Defend Nature

Whilst a member of the EU, the UK relied on some legislation created by the EU and to minimise disruption after Brexit, the UK converted EU law to domestic law and called it “retained EU law” – or REUL for short.  

REUL meant that pre-Brexit laws stayed in place to avoid gaps in the law on important areas and almost three years later, a lot of REUL remains in place – over 2,400 pieces of legislation. The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) has the most REUL of any government department with over 570 retained EU laws currently still in place.  

However, the UK Government says there “there will no longer be a place for EU law concepts in our statute book”. This led the Government to put forward the Retained EU Law Bill to remove and replace the remaining REUL. 

You can take a look at which laws are impacted through the Government’s REUL Dashboard. 

The Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill, also known as the ‘Brexit Freedoms Bill’ is proposed legislation that includes the automatic removal of EU derived laws by end of 2023 unless ministers take action to preserve or replace them beforehand.  

This has nothing to do with whether the laws are bad or ineffective, it is simply about whether they are EU derived.  

This review will result in a decision of whether to keep, modify, or get rid of hundreds of environmental laws which could greatly affect our wildlife. The Bill requires the civil service and Ministers in Westminster to carry out this substantial review by the 31st of December 2023 – a near-impossible task in the timeframe. 

In summary, the Retained EU Law Bill (Revocation and Reform) would: 

• Sunset the majority of retained EU law (REUL) so that it expires at the end of 2023. 

• Provide an extension mechanism up to 23 June 2026 for more complicated reforms but there are no details of which legislation this would refer to. 

• Grant Ministers powers to reverse the order of supremacy in law, so that domestic law is reinstated as “the highest form of law on the UK statute book”. 

• Grant UK Ministers powers to amend, repeal and replace REUL and assimilated law more easily, in most cases reducing parliamentary scrutiny. 

• Give Government the power to remove any secondary retained EU law without replacing it, or to replace it it with something new that achieves similar objectives. 

• Provide domestic courts with discretion to depart from REUL case law. 

There are currently 570 environmental laws derived from EU directives that make up the bedrock of environmental regulations in the UK, covering wildlife protection, sewage pollution, water quality, protection of our seas, and clean air.   

Whilst in theory the REUL Bill allows some elements of EU law to be preserved, in practice this is a colossal task especially for DEFRA which has the largest number of laws to review. With limited time to review all Retained Laws by the end of 2023, Defra will only have about 4 working hours to review each one of the 570 laws before they expire.

And even if some of these are chosen to be preserved, the job of assimilating these into domestic law having had the special EU law features removed, is highly unlikely to be done in this timeframe. It is inevitable there will be a gap at best, and at worst our strongest environmental laws will be consigned to history.   

On top of all that, it will create extended uncertainty for businesses, who need a stable regulatory framework to invest in confidence to grow the economy as new case law would need to be developed. 

A constructive debate about how we reform, strengthen and improve the delivery of vital protections is needed. But the Retained EU Law Bill isn’t the way to do that. It’s a self-imposed deadline which will unnecessarily distract the government from our ambitions to halt nature’s decline by 2030. 

The Habitat Regulations, which will be impacted by the REUL Bill, have protected areas for wildlife for more than 30 years. The UK was one of the key architects in developing these laws which have been strengthened and improved over decades of case law and have delivered significant improvements for nature in that time.    

The regulations have helped to steer development away from our most important wildlife habitats and protect some of our most vulnerable species. They provide clarity and certainty for landowners and business and, after three decades, are generally well understood.  

While the Habitat Regulations aren’t perfect, they have been our most effective protections for nature as any plans that would impact rare and protected habitats or species must go through a rigorous assessment. In exceptional circumstances where projects must be built, they ensure new habitat is created elsewhere. 

We have 8 years to halt nature’s decline so, unless we intend to replace them with stronger protections immediately, we should not waste precious time reassessing effective laws that provide vital protections already – regardless of whether they originate from the EU or not. 

We are asking all MPs to:  

• Urge the government to withdraw the REUL Bill – we have no objection to a sensible, consultative process that examines, updates, and improves European environmental laws, but that is not what this Bill offers.   

• Reassert Parliament’s role on the oversight, scrutiny and passing of legislation, so that amendments to or removal of REUL take place under conventional Parliamentary procedures, ensuring nature protections are safeguarded.  

• Insist the government focus on its environmental commitments in the Environment Act 2021, including putting in place the ambitious actions, policies, and mechanisms necessary to make Britain a world leader in nature’s recovery by 2030. 

You can read our latest briefing for MPs here.

Deregulation means removing rules and protections, often characterised as “cutting red tape”. In reality, it means polluters can get away with poisoning our rivers and countryside or removing rules that protect our most important wildlife sites from damage. 

The overarching theme of the Government’s Growth Plan is growth at any cost. The narrative is that environmental rules are partly responsible for stagnant growth, and that these will be reformed and streamlined, ‘reducing unnecessary burdens to speed up the delivery of much-needed infrastructure’.   

In particular it aims fire at the Habitat Regulations, our most important nature protections.  

As detailed in the Growth Plan, we are expecting loosening environmental protections through the Planning and Infrastructure Bill and the rollout of ‘Investment Zones’ which could allow inappropriate development on important habitats or agricultural land.    

Without these essential safeguards, there could be a desperate fight for Hampshire and the Isle of Wight’s precious natural assets, a free-for-all, with wildlife and communities inevitably losing out to development and intensive land use.