“If a company wants to align with EU regulations, it can. It does not need U.K. legislation to do so. The very idea of the legislation is to compel British businesses to comply with foreign legislation which we have no control over.”
The long-term effects of the plan could be far-reaching, with sectors ranging from tech to manufacturing sitting up to take notice.
According to lawyer George Peretz, whose practice covers trade and regulatory issues, the legislation will “undo some of the damage done by the last government in the Retained EU Law Bill,” a law that let ministers change or entirely scrub laws inherited from the EU.
“What the [Retained EU Law] bill did was to pretend that rules we’ve inherited from the EU are not EU rules and to tell U.K. courts to interpret them without reference to EU law principles of interpretation,” he explained. “The last government knew that that would lead to a lot of damaging uncertainty, but did it anyway.”
By contrast, he said, new legislation will “enable regulators, when they are regulating detailed product technical requirements, to simply say: ‘This means whatever the EU law says it means and to do that.’ Essentially, this means telling our courts to follow the European Court of Justice’s interpretation so that the rules remain the same.”
Win for importers and exporters
Crucially, the legislation could make it easier to align with EU agri-food standards — a major source of post-Brexit friction for people trying to do cross-border business.
