Department for Exiting the European Union

John Bercow Excerpts

Monday 26th February 2018 Commons Chamber

[Douglas Ross]

On a point of order, Mr Speaker. The hon. Member for Glenrothes (Peter Grant) mentioned at the opening of his remarks that there had been no Conservative Back-Bench speakers and he criticised Conservative Members for that. May I ask, through you, whether he would agree that that would therefore be a criticism of the Scottish National party, which in a four-hour defence debate immediately preceding this one could not muster one Back-Bench speaker?

[Mr Speaker]

The hon. Gentleman has found his own salvation. He has made his own point in his own way, with his usual force and alacrity. It is on the record.

[Jenny Chapman (Darlington) (Lab)]

Today, Parliament is asked to consider an underspend by the Department for Exiting the European Union. We might as well, as it is far from clear what we have been getting for our money anyway. The Government wasted £1.4 million on fighting Parliament’s right to vote on the decision to trigger article 50. Around 75% of the cost derived from the Supreme Court appeal that Labour opposed at the time as a waste of money.

It gets worse. The Government decided that, for show, it would look good if Sir Tim Barrow could be photographed hand-delivering the article 50 letter from the Prime Minister to the European Council. The two business-premier class return tickets cost around £1,000. Apparently, it took two people to deliver the letter, which is surprising given how understaffed the Department is.

Will the Minister comment on the Department’s unusually large staff churn? The National Audit Office recently found that churn at the Department is running at 9% per quarter. The civil service average is 9% per year. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Leeds Central (Hilary Benn) said in his, as ever, excellent speech, the Institute for Government thinks that that degree of churn in the Department at the forefront of co-ordinating the complicated task of leaving the EU should cause concern both within and outside the Department. It certainly causes me concerns.

Perhaps the Department is not so much at the centre of co-ordinating this complicated task after all. In December 2017, Oliver Robbins left his role as permanent secretary at the Department to focus on his role as the Prime Minister’s European adviser. Robbins was joined at the Cabinet Office by his own team and a unit of around 30 staff. An answer to a Labour written question revealed that Robbins’ new unit includes five deputy directors, on up to £118,000 each; six Cabinet Office band As, on up to £60,500 each; and seven Cabinet Office band Bs, on up to £38,500 each.

In December, we found out that one in four DExEU posts was unfilled, including 81 policy roles, and that 44% of DExEU staff plan to leave within the next year. Jill Rutter, programme director at the Institute for Government, put it like this:

“They’ve been losing people at a higher rate than any civil service department. It obviously makes your task harder of filling up that bucket, it’s like filling up a bucket with a bit of a leak”.

Can the Minister explain how much of the Department’s underspend is because of an inability to recruit and retain staff? Why is it that the Department struggles to find and keep hold of good staff? What is it about the Department that is so off-putting to talented civil servants? Perhaps it is because there is a Whitehall turf war over Brexit, leaving the Department effectively neutered and paralysed by the division in government.

With such excess resources available, how is it that the Department made such a pathetic job of pretending that it had conducted sectoral analyses of Brexit’s impact on the economy? When they were finally made available, they were an embarrassing copy-and-paste waste of paper. I will not go over the whole shoddy tale again, but it proved just how disorganised and under-powered the Government’s Brexit operation is. It is chaotic.

The worst part of all of this is that amid the chaos, the Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union has turned his face away from one of the most important issues that his Government faces: the impact of Brexit on the border in Northern Ireland. I have visited Northern Ireland on three occasions in the past three months, because the impact of the reintroduction of a hard border would be a catastrophe for all communities in Northern Ireland. I agree with the Government’s assertion that Northern Ireland should be treated the same as the rest of the UK, but Labour will never support a Brexit deal that results in any customs infrastructure whatsoever on the Northern Ireland border.

The Secretary of State has not visited Northern Ireland once since September 2016, and I do not think he has ever visited the border. That is neglectful. He ought to go there so that he can correct the Tory former Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, the right hon. Member for North Shropshire (Mr Paterson), when he says that the Good Friday agreement has outlived its use. Such outrageous, casual ignorance is frightening. Will the Minister assure the House that there is no circumstance in which the Government would countenance establishing any infrastructure on the Northern Ireland border?

Can the Minister identify for the House a single example of an open border between two countries operating different customs regimes? Anywhere—Norway and Sweden, or the USA and Canada? It cannot be done. Therefore, because there are no credible alternatives that would safeguard the Good Friday agreement, and because of the need to support manufacturers throughout the UK, the Labour party has said that it would seek to negotiate a new customs union with the EU.

The Government are failing in so many of their responsibilities, and the excuse that is so often given is that they are focused on Brexit. Maybe if Brexit was going well, if the Department was not so unstable, if there was clarity of position or a sense of energy and purpose, or if the Prime Minister could articulate with any certainty where the country is heading, Ministers might be forgiven for their lack of progress on so many issues. The hon. Member for Edinburgh East (Tommy Sheppard) and the right hon. Member for East Antrim (Sammy Wilson) spoke of metaphors, but sadly an apt metaphor for the entire Government can be found in the Department’s rapid decline into chaos, division, irrelevance and incompetence.

[Mr Speaker]

We are joined this evening by the Prime Minister of Kosovo, who is supported by the hon. Member for Cleethorpes (Martin Vickers). We are most grateful to the Prime Minister for his attendance at the House of Commons and we wish him and his country all the best.