Is the Government heading for trouble with its Great Repeal Bill?

Britain’s biggest exercise in copying and pasting has begun in earnest. The Government has published its Great Repeal Bill White Paper, which it says is vital to ensuring that whether we end up with a ‘hard’ or ‘soft’ Brexit (or any other type of Brexit), it’ll be a ‘smooth’ Brexit. The scale of the task is no mean feat. The Times reported this morning a study by Reuters identifying 53,000 laws affecting those in the UK that originated in Brussels since 1990. All of these will need to be dealt with and passed over into UK law. But even that estimate could be downplaying what the Government needs to do. In its White Paper, we learn today that: ‘There is no single figure for how much EU law already forms part of UK law’. In other words, ministers simply don’t know how many laws they need to repeal and replace.

For some, the scale of the task at hand proves the point about why leaving the EU risks bogging down Whitehall for years to come.