Hundreds of laws covering jobs and environmental protection could disappear overnight if Liz Truss becomes prime minister after she pledged to scrap all remaining EU regulations by the end of 2023.
Despite warnings about the scale and complexity of the task, Truss launched his leadership campaign promising a “sunset” for all EU derivation laws within 15 months.
Trying to position herself as the self-styled “Brexit delivery prime minister”, the timetable proposed by Truss is noticeably accelerated compared to that given by the government of Boris Johnson.
Jacob Rees-Mogg had pushed for a similar cliff-edge deadline, seeing 2,400 laws disappear, but two-and-a-half years later, in June 2026. His plan sparked a cabinet row over viability, given the planned elimination of a fifth of the number of civil servants, or about 90,000 jobs.
Experts and union leaders said Truss’s proposals would be very difficult to achieve in the context of public service cuts, with warnings it could end up becoming a “bonfire of entitlements”.
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The plan comes as Truss and Rishi Sunak begin a bombardment of political ads in a bid to advance in the Tory leadership run-off. Ballots will start arriving on the doormats of party members in just over a week, although they have until September 2 to vote.
Truss and Sunak, who passed an initial stage of voting by MPs, will go through a series of member search events, the first of which will take place in Leeds on Thursday. They will also face off in a televised debate on Monday.
Sunak announced a vaccine launch-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, Margaret Thatcher’s birthplace.
The foreign secretary is seen as the preferred choice by many Tory members, but Truss has previously faced skepticism from some in the party over her political journey, having started as a Liberal Democrat before backing to its permanence in the 2016 Brexit referendum.
His Brexit plan would mean that all remaining EU laws and regulations would be “assessed on whether they support UK growth or boost investment”, with those deemed not to. Any EU law not replaced would simply disappear at the end of 2023, just 15 months after Truss took power in September.
Truss said this would mean that as prime minister she could “unleash the full potential of post-Brexit Britain and accelerate plans to get EU legislation off our statute books so we can boost growth and make the most of our new freedoms outside the EU”.
Sunak has previously said he will appoint a new Brexit minister to review remaining EU laws, with instructions for the first set of changes within 100 days of him becoming prime minister.
After Truss’ plans were announced, unions warned of the potential impact on workers’ protections derived from the EU. “These are all essentials, not nice-to-haves,” said Frances O’Grady, the general secretary of the Trades Union Congress. “Let’s call it what it is: ideological posturing at the expense of ordinary working people.”
Dave Penman, head of the FDA union, which represents senior officials, said the task had to be seen in the context of plans to shed one in five civil service jobs during the next three years
“If a new prime minister also wants to revise thousands of laws, then something has 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 protection could lead to retaliation from Brussels, given the terms of the post-Brexit trade deal, particularly because does the additional checks.
“The more divergence there is in practice, the more controls the EU will want to impose,” said Catherine Barnard, UK deputy director of a changing Europe think tank. “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 have worked well,” he said, citing the Equality Act as an example. The Truss campaign said the Equality Act would not be included in its plans.
Steve Peers, a law professor at the University of Essex and an expert on EU law, said another problem with a guillotine-like end to the remaining laws would be whether some would cover taxes. Treasury officials have called for EU tax laws to be exempted from these plans.
While it was still unclear what would happen at the end of 2023, Peers said, there was a risk the exercise would end up as “a bonfire of entitlements” rather than the bonfire of red tape Truss promised.
“It’s a massive undertaking, and you wonder how far it will go,” he said. “He seems to prioritize ideology over pragmatism.
“I wonder if revising what I think would be 2,000 laws in 15 months is the right priority during a cost of living crisis, with so many other things going on. The UK would have voted for most of them anyway. We’ve already removed hundreds that aren’t working since we left the EU, or that the government wanted to change.”