The Department for Business and Trade (formerly the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS)) has added over 1,000 additional pieces of retained EU law (REUL) to its Retained EU law dashboard. The extra legislation was identified in the period from July 2022 to January 2023 as part of an ongoing exercise to identify REUL that did not have a clear departmental owner. The updated figures show an increase in the amount of REUL falling under the Treasury’s remit, from 374 to 452 pieces of legislation. So far, the dashboard records that the UK government has dealt with just over 10% of this legislation by amending, repealing or otherwise replacing it.
It remains to be seen whether the government will be able not only to identify all REUL, but also review and take a decision on each piece of legislation, before the 31 December 2023 deadline (the ‘sunset clause’) set out in the Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill. Although, as Baroness Chapman noted in the House of Lords: ‘The Bill contains no requirement for public consultation or impact assessments of proposed changes. Any parliamentarian who wishes to scrutinise or object to future legislation replacing retained law will be taking a gamble because, unless that legislation is passed in time, the current law in its entirety will simply fall away. The sunset clause puts a gun to Parliament’s head.’
The Department for Business and Trade (formerly the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS)) has added over 1,000 additional pieces of retained EU law (REUL) to its Retained EU law dashboard. The extra legislation was identified in the period from July 2022 to January 2023 as part of an ongoing exercise to identify REUL that did not have a clear departmental owner. The updated figures show an increase in the amount of REUL falling under the Treasury’s remit, from 374 to 452 pieces of legislation. So far, the dashboard records that the UK government has dealt with just over 10% of this legislation by amending, repealing or otherwise replacing it.
It remains to be seen whether the government will be able not only to identify all REUL, but also review and take a decision on each piece of legislation, before the 31 December 2023 deadline (the ‘sunset clause’) set out in the Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill. Although, as Baroness Chapman noted in the House of Lords: ‘The Bill contains no requirement for public consultation or impact assessments of proposed changes. Any parliamentarian who wishes to scrutinise or object to future legislation replacing retained law will be taking a gamble because, unless that legislation is passed in time, the current law in its entirety will simply fall away. The sunset clause puts a gun to Parliament’s head.’
