Exiting the European Union

Liz Kendall Excerpts

Monday 5th September 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr Davis]

I thank my right hon. Friend for his question. I promise him that I will take no lessons in organisation from the Labour party.

[Liz Kendall (Leicester West) (Lab)]

May I press the Secretary of State on the issue raised by the right hon. Member for Broxtowe (Anna Soubry)? Japanese companies employ 140,000 people in the UK, and the Japanese Government say that these companies need to maintain tariff-free trade, consistency of regulation between the UK and the EU, passporting rights for financial services, and continued access to EU workers. In order to minimise uncertainty for these vital companies and their employees, is the Secretary of State going to prioritise any of those criteria? If not, which ones will he pursue?

[Mr Davis]

I have already made this pretty plain. All the issues that the hon. Lady names, such as passporting and access to markets, are being looked at and evaluated in terms of where the real risks are. Let me take passporting as an example. I have consulted a number of people in the City on passporting, and I get very different views. The City is not a single business but a sort of ecosystem of businesses, and one gets different views from each of them. Some of them have different solutions too, such as “brass plate” arrangements and so on. We have to assess all that before we decide exactly how we organise the strategy. It is pretty straightforward. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Forest of Dean (Mr Harper) pointed out, it is straightforward, but it is complex to calculate and complex to work out, and we will do that.