The future of retained EU law in the UK

The Government has announced plans to pass a Brexit-related bill to make it easier to amend or repeal "retained EU law", and end the special status of historic EU law in the UK. It has also launched a call for evidence as part of its review of retained EU law.

In order to avoid leaving gaps in the UK legal system when the UK withdrew from the EU, the body of EU law in force at the end of 2020 was imported into UK law, and the UK legislation that implemented EU law was retained, under the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018 (with necessary amendments). This body of law is called "retained EU law”. In order to achieve its aims of making it easier to amend retained EU law, the Government plans to pass a bill making amendments to the Withdrawal Act.

Additionally, the House of Commons European Scrutiny Committee has launched an inquiry, Retained EU Law: Where next?, which examines the future of retained EU law in the UK. The deadline to submit evidence is 14 March 2022. Questions on which the Committee is interested to hear evidence include:

• whether retained EU law is a sustainable concept and whether it should be kept at all;
• how the concept of retained EU law has worked in practice since it came into effect and what anomalies have arisen or may arise in future; and
• whether a wider range of courts and tribunals should have the ability to depart from retained EU case law, and whether in fact it should be binding at all.