David Davis accused of misleading Parliament

Minister admits to committee there are no detailed impact assessments

Brexit Secretary David Davis has been accused of misleading Parliament after admitting the Government has made no formal assessment of the likely impact of EU withdrawal on different sectors of the UK economy.

Mr Davis told the House of Commons Exiting the EU Committee that the usefulness of an assessment of this kind would be “near zero” because of the scale of change which Brexit is likely to cause.

Mr Davis was appearing before the committee to defend his failure to deliver the 58 impact assessments demanded by a parliamentary motion last month, handing over instead 850 pages of heavily-edited “sectoral analyses” setting out detail about the current position of different parts of the economy.

The Brexit Secretary 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. 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”.

But on Wednesday he told the committee that “no systematic impact assessments” had in fact been carried out.

He also told committee chairman Hilary Benn there was no “formal quantitative” assessment undertaken of the likely impact of leaving the customs union before the Government committed itself to the step.

“There was a judgment made on qualitative things, not a quantitative one,” he said.

Mr Benn described the decision not to conduct impact assessment as “rather strange” when ministers were hoping within weeks to enter into a fundamental renegotiation of Britain’s trade relations with the rest of Europe.”

Mr Davis was last week accused by some MPS of contempt of Parliament, after it emerged that the information handed over to the committee by his Department for Exiting the EU had been edited.

Mr Davis’s admission that no sectoral impact assessments have been made provoked outrage among opposition MPS.

Lib Dem committee member Wera Hobhouse said: “David Davis has been misleading Parliament from the start.”

Picture: PA. Brexit Minister David Davis told a Parliamentary committee that the Government has not carried out any detailed impact assessments on how Brexit will affect the economy.