Mr. Neil McDonnell:

I have not seen it floated in a legislative sense, although I have seen it in the British press, as in "Who are they to tell us how many hours we can work?" There is a substantial emphasis on US thinking where hours of work for static workers are not regulated and even in the US, where mobile workers are not regulated. I spent 12 years in the trucking business. Regulations on mobile workers have a European context beyond the EU so we would really be into a safety issue if we had drivers breaking the mobile working time directive. I have seen it floated in the press. I have not seen it as a formal proposal anywhere.

I will give the Senator a really good example of what is current. Having been in petroleum in for years, I never wanted to touch the registration, evaluation, authorisation and restriction of chemicals, REACH, regulation because it is such a difficult, technical and geeky area. I do not know if the Senator has ever heard of that with regard to the regulation of chemicals. It is a regulation governing the labelling, quantities, containering, transport and storage of chemicals throughout the EU. The UK has said it wants to diverge from REACH. The UK chemical industry is saying it was a massive headache for the ten or 12 years it took the EU to get it through and that it would be mad to try do this and asking whether the UK is going to change the regulations, for example, on chlorine or peroxides. Everyone thinks all of this stuff only goes into factories. The entire hair and beauty business revolves around large amounts of peroxides moving around all the time. If the British diverge from that, are we going back to stopping a truck in a warehouse in Holyhead and re-labelling it before it comes over here to go into hairdressers? That is the extent to which REACH could affect us. An awful lot of what we see on the high street in terms of grooming has UK labels and is from UK chains. UK industry does not want to diverge again from that sort of stuff but, for its own reasons, the body politic is taking this very theological stance that it has to diverge and that this was what Brexit was about - the bonfire of red tape. If the UK does diverge on something as technical and granular as REACH, that could be just the beginning, although I do not think the UK will diverge. The same applies to aircraft. Having written most of the regulations that cover flying and aircraft maintenance, the British now say they want to diverge from them. It is difficult.