The Independent reported on Monday that the government is threatening to ditch new EU car safety rules – citing the “regulatory freedoms” granted by Brexit.
Ministers doubled down when our report was raised in the House of Lords this afternoon, with transport minister Baroness Vere telling peers: “Ministers are considering what we will do. We will make the right decision.”
The transport minister claimed the policy change was “nothing to do with Brexit”, though this cannot be the case because if Britain was still in the EU, the regulations would automatically apply.
In fact, the UK helped write the rules and played a significant part in getting the package to where it is. A key part of the regulations, “direct vision” standards for lorries – meant to stop cyclists and pedestrians being crushed in blind-spots – were first drawn up by Transport for London and are a British export to Europe, rather than the other way around.
Ministers have generally said they are on a drive to cut regulations, but some readers have suggested that dropping the rules will have little practical effect. Will EU car makers, or British-based carmakers hoping to export to the EU, really design their cars differently for the UK?
It seems unlikely. But this is actually a clue as to why dropping the rules does matter. To understand why the government wants to do this, we must remember why Brexiteers generally argued for regulatory “freedom” from EU standards in the first place.
For many Thatcherite Tories, cutting regulations is an end in itself, but this is not a popular argument to make in public. Instead, the stated justification for stripping out EU rules has, since the referendum, been that it will help the UK sign trade deals with other countries.
So will this change affect cars made with the EU market in mind? No, the UK is in that respect a rule-taker, and Brussels will set the standard no matter what, as in so many other areas.
But not all cars are made in the EU, or for the EU market. If, to pick a country at random, American cars were bigger and more dangerous and did not meet the standards, they could not be imported to Britain under the tougher regime.
Requiring high product standards is what economists call a “non-tariff barrier” to trade. We’re more familiar with this argument on food: the UK does not want to be locked into EU standards on agricultural products, because it would make it harder to sign trade deals with other countries that want to export their food to Britain. Say, to pick a country at random, the US.
The thinking in government may be the same with cars: impose EU standards, and trade deals get just that little bit tricker.
