Usually means labels, safety, privacy, worker rights, quotas, etc. The EU has a vast amount of regulations that protect consummers but make business harder/more expensive. The UK should retain most of those independently, will probably fudge some of them.
The EU rule is minimum 15%, the UK choses 20% of its own accord.
But that's not the interesting bit, the interesting bit is the follow-up question: "what stops the UK changing this from within the EU?"
The answer for this one is nothing - in fact, EU states have already agreed that all states will have full VAT setting powers from 2022.
>> biofuels directive
You'd need to give more context here - Boris Johnson has committed £12 billion partly in support of going beyond the requirements of this directive as part of the so called "new green revolution".
What exactly is the conflict with the biofuels directive? If anything it's weaker than the current UK Gov's expressed desires in this space?
Thank you for the information on the VAT directive changing in 2022. Is that the definitive VAT system? I've not really been following EU legislation for the last few years.
The thing that concerns me with the biofuels directive is it's requirement for 5% of petrol to be made up of biofuel. As the cheapest source of this is palm oil, we then end up contributing to the destruction of habitats in Indonesia in order to grow palm oil to burn in our cars. The EU does recognise this and I'm sure I read that come 2030, that will be disallowed, but then they will likely need to use Soy or some other oil that will cause even more destruction.
I don't have any sources for this to hand and I may well have some of this information incorrect. It's been about five years since I researched much of this.
The only reason to do that is price, which importing (from the USA, presumably) would surely negate. When chlorinated chicken has been brought up as a debate point it's as an example of a standard that might slip, that cheaper UK chicken might be chlorinated for a UK market.
I always wanted a good solid answer to that so i could ask what stopped us changing them from within the EU but i never got past the first hurdle.