Furious Brexiteers have accused Rishi Sunak, the UK's Chancellor of the Exchequer, of breaking his promise to scrap thousands of leftover EU laws by the end of this

year. Kemi Badenoch, the Business Secretary, confirmed that only 600 out of the 4,000 EU laws still enforceable in the UK will be removed by December, in addition to 1,000 that have already been scrapped. Badenoch admitted that there were risks of legal uncertainty by scrapping the laws by the end of the year in a sunset clause in the Retained EU Law Bill.

Jacob Rees-Mogg, the former business secretary who supported the removal of the laws, criticised the Prime Minister, though not Badenoch. He tweeted a link to a video from Sunak's 2022 Tory leadership campaign in which he pledged to "review or repeal" EU laws within his first 100 days in office. Rees-Mogg commented that "regrettably the Prime Minister has shredded his own promise rather than EU laws."

Officials have previously suggested that the 2023 deadline for removing EU laws should be extended to 2026 to ensure that it is done correctly. In her statement, Badenoch said that the government would still take back control of its laws and end the supremacy and special status of retained EU law by the end of 2023. She also added that the programme to remove the laws was becoming more about reducing legal risk by preserving EU laws than prioritising meaningful reform.

Instead of issuing a shortlist of laws to be kept, the government now plans to release a list of up to 600 laws that will be removed. The Labour Party's shadow Cabinet Office minister, Baroness Chapman, criticised the Tories for wasting time with an unpopular bill that would damage the economy, particularly at a time when businesses and families are already struggling with the cost of living crisis. Chapman added that the Tories were now trying to adopt some of Labour's amendments to save the bill. Photo by MPD01605, Wikimedia commons.