: it simply says that the Government ought to commission a proper independent report into the constitutional ramifications and implications of their proposal. In my view, they have not thought the process through properly. They denied the House a pre-legislative scrutiny process for the Bill and, importantly, ignored an extremely detailed and thoughtful report and set of recommendations from the House of Lords Constitution Committee, which went into painstaking detail to review Ministers’ proposals, particularly those in clause 7. It also did so with respect to clause 9—we will not be voting on aspects of clause 9 today, but certain amendments to it have been grouped for discussion.

I accept that if we leave the EU, the acquis—the body of existing EU law—will need to be converted into UK law. We were told, of course, that the Bill was supposed to be a simple “copy and paste” exercise that merely transposed those EU rules under which we have lived for the past 30 or 40 years into UK law. Despite the early recommendations from the House of Lords Constitution Committee, made long before publication of the Bill, back in March, Ministers have made a real error in failing to distinguish between the technical and necessary task of transposing existing laws from EU to UK statute and the wider powers that Ministers are taking potentially to make substantive policy changes, by order, in areas that currently fall within EU competence. In other words, they have not sought to curtail the order-making powers simply to focus on that transposition exercise. The order-making powers go far wider into a whole array of policy making areas.