The British government has abandoned a promise to replace all EU-era legislation by the end of this year. The REUL Bill was introduced by Liz Truss and Jacob Rees-Mogg with the aim of removing all EU legislation from the UK by the end of 2023, after the country exits in 2020, but now Kemi Badenoch, the Secretary of Business and Commerce revealed that fewer than 600 laws will be repealed even under the bill by the end of the year. A number far from the four thousand promised.
Kemi Badenoch acknowledged that there are “legal certainty risks” in automatically removing laws by the end of 2023. So instead of looking for laws that need to be saved, the government will keep existing laws and look for those that can be removed without causing problems. .
In addition, the MEP stated, in a written statement to the European Parliament, that “over the last year, Whitehall departments have worked hard to identify EU legislation that should be preserved, reformed or repealed.”
“However, with the risks of legal uncertainty posed by the expiration of instruments created under EU law, it became clear that the program was becoming more a matter of reducing legal risk by preserving EU law than of prioritize meaningful reform. That is why today I am proposing a new approach: one that ensures that ministers and officials can focus more on REUL reform and that they do so quickly,” Kemi Badenoch was quoted as saying by Sky News.
The move is likely to anger Conservative Brexiteers who wanted to remove the UK from the influence of the EU, but it will be welcomed by critics who warned that the project was unfeasible and that important regulations would be scrapped without proper scrutiny.
Source: TSF
