Brexit delayed by lack of strategy

Whitehall has begun to build the machinery of Brexit but the government doesn’t yet know what to do with it, a new briefing paper has contested.

The Institute for Government (IfG) has assessed the progress the government has made towards planning for Brexit, claiming that the government will need an extra 500 new staff, costing up to
£65 million a year, just to plan its departure approach.

The paper also claims that Prime Minister Theresa May’s decision to establish two new government departments for handling Brexit - the Department for Exiting the EU (DExEU) and the Department for International Trade (DIT) - instead of a unit within the Cabinet Office, has caused ‘distractions and delayed work’ because of a lack of clarity about each department’s responsibilities.

The paper determines the two offices as running the risk of ‘creating fragmentation and incoherence’. The paper contends that the Prime Minister must now move swiftly to stamp out ‘potential turf wars between her Brexit ministers and make clear who does what’.

Ministers need to be clear how they intend to engage beyond Whitehall as Brexit will affect every sector of the economy and region of the UK, with the public needing to know more about how the government plans to reach a negotiating position, it argues.

Dr Hannah White, co-author of the report, said: “Silence is not a strategy. The Prime Minister has sworn she will not give a running commentary on negotiations, but she needs rapidly to clarify how and when the government intends to go about making decisions on Brexit.”