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Government announces major Brexit climbdown on scrapping EU laws

The government has announced a major climbdown over its Brexit plans to remove EU laws from British statue books by the end of the year.

The EU Retained Law Bill currently going through parliament was due to automatically delete any European legislation at the end of 2023 – unless it was explicitly chosen to be saved.

But ministers on Wednesday quietly confirmed that they were gutting the bill’s “sunset clause” and that the mass deletion would not go ahead as planned.

Now, only EU laws specifically chosen to be repealed will be scrapped – with the rest automatically becoming UK law at the end of the year.

The change, confirmed by business secretary Kemi Badenoch in a written ministerial statement, turns the logic of the bill on its head and is likely to upset hardcore Brexiteers, who were keen to expunge the influence of Brussels from the statue books.

Civil servants had been racing against time to go through laws and decide whether they needed saving – and critics had warned that the rushed process could see important rules accidentally deleted.

Ms Badenoch said in a written statement published on Wednesday afternoon that said she was proposing “a new approach” which would “replace the current sunset in the Bill with a list of the retained EU laws that we intend to revoke under the Bill at the end of 2023”.

“This provides certainty for business by making it clear which regulations will be removed from our statue book, instead of highlighting only the [EU law] that would be saved,” she said.

“We will retain the vitally important powers in the Bill that allow us to continue to amend EU laws, so more complex regulation can still be revoked or reformed after proper assessment and consultation.”

Ms Badenoch says the number of laws intended to be revoked by ministers at the end of 2023 is around 600.

Officials confirmed on Wednesday that they were planning to consult on changes to the EU’s working time directive, including removing the requirement for companies to keep working time records.

Commenting on the governemnt’s EU retained law bill U-turn, Jonathan Reynolds, Labour’s shadow business secretary, said his party had “long maintained this is a disastrous piece of legislation dreamt up by an out of touch government with no thought for how it would impact real people and real businesses”.

He described the original plan as “a chaotic Conservative cliff edge that would have plunged business into more uncertainty at the worst possible time”.

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Source: UK Politics - www.independent.co.uk


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