Brexit ‘sabotage’ warning as product safety proposals clear Commons

MPs voted 264 to 99, majority 165, to approve at third reading the Product Regulation and Metrology Bill, which provides for new government powers to regulate the marketing and use of goods in the UK post-Brexit.

But TUV leader Jim Allister was among those MPs to raise concerns about specific references in the Bill to “EU law” and questioned whether this could allow ministers to act against the 2016 referendum result.

Critics of the legislation fear the Bill would result in UK regulations having to automatically follow changes in European Union law and give ministers “inappropriately wide” powers to rewrite regulations.

Mr Allister, the MP for North Antrim, told the Commons: “There are aspects of this Bill which I think are democratically dangerous.

“Because this Bill gifts to government unbridled capacity to make regulations, with virtually no oversight from this elected House, on matters which touch not just upon the sanctity of our product production, but the sovereignty of this nation.

“This Bill, with little attempt at subtlety, is a vehicle which enables a Government, if so minded – and this one, I fear, might be – to sabotage Brexit in many ways.

“I stand to be corrected, but I don’t think a single member of this Government voted for Brexit, and yet that is the settled and declared will of the people, greatest number of people who ever participated in a democratic vote in this nation.

“Yet in the Bill, we have the capacity, particularly through clause 2(7), to dynamically align all our regulations with those of the EU, and to do that without recourse to this House, at the whim of the executive. Whatever the subject matter, that surely is a most unhealthy situation.”

Shadow business minister Dame Harriett Baldwin also said: “As an independent nation, the UK we believe should set its own product regulations to foster innovation, support domestic industry, and not automatically align with EU rules which we no longer have any influence or help to shape.”

Responding, business minister Justin Madders told the Commons: “The powers in this Bill give the UK the flexibility to manage its own product regulatory framework.

“Part of this is of course making sure that the UK can respond to relevant developments in EU law, and this does not mean that the UK is beholden to EU changes, and all regulations will be subject to Parliament oversight.”

He added that “the reason why the Bill explicitly references the EU rather than other jurisdictions is because most of our product regulation is of course inherited from EU law”.