Tories want UK to poach top EU staff as 75pc say they want to stay

BRITAIN should poach top experts from the European medicines regulator post-brexit, leading Tories have said, after it was revealed most of its staff want to remain in London. MEPS were warned in a behind closed-doors meeting in Brussels that three quarters of European Medicines Agency (EMA) employees do not want to leave Britain.

Twenty three cities, including Amsterdam, Stockholm, Milan and Barcelona, are competing to host the prestigious agency, which governs the safety of medical products and gives drugs EU market approval.

The Daily Telegraph can reveal that the European Parliament’s budget committee was told in July that 75 per cent of the 890 EMA workers wanted to stay in London. More than half (54 per cent) of the workers have children and in 2016, 61 were British. That has prompted MPS to urge businesses and the Government to do everything they can to offer the workers new jobs in the UK.

Geoffrey Clifton-brown, Tory MP for the Cotswolds, said Britain should try to poach the workers. He said: “A lot of those people were involved in shaping the European legislation and I imagine our legislation will have to be very similar to the Europeans’.” Peter Lilley, the Tory former shadow chancellor, said poaching the workers would help the UK “get off to a flying start” after Brexit.

At the meeting, the EMA said the relocation would cost more than £500million and that Brexit was the biggest challenge it had faced since it was set up in 1995. The European Commission insists UK must foot the bill but Britain will contest that. “The EMA said the loss of its staff would be devastating for the agency,” a source at the meeting said. An EMA spokesman said that they could not confirm how many staff would move with the agency as a decision on its location is not expected until November.