‘EU preparing for no-deal Brexit with UK’ – official
BRUSSELS is preparing for Britain to crash out of the European Union without a deal, a senior EU official has said.
The EU is braced in case an agreement is not reached but it is “not a scenario” the bloc wants, according to Stefaan De Rynck.
Transitional arrangements could be “wrapped up very quickly” but only once progress has been made in divorce talks, the adviser to the EU’s Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier said.
Mr De Rynck also dismissed claims by Brexit Secretary David Davis that Brussels will push the deal down to the wire. The EU does not want to “add risk” to the exit process by “playing with time”, he told the Institute for Government (IfG) think-tank.
“On going to the wire, we would certainly want to avoid that,” he said. “Brexit is a process we want to manage in a calm and rational way.”
Mr De Rynck said failing to reach a deal would harm both sides.
He said: “There is a clear negative impact from no deal, I think that that is clear, for both sides but especially for the UK economy. But it is not a scenario people want to work towards.
“We are preparing for it, that is for sure, at 27 but it is not a scenario that we in the negotiation room want to bring in that negotiation room.”
Earlier this month, European Council president Donald Tusk said the rest of the bloc was not preparing for a no-deal outcome.
“EU27 is not working on ‘no-deal’ scenario,” he said. “We negotiate in good faith and hope for ‘sufficient progress’ by December.”
Hopes that negotiations would move on to Britain’s future relationship with the EU this month were dashed after EU chiefs said more work was needed first on the divorce talks. But Mr De Rynck said “sufficient progress is not far away”.
Britain must set out how it believes the exit bill should be calculated to end the deadlock over money, he told the IfG. “In terms of sufficient progress we need a method to be able to reassure the 27 of the solidity of the UK guarantees on how it will honour its commitments,” he said.