THERESA May’s Government has been accused of seeking to give itself “sweeping powers” to bypass proper parliamentary scrutiny as it transfers thousands of EU laws onto the UK Statute Book in preparation for Brexit.

As a 37-page White Paper was published to set out the process, Labour’s Sir Keir Starmer told MPs that the powers would be sweeping “because the Government proposes a power to use a delegated legislation to correct and thus change primary legislation and also devolved legislation; sweeping because of the sheer scale of the exercise”.

The Shadow Brexit Secretary, urging David Davis to “face down” the hardline Brexiteers, claimed there were no safeguards against such sweeping powers in the Government document and added: “In those circumstances, we should go back to first principles and, that is, there should be no change to rights and protections without primary legislation.”

There are more than 12,000 EU regulations in force in the UK; the Government intends to transfer all of them into UK law in what some MPs have dubbed the “Great Cut and Paste Bill”.

Ministers estimate as many as 1,000 existing measures will need to change and proposes using secondary legislation, so-called statutory instruments - laws passed with little debate or scrutiny - to do so.

In a Commons statement, Mr Davis, the Brexit Secretary, said, given the scale of the exercise, then a balance had to be struck between full scrutiny on important matters and little or none on merely technical changes.

“Parliament of course can, and does, regularly debate and vote on secondary legislation; we are not considering some form of governmental executive orders but using a legislative process of long standing,” he explained.

The Secretary of State went on: “Similar corrections will be needed to the Statute Books of the three devolved administrations and so we propose that the Bill will also give ministers in the devolved administrations a power to amend devolved legislation to correct their law in line with the way that UK ministers will be able to correct UK law.”

But Stephen Gethins, the SNP’s Europe spokesman, said Scotland had been given a "rough wooing" over Brexit given the White Paper had revealed the use of Henry VIII clauses, allowing the Government to repeal laws without parliamentary approval.

Insisting that “we are turning the clock back 40 years,” the Fife MP accused the Government of having "pushed the big, red button marked Brexit with their fingers crossed" and there was little clarity on what came next.

In reply, Mr Davis said the powers were not "an executive fiat dating from the Middle Ages" but, rather, a procedure that remained in "complete control" of MPs.

Labour’s Owen Smith, noting how many of 1,000 statutory instruments would not receive parliamentary scrutiny, asked: “How on earth can that be commensurate with taking back control and increasing the sovereignty of this Parliament?”

The Brexit Secretary responded statutory instruments would be needed “to modify technical aspects” and that there were up to 1,000 because “we are talking about 40 years of law”.

Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh, the SNP MP for Ochil and South Perthshire, highlighted how the White Paper spoke of working closely with devolved administrations for “an approach that works for the whole and each part of the UK.”

She told the Secretary of State that she had a sense of déjà vu as the Conservative Government had done nothing to demonstrate their intention to work with the devolved administrations.

“If the Government continue their unsustainable approach of ignoring the will of the Scottish Parliament in relation to Brexit, and indeed on any other issue, why should the devolved administrations trust the UK Government on anything?” she asked.

But Mr Davis replied that it sometimes seemed the SNP had only “one element in its ideology and one element only, and it is entitled ‘grievance’”.

He told MPs how the repeal bill would end the supremacy of EU law in the UK and so deliver on the result of last year's referendum.

"Our laws will then be made in London, Edinburgh, Cardiff and Belfast and interpreted not by judges in Luxembourg but by judges across the United Kingdom," declared the Secretary of State.

Mr Davis made clear the new legislation would not give the European Court of Justice a "future role" in the interpretation of UK laws and that UK courts would not be obliged to consider cases decided by the ECJ after Brexit.

However, he pointed out that UK courts would be allowed to refer to ECJ case law "as it exists on the day we leave the EU" and it would have the same status as UK Supreme Court decisions, which could be overturned by subsequent rulings.