Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what preparations his Department is making for the UK leaving the EU without an agreement; and how much funding has been allocated to those preparations.

The UK Government remains focussed on ensuring a smooth and orderly withdrawal from the EU with a deal as soon as possible

However, as a responsible government, we’ve been preparing to minimise any disruption in the event of no deal for nearly three years. The Home Office has been planning and preparing for a no deal scenario ensuring we have contingency plans in place across areas including law enforcement, passport operations and the border.

We have taken extensive steps to provide businesses and citizens with advice on helping them mitigate the potential impacts of a no deal exit. When necessary we will continue to update our advice on gov.uk/euexit on how people should prepare

During the extension period, to underpin our ability to respond in a no deal scenario, we are working closely with operational partners to develop our response to a range of theoretical scenarios

The Treasury has allocated over £4.2 billion of additional funding to departments and Devolved Administrations for EU exit preparations so far. This breaks down as £412m over the spending review period for the Department for Exiting the European Union, Department for International Trade and the Foreign & Commonwealth Office (Autumn Statement 2016); £286m of additional funding for 2017/18 (a full breakdown of which can be found in Supplementary Estimates 2017/18); over £1.5 billion for 2018/19 (Supplementary Estimates 2018/19); and over £2 billion for 2019/20 (Main Estimates 2019/20). This funding is to cover all exit scenarios and is in addition to departmental efforts to reprioritise from business as usual toward preparations for the UK’s departure from the EU. Work on no-deal exit preparations cannot be readily separated from other EU exit work, given the significant overlap in plans in many cases.