MINISTERS ARE GETTING BEHIND ON BREXIT WORK

WHITEHALL departments have been ‘too slow’ to start preparations for Brexit, MPs warn today.

In a report the Commons public accounts committee says with 14 months until Brexit, departments need more staff and to focus their attention on preparations for leaving the EU.

‘The real world will not wait for the Government to get its house in order,’ the report says.

Last night the committee’s Tory vicechairman Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown said Brexit was ‘a byzantinely complicated task with the potential to become a damaging and unmanageable muddle’.

Sir Geoffrey, who backed Brexit, said departments ‘do not have the technical, project or senior leadership capacity for Brexit alongside all their other planned activity’.

David Davis’s Department for Exiting the EU has identified 313 separate ‘work streams’ which will need to be completed and has focused on ensuring plans to deal with them are ‘up to scratch’, the report says.

But the department’s top civil servant, permanent secretary Philip Rycroft, told the committee in December that there was ‘a long road to go’ to turn some of the plans into reality.