Hundreds of laws covering employment and environmental protections could disappear overnight if Liz Truss becomes prime minister after she promised to scrap all remaining EU regulations by the end of 2023. Despite warnings about the scale and complexity of the task, Truss launched her leadership runoff campaign by promising a “sunset” for all EU-derived laws within 15 months. Attempting to position herself as the self-styled “Brexit-delivery prime minister”, Truss’s proposed timetable is notably accelerated from that given by Boris Johnson’s government. Jacob Rees-Mogg had pushed for a similar cliff-edge deadline, seeing the demise of 2,400 pieces of legislation, but two and a half years later, in June 2026. His plan prompted a cabinet row over feasibility, given the scheduled cull of a fifth of civil service numbers, or about 90,000 jobs. Experts and union leaders said Truss’s proposals would be hugely difficult to achieve in the context of civil service cuts, with warnings it could end up becoming a “bonfire of rights”.
The plan comes as Truss and Rishi Sunak begin a blitz of policy announcements in an attempt to edge ahead in the Conservative leadership runoff. Ballot papers will start arriving on party members’ doormats in little more than a week, although they have until 2 September to vote. Truss and Sunak, who made it through an initial stage of voting by MPs, will go through a series of hustings events for members, the first taking place in Leeds on Thursday. They will also go head to head in a televised debate on Monday. Sunak announced a vaccine rollout-style scheme to reduce NHS backlogs. In a highly symbolic choice of venue, the former chancellor will launch the next stage of his campaign on Saturday with a speech in Grantham, the birthplace of Margaret Thatcher.
The foreign secretary is seen as the preferred choice of many Tory members, but Truss has previously faced scepticism from some in the party for her political journey, which she began as a Liberal Democrat before supporting remain in the 2016 Brexit referendum. Her Brexit plan would mean each remaining EU law and regulation would be “evaluated on the basis of whether it supports UK growth or boosts investment”, with those deemed to do so replaced in new UK law. Any EU laws not replaced would simply disappear at the end of 2023, just 15 months after Truss potentially takes power in September. Truss said this would mean that as PM she could “unleash the full potential of Britain post-Brexit, and accelerate plans to get EU law off our statute books so we can boost growth and make the most of our newfound freedoms outside the EU”. Sunak has previously said he will appoint a new Brexit minister to go through the remaining EU laws, with instructions for the first set of changes coming within 100 days of him becoming prime minister. After the announcement of Truss’s plans, unions warned of the potential impact on EU-derived workers’ protections. “These are all essential, not a nice-to-have,” said Frances O’Grady, the general secretary of the Trades Union Congress. “Let’s call this out for what it is – ideological posturing at the expense of ordinary working people.” Dave Penman, head of the FDA union, which represent senior civil servants, said the task had to be seen in the context of plans to get rid of one in five civil service jobs over the next three years. “If a new prime minister also wants to review thousands of pieces of legislation, then something needs to give,” he said. “Any serious government needs to demonstrate how it will match resources with commitments, otherwise this is just fantasy politics.” Another complication is the fact that diverging from EU standards in areas such as employment or environmental protections could bring retaliation from Brussels, given the terms of the post-Brexit trade deal, not least in terms of extra checks. “The more divergence there is in practice, the more checks the EU will want to impose,” said Catherine Barnard, deputy director of the UK in a Changing Europe thinktank. “The more divergence there is, the more trade friction there will be.” Barnard, who is professor of EU law at Cambridge University, said there would be concerns about a plan apparently based on the idea that “any retained EU law is bad”. “Of course, some of it has worked well,” she said, citing the Equality Act as an example. The Truss campaign said the Equality Act would not be included in their plans. Steve Peers, professor of law at the University of Essex and an expert on EU law, said another issue with a guillotine-like end to any remaining laws would be if some covered taxation. Treasury officials have called for EU-based tax laws to be exempt from such plans. While it remained unclear what would happen at the end of 2023, Peers said, there was a risk the exercise ended as “a bonfire of rights” rather than Truss’s promised bonfire of red tape. “It is a massive undertaking, and you wonder how thoroughly it will be done,” he said. “It does seem to prioritise ideology over pragmatism. “I wonder if reviewing what I think would be 2,000 laws in 15 months is the right priority during a cost of living crisis, with lots of other things going on. The UK would have voted for most of them anyway. We have already removed hundreds that don’t work since we’ve left the EU, or that the government wanted to change.” • This article was amended on 24 and 27 July 2022 to refer to the Equality Act, rather than the Equalities Act, and to make clear that under Truss’s plan each remaining EU law that does, rather than does not, “support UK growth or boost investment” will be replaced in new UK law.