31 October 2019

Financial Times: Counting the costs of another missed Brexit deadline

[...] it’s worth reflecting on how wasteful the string of missed Brexit deadlines has been for the taxpayer and how debilitating it has proved for the UK civil service and British business.

First there is the cost paid by Whitehall. Over the past year, the civil service has been told to mobilise for a no-deal Brexit on March 29, April 12, October 31 and now January 31. Thousands have been moved out of their usual jobs into no-deal contingency planning — only to be stood down again each time.

The government has spent £100m on a communications campaign focused on an October 31 Brexit. Total UK spending on Brexit planning is now £6.3bn.

Then there is the impact on business. Companies across the country have spent heavily on no-deal preparations ahead of each Brexit deadline with huge sums used up — and wasted — on emergency stockpiling. Now they are being marched down the hill again.

Pauline Bastidon, head of Global and European policy at the Freight Transport Association, says: “Now that another no-deal Brexit deadline has been missed it will be even harder for companies to ramp up their preparations for the next deadline on January 31.”

She adds: “There are certain things like stockpiling where many companies are finding it increasingly hard to justify the costs.”

In this article for the Institute for Government website, Joe Owen takes a similar view. “The government has now ‘cried wolf’ for a third time,” he writes. “If the UK approaches another key deadline, there is not much the government or prime minister can do that couldn’t be greeted with a response of “well, we’ve heard that before”.

Nobody can predict what the Brexit landscape will look like after the December 12 election. But many outside Westminster shudder at the cost the country has paid so far.

As Peter Ricketts, the former head of the Foreign Office, tweeted this morning, this is a “time to reflect on the hundreds of millions of pounds wasted on no-deal preparations, all the civil service time and effort that could have gone into improving peoples’ lives, the humiliation of asking Brussels for yet another extension. All for what?”

Full article on Financial Times (subscription required)

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