Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 5:30 pm on 24 May 2023.

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Photo of Michael Tomlinson Michael Tomlinson The Solicitor-General 5:30, 24 May 2023

What a great pleasure it is to follow the winding-up speech from the Back Benches by my hon. Friend Danny Kruger. I agree with him entirely. This has been a good-natured debate, both detailed and robust where it needed to be. I also agree with my hon. Friend Bim Afolami that this debate is Parliament doing what it does best—as it often does, and often unseen. This has been a robust but grown-up debate, worthy of the subject matter.

I fear that I will not be able to go into detail for every Member who has spoken, but it is right and proper that I mention the speeches that have been made. I am very grateful to my right hon. and learned Friends the Members for Kenilworth and Southam (Sir Jeremy Wright) and for South Swindon (Sir Robert Buckland). There is always a risk in such debates of a sort of lawyers’ love-in, but I am grateful to my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for South Swindon for his kind remarks and for reminding us of the history of Solicitors General appearing at the Dispatch Box for other tricky bits of legislation—not to mention litigation.

I will come back to some of the detail, but in no particular order, I am grateful to my hon. Friend Andrew Jones for what he does in his Committee. He is right that, in many ways, his Committee and that of my hon. Friend Sir William Cash do similar things: detailed, painstaking and incredibly valuable work that is done unseen, upstairs in the Committee corridors. I am grateful to my Friend the Member for Harrogate and Knaresborough for his elucidation of that work.

I am grateful to my hon. Friend Gareth Bacon, who served throughout the Bill Committee. He has been here from the beginning through to the end, and I am grateful for his dedication and persistence, and for his speech. I have mentioned my hon. Friend the Member for Hitchin and Harpenden, but I will come back to him in a few moments.

I thank my hon. Friends the Members for Devizes and for Clwyd South (Simon Baynes), and my neighbour and hon. Friend Simon Hoare, who I will, of course, come back to in due course. I thank my right hon. Friend Vicky Ford, as well as my hon. Friend Brendan Clarke-Smith for his remarks as a dedicated Brexiteer. I will, as I must, come back to my right hon. Friend Mr Rees-Mogg and try to engage with the points that he made.

Let me mention some of the interventions that were made. I thought that my right hon. Friend George Eustice—a former Secretary of State—made some pertinent and detailed interventions at the right moment. I thank him for his work as Secretary of State and for the continued work and thoughts that he feeds into His Majesty’s Government.

I am also grateful to my hon. Friend Dean Russell for his interventions. When preparing for this debate, I re-read his Second Reading speech, which was rightly credited by both sides of the House as a simply magnificent speech in the circumstances. The former Secretary of State, my right hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset, quite rightly paid tribute to him at the time, and I am sure that he would echo my comments.

I also pay tribute to Stella Creasy for serving on the Bill Committee. I mentioned that she and I have served on Bill Committees before, and I know that she undertakes her work diligently. Indeed, when she mentioned Bill Committees and Whips, I wondered whether she was putting in a bid to be a shadow