Brexit Bill “constitutionally unacceptable”, Lords Committee warns

02 February 2018

The EU (Withdrawal) Bill has been described as “constitutionally unacceptable” by a cross-party group of Lords.

The Constitution Committee published its latest report on the Bill on Monday (29 January 2018), stressing that this is now the third time it has warned the government of the “fundamental flaws” within it.

In a statement, the Committee explained “the Bill risks undermining the legal certainty it seeks to provide, gives overly-broad powers to ministers, and has significant consequences for the relationship between the UK government and the devolved administrations”.

Baroness Taylor of Bolton, Chairman of the Committee, added: “We acknowledge the scale, challenge and unprecedented nature of the task of converting existing EU law into UK law, but as it stands this Bill is constitutionally unacceptable.

” In our two previous reports we highlighted the issues this raised and we are disappointed that the government has not acted on a number of our recommendations.”

The Committee’s report focused largely on the status of “retained EU law”, which it said was being treated as separate to domestic primary legislation quite unnecessarily, recommending that laws being transferred from the EU should be absorbed into the UK statute and not treated any differently from laws which began their life in Westminster.