European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

Debate between Paul Blomfield and Mike Gapes

Committee: 8th sitting: House of Commons
Wednesday 20th December 2017 Commons Chamber

[Paul Blomfield]

The worry is that either they are not conducting them or they are conducting them and not sharing them in the way that was required.

[Mike Gapes]

Could not there be another, far more simple, explanation—that the Secretary of State is heading a Department that should be renamed “the Department for Winging It”?

[Paul Blomfield]

That is probably the sort of phrase that the Secretary of State might use on some occasions.

On 2 February 2017, the Secretary of State told the House:

“We continue to analyse the impact of our exit across the breadth of the UK economy, covering more than 50 sectors—I think it was 58 at the last count—to shape our negotiating position.”—[Official Report, 2 February 2017; Vol. 620, c. 1218.]

Was he right? Or was the hon. Member for Harwich and North Essex (Mr Jenkin) right when he said recently that the Secretary of State

“has never actually referred to impact assessments… These were a fiction of the media and the Labour party”?

If the Government are playing with semantics, claiming that assessments of impact and impact assessments are not the same thing, they should be aware that they are at serious risk of misleading the House. Even more worryingly, have they, as we have heard suggested, actually not undertaken this work at all? Are they hiding these assessments in semantics—hiding them from the House and from the Select Committee—or do they not even have any work to hide?