Brexit Britain will keep thousands of EU laws on the statute book until at least 2026 despite an original deadline of 2023.
The Government said in an update yesterday that it was due to have reformed or repealed over half of the 6,757 Brussels-era laws by June 2026.
But the timeline risks angering Brexiteers who have called for a swifter approach.
The original cut-off date under the Retained EU Law Bill for the Brexit bonfire was the end of 2023.
The deadline was abandoned last May in a watering down of the plans, which critics said threatened legal rights and protections.
Business and Trade Secretary Secretary Kemi Badenoch said EU laws will be ditched “in favour of a more agile regulatory approach that benefits the UK”.
In the introduction to a report by the Department for Business and Trade published on Monday, she said: “New regulatory approaches will be designed to give businesses more opportunity to innovate, experiment, and capitalise on the UK’s global leadership in areas such as technology, life sciences, and digital services.”
The UK retained thousands of EU laws after Brexit to provide continuity and certainty.
Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg championed the process to scrap the legislation when he was business secretary.
An interactive dashboard by the Department for Business and Trade shows that 33 per cent of retained EU laws have so far been amended, repealed or replaced.
Ms Badenoch previously insisted that scrapping EU laws “should be about more than a race to a deadline”.
