European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

Debate between Kirsty Blackman and Tom Brake

Committee: 5th sitting: House of Commons
Wednesday 6th December 2017 Commons Chamber

[Kirsty Blackman]

I absolutely agree. I will come on to the more indirect costs in a moment, but first I want to mention one more thing in relation to direct costs.

There is still ongoing uncertainty about the replacements, or possible replacements, for EU structural funds—for example, the Horizon 2020 money, the social fund and the common agricultural policy payments. We have a level of certainty on some of those in the very short term, but what happens after April 2019? What happens to the projects that currently receive money, or are likely to be bidding for money in future? What are the UK Government going to do to replace those funds? We do not have any certainty on the replacements for most of the direct funding.

I now move on to the indirect costs of Brexit. I am totally baffled as to whether or not there are economic impact assessments. The UK Government told us that there were impact assessments. They were incredibly clear that there were impact assessments and so they definitely knew how this was going to impact on the economy. Then, at the Brexit Committee, the Secretary of State said that there are no economic impact assessments. Any kind of responsible organisation does an economic impact assessment—before it takes an action, preferably. If an organisation is in this crazy situation where it has signed up to an action and drawn all these ridiculous red lines, it will probably be wise to do the economic impact assessments then so that it has an idea of quite how much of a mess it has got itself into.

[Tom Brake]

I do not know whether the hon. Lady is one of a number of MPs, including me, who put in a freedom of information request to access these reports. The response we got was that they could not be released because the information contained therein would damage the UK’s negotiating position. I do not know whether she has been to see the reports, but frankly there is nothing in them that could not be obtained by googling different sectors. I am not quite sure why that was used as an excuse for not releasing them to Members of Parliament.