Heat on Brexit Secretary

There are growing calls in Britain for the official shepherding Britain's departure from the European Union to resign and face investigation after he admitted that the Government has produced no impact assessments on the effect of Brexit on different sectors of the British economy.

Hauled before the House of Commons Exiting the EU Committee to explain his failure to hand over 58 sectoral assessments as required by Parliament, Brexit Secretary David Davis said that no such documents had been produced as their usefulness was thought to be “near zero”.

Leaving the EU would provoke a “paradigm change” in the British economy on a similar order of magnitude to the financial crash of 2008, making economic forecast models unlikely to be “informative”, he told MPs.

He told MPs as early as last December that his department was “in the midst of carrying out about 57 sets of analyses” on different parts of the economy.

In June he said nearly 60 sector analyses had been completed and in October he told the Brexit committee that Prime Minister Theresa May had read “summary outcomes” of impact assessments, which he said went into “excruciating detail”.

His admission that no assessments existed was branded a “dereliction of duty” by Labour committee member Seema Malhotra, while Green Party co-leader Caroline Lucas said: “This is beyond farcical. Davis is either grossly incompetent, or someone who struggles with the truth and treats MPs with contempt. Either way, he should be out of his job.”

May’s office, meanwhile, said May and Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar were “working hard to find a specific solution to the unique circumstances in Northern Ireland”, which have triggered a crisis in negotiations. An agreement on the Irish border was scuttled at the last minute on Tuesday by Northern Ireland's Democratic Unionist Party.— PA, AP