- What might the post-Brexit ‘new world’ look like for product regulation in the UK? Can the UK’s domestic regulator alone keep us safe? And what legal challenges will be created?
Irrespective of whether the words in this title trigger Frozen 2 flashbacks, or not, they pose a crucial question in the context of post-Brexit product liability.
On 31 December 2020, we moved out of the Brexit transition period, and into, well, the unknown, with respect to the network of institutions and agencies across the EU that have worked alongside our domestic regulator—the Medicines and Healthcare Regulatory Authority (MHRA)—to protect patients and consumers from unsafe medical products.
The UK entered the European Economic Community, the predecessor to the EU, in 1973. A year prior, Sir Harold Evans at the Sunday Times had broken the story of the Thalidomide tragedy. Evans’s reporting exposed the UK as a ‘Wild West’ in which poorly tested drugs, with limited
