European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

Wes Streeting Excerpts

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

[Wes Streeting (Ilford North) (Lab)]

Is my hon. Friend aware yet of the evidence the Chancellor gave to the Treasury Committee this afternoon, when he, in effect, confirmed that there has been no Cabinet decision or agreement about the desired end position of the British Government? So we are leaving the single market and the customs union—that is not a decision taken by the Cabinet—but if we ask any Minister what the form will be to deliver on the Florence speech, they will not be able to give us a Government position. What an absurdity this is.

[Mr Leslie]

It is not just an absurdity; it is massively irresponsible for the Government to run headlong in a direction without knowing where they are going and without doing any assessments of potential costs. It is important that the British public see this, because they need to understand that this is not a fait accompli. We do not just have to throw up our hands and say, “Nothing can be done about this. It is all just going to happen.” The British people do have power. They do have a chance to change course. I believe we will see the clock ticking away and there will come a moment when we have to make a judgment and say, “Are we just going to continue to this timeframe?” Article 50 can of course be revoked or put on pause, and we need to consider that as an option. The British people do have the right to think again if, on reflection, they see that this process is too costly and potentially too damaging.

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[Kirsty Blackman]

I absolutely agree with the hon. Gentleman, with whom I used to serve on the Scottish Affairs Committee. This does need to be as transparent as possible. Every bit of money that is agreed between the UK Government and the EU as part of the withdrawal settlement needs to be itemised. We need to know what the UK is agreeing to pay for and the timescale over which we will be paying it.

[Wes Streeting]

I entirely agree with the points that the hon. Lady is making. It was interesting that this afternoon in the Treasury Committee, the Chancellor acknowledged that the cost to the UK of settling any outstanding debts with the European Union will be small beer compared with the costs if we do not get a good long-term trading relationship with the EU. There are two issues: the short-term cost and the impact on the scorecard, and the long-term cost to the economy and the damage that that will do if we cannot move on to phase 2 of these talks.

[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.