VR helped civil servants imagine no-deal Brexit

Civil servants wore virtual reality headsets to imagine life without a Brexit deal, a former boss has revealed.

It was intended to help staff at the Department for Exiting the European Union in 2019 to plan if the UK crashed out of the EU without a deal.

Dame Clare Moriarty, then the department’s permanent secretary, said: “I put a virtual reality headset on my entire department to say, ‘Within this headset, let’s assume that we are definitely leaving without a deal and now let’s do everything we would do if we knew that for certain.’”

The interview can be heard on The

Archbishop Interviews on BBC Radio 4.