Research from Business for Britain published today takes a detailed statistical approach to the question of who makes Britain’s laws. On the one hand we had Nick Clegg claiming in his debate with Nigel Farage that only 7% of British laws were made in Brussels. On the other side Nigel Farage, quoting Viviane Reding, the former European Commissioner for Justice, claimed 75% of legislation originates from the EU. Turns out Nigel was far closer…

Today’s report‘s key findings:

• Between 1993 and 2014, 64.7% of UK law can be deemed to be EU-influenced. EU regulations accounted for 59.3%t of all UK law. UK laws implementing EU directives accounted for 5.4% of total laws in force in UK.
• This body of legislation  driven by EU regulations consists of 49,699 exclusively ‘EU’ regulations, 4,532 UK measures which implement EU directives and 29,573 UK only laws.

Analysis of the EU’s influence on British law is continually hijacked for political purposes, leading to disputes over the true number:

Nobody believes the 7% figure Nick Clegg advanced in his disastrous debate with Nigel Farage. Europhiles like to cite the various House of Commons Library which put the percentage in the mid-teens, however EU regulations are transposed into national law without passing through Parliament. Hence they do not appear in studies by the House of Commons Library which most recently estimated the proportion of EU legislation at just 13.3%. If most of our laws and regulations are being made abroad without reference to parliament, do we really need full-time MPs in Westminster?