Why can’t the UK remove EU laws in a year?

As is increasingly common, government policy was leaked to the Times this week by a ‘senior government source’. The source stated that the government’s plan to remove Retained EU Law (REUL) from the British statute book by the end of the year must now be put off for another four years (meaning ten years after the Brexit vote).

REUL is not all the laws the EU ever made which apply in Britain. Lots of EU law was made by our own parliament becoming our own law. REUL just covers the laws made directly here by the EU, or by our ministers if the EU told them to. Theresa May decided it was too risky and the government too busy to remove all of these laws five years ago. So we kept it all ‘just in case’. 

There are now apparently two reasons this REUL cannot be removed by the end of the year: that the House of Lords won’t allow it, and that there is not enough time to review these 4,000 laws.