Comment by Symbiote

Hmm. The thing is, EU directives aren't themselves law, or rather, in a sense they are but they're laws for the EU member states, telling them that they need to legislate to achieve this thing but without specifying how. The EU can write legislation which is binding on actual citizens, but it mostly writes directives, like this, which just tell the member states to do the legislating.

So, was this directive actually implemented by the UK before it left? Or did they go "Eh, we achieved the intended goal anyway, no action" ?

This way the EU doesn't have to worry about weird edge cases where the EU wants to control Foozling of Doodads but it turns out that in Poland ordinary people often Foozle their own Doodad at home and so their approach needs to consider individual citizens who want to Foozle a Doodad, but in Ireland that's crazy and you pay one of a few dozen Registered Doodad Foozlers to do it at scale, requiring a very different regulation to achieve the same goal.