My hon. Friend raises an important point. In another report, published last December, we looked at Brexit and the border—I say “looked at”, but the situation is not static; we are working closely with sister Committees, particularly the Treasury Committee, with which we are doing some joint work on the cost of Brexit. We need to look at the wider cost and what Departments are having to do to implement these new systems and employ new staff.
HMRC has told us very candidly that it does not expect, as the right hon. Member for Loughborough highlighted, to have any additional border infrastructure in place by next March, yet other countries are planning for this already. In the Netherlands and Ireland, they are buying up land and planning to build facilities to do those necessary checks. Pieter Omtzigt, the Dutch Parliament’s Brexit rapporteur, has said that his country is
“preparing for the stated policy of the UK government”
and that it needs
“hundreds of new customs and agricultural inspectors”.
He says: “if we need” that,
“the British are going to need thousands”.
Already this week, we have seen Border Force advertising to recruit 550 staff—in addition to staff it has already had to recruit and will have to recruit again in the future.
Extraordinarily, a response to our work from the border planning group, which comprises a number of Departments, told our Committee there was no evidence to suggest that the risk profile of goods would change on day one. It went on:
“The Government is reviewing the specific areas where the risk posed by these imports could change, both immediately following EU exit and over time, and the measures that should be put in place to address this”—
should be put in place! We are one year away from Brexit. Even with a transition period, it will be enormously challenging—in fact impossible—to deliver the infrastructure needed to make sure that our country is safe.
We need full clarity on the costs. The Treasury Committee and the Public Accounts Committee are pressing the Treasury and other bits of Government about what the total cost will be. Let us be clear: there will be additional costs to the financial settlement, which will be only a small portion of the overall costs. That is the cost we will have to pay for the political exit, but there are the on-costs—the lost opportunity costs. We need to see the full bill and to have it analysed by the National Audit Office. We need to have that before any meaningful vote in the autumn. We are still woefully short on such
information, but the right hon. Member for Loughborough and I are on the march, so I warn the Government: they had better be prepared.
As with the emperor’s new clothes, we need to call it out. Wishful thinking is not enough. It is not about ideology or romance, though many of us hold ideological positions. We need clarity. We need a decision so that business, and indeed the Government, can prepare. We need a customs union—we need the customs union. The alternative is chaos, cost, confusion and huge damage to the UK economy.
2.44 pm