Toby Nangle – author of this blog
The British government has identified 3,745 UK laws and binding judgements that were based on EU regulations or Directives. To address this, it has proposed the Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill – commonly known as REUL – which will give ministers the ability to rip up these laws without first requiring Parliamentary approval.
Brexiteers and Europhiles alike have huge concerns about granting Henry VIII powers to ministers – named with reference to the king’s supposed preference for legislating directly by proclamation rather than through Parliament. As such, an unlikely grouping of parliamentarians from right across the political spectrum – orchestrated by Stella Creasey MP and David Davis MP – have come together to ask questions of government around the most important of these laws and judgements.
But reviewing 3,475 pieces of legislation is a HUGE undertaking. And their bandwidth (and expertise in the field of pensions) is LIMITED.
This is where you come in.
If you are reading this you probably qualify – like me – as a proud pensions nerd. I’m asking for your view on the 39 laws and judgements that pertain to private pensions and pensions protection. Many of these could be pretty inconsequential. But some might be seriously important. The Hampshire judgement? Yeah, that sort of thing.
If we can use our collective knowledge and experience to reduce the probability that a minister ‘accidentally’ changes something by edict which then has big knock-on effects in our field this sounds like a good deed and public service. Big changes should get Parliamentary scrutiny.
Download the spreadsheet:
What can I do?!?
Look at the list (available for download here) and score them 0-10 (0=no-one would notice it go; 10=this would have big consequences). It’s fine to leave blanks.
If your feel inclined, you can even write a comment to explain the impact/ importance of scrapping the law/ judgement.
Send a copy of your (saved) completed list to financeblah123@gmail.com by Wednesday 15th February (earlier if you can) so that I can amalgamate responses and feed them back to parliamentarians.
Your identity and individual responses will not be shared unless you specifically indicate that you are happy for this to occur.
What will be done with the responses?
This is all to better-inform Parliamentarians. They have the opportunity – prior to the passage of the Bill – to ask questions to the government about their intentions related to specific pieces of legislation that might be scrapped or amended by edict. These questions can help avoid accidents.
Hi Henry – same comment as on Saturday’s post, which seems to point to the same webpage. I am concerned that this is the wrong list of legislation, and most of this will not be revoked by the REUL Bill, so whilst the effort to get industry to comment is laudable, they’ll be opining on legislation which isn’t going anywhere, and potentially missing some legislation which could be.
As I said on Saturday, section 1 of the REUL Bill makes clear – to my non-legal eyes at least – that it revokes legislation which is ether direct (i.e. directly applicable regulations) or “was made under section 2(2) of, or paragraph 1A of Schedule 2 to, the European Communities Act 1972 [the ECA]”.
So, for instance the SIP requirements in SI 2018/988 were not made under the ECA. You can tell from https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2018/988/pdfs/uksi_20180988_en.pdf – no mention of the ECA in the list of powers at the top.
Likewise 2015/742 [mistyped as 274] on appropriate advice isn’t made under the Act.. Nor is SI 2018/233 on cost, charge and investment disclosure. I haven’t checked others but I’m sceptical about a bunch of them.
Also I’m a bit surprised to see so much primary legislation referenced, such as the 2015 and 2017 Acts which I understood to have purely domestic origins – although some parts of the 2004 Acts – e.g. s249A and s249B on system of governance and internal controls – do derive from EU law.