August sees the traditional pause in the Parliamentary calendar, and a chance in recent years to pause for breath between momentous political events. It is also an opportunity to look ahead to what may take place in the busy Parliamentary session taking us to the end of the year.
As with last year, and probably next year, Brexit will dominate the autumn. Specifically, we’ll see the Government start to pilot its EU (Withdrawal) Bill through a House of Commons in which it has a tiny majority and a House of Lords where it does not have a majority at all.
You may know this EU (Withdrawal) Bill by its previous name, the Great Repeal Bill. Through re-christened, the intention of the law is the same: to repeal the 1972 Act of Parliament that took the UK into the EU – and more ambitiously to transfer EU law into UK law.
This must be done to make sure that when the UK leaves then forty years of European law does not suddenly fall away; few of us would want to see a sudden disappearance of all recent food safety law, even if we may want to do away with one or two aspects of it.
For the most part, this transfer should be smooth enough. Many pieces of legislation can simply be copied and pasted. British politicians (acting on the instructions of the British public) can then change EU law at their leisure in the future. In some cases, however, things get trickier. When the text of an EU law refers to an EU institution – in a supervisory role, say, or to give specific advice – then some changes are obviously going to have to be made; British law cannot refer to an institution that has no legal authority in the UK. These tweaks will have to be made using delegated legislation, which is quicker than primary legislation – mainly because the level of scrutiny is much lower.
This has raised concerns amongst some; what if the Government seizes the chance to unpick laws around, say, employment rights? Realistically the Government won’t do this as the political storm may well fatally damage its small Commons majority. But there are still difficulties ahead.
The Nutrition and Health Claims Regulation is an example of one law that requires change: it refers to both the European Food Safety Agency and the European Commission. The question for British businesses is what replaces these bodies? Will their UK replacements get sufficient resources to deal with the time-consuming and tricky task of approving claims? And how comfortable should the food industry be about a significant change to an important law that, for better or for worse, will be done with minimal Parliamentary scrutiny?
Not easy questions to answer: let us hope that politicians and civil servants have spent their summer breaks thinking about the tricky issues ahead.
You can learn more about how Brexit will affect the food sector, as well as many other industries, at The Whitehouse Consultancy’s dedicated Brexit website: www.whitehouseconsulting.co.uk/project_brexit
