Member

This piece of legislation will affect over 300,000 businesses in our constituencies, because it will hopefully help to start dealing with the paperwork mountain that is the product of Brexit. It makes no sense at all to ask people to follow two sets of rules when one of those sets is perfectly functional. Opposition Members should be honest and admit that, because their own attempts to run two separate regulatory regimes fell so flat. We saw that with the UK conformity assessment, which the previous Government originally tried to introduce in December 2021; because it was such a disaster and was creating so much extra cost and paperwork for small businesses, it kept getting delayed until May 2024, when the then Government finally admitted defeat and claimed that any business in the UK that had met the European charter mark had also met the UK charter mark. They did that because it would have cost businesses up to £1.6 billion over the next decade to try to run two separate lots of conformity assessments for the very product regulations whose operation we are talking about today.