The Retained EU Law Bill sets out the wrong way for writing and passing laws - Olivia Blake

Not only have they set an arbitrary and irresponsible deadline for sifting through thousands of pieces of EU legislation and deciding whether to retain them; they can’t even give us a straight answer on how many laws the Bill affects.

Take environmental regulations. The Government’s dashboard says there are 570 pieces of retained EU law in the Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) alone. At the last count, a decision to revoke or carry them over needs to be made on 437 of those laws – and then a new law needs to be drafted by the end of the year. That’s just one government department. As if that wasn’t already an insurmountable task, the legislation noted on the dashboard isn’t even correct. In Parliament, the Minister for Defra said there were actually around 1,100 pieces of EU retained law that needed to be dealt with. During a Public Accounts Committee session last week officials couldn’t even confirm to me whether 1,100 was the exact number.

Among those missing from the dashboard are key pieces of environmental legislation such as the Conservation of Species and Habitats regulations and the Marine Strategy Regulations. It’s a sign of how much Ministers value them that they’re so easily left off the list. The truth is, the Government doesn’t value our natural environment.

At a time when we need to strengthen the regulation protecting nature and biodiversity, this Bill does the complete opposite. I remember the debates on the Environment Act. Ministers repeatedly assured us that there would be no regression of environmental standards, but they refused to legislate to provide any guarantee.

This Bill allows a relevant national authority to revoke or replace a law provided it does not ‘increase a regulatory burden’. It explicitly rules out stronger forms of regulation. It’s a charter for deregulation and environmental chaos. But the nature emergency is not the only crisis this Bill will potentially make worse. For over a decade we’ve seen a decline in workers’ pay and conditions, culminating in the economic collapse and cost of living crisis we’re now living through. People have rightly had enough – and that’s why we’re seeing strike action.

Rather than address the root cause and improve pay and conditions in the workplace, this Bill puts basic workers’ rights in the firing line.

The TUC tells us that holiday pay, agency worker rights, data protection rights, TUPE, collective consultation on redundancies, rights for pregnant workers, maternity and parental leave, rights for fixed term and part time workers, regulations on working time and protecting night workers, and even more, are all potentially at risk. This Bill sets out exactly the wrong way we should be writing and passing laws, and it spells potential disaster for the environment and for working people. We must oppose it.

Olivia Blake is the MP for Sheffield Hallam and former Shadow Minister for Climate Change.