Theresa May’s government has been “too slow” to begin practical preparations to get the country ready to leave the European Union, parliament’s spending watchdog has concluded.
The public accounts committee found that Whitehall has still not reprioritised its work to be ready for Brexit day in 14 months. Tasks still to be completed include closing down existing programmes so attention can be focused on EU withdrawal, MPs said.
In a report released on Wednesday, MPs expressed concern that government departments have to recruit hundreds of staff and streamline decision-making.
The committee’s deputy chairman, leave-backing Tory MP Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown, said Brexit was a “complicated task with the potential to become a damaging and unmanageable muddle”.
“It is concerning that government departments still have so far to go to put their plans into practice. [The] real world will not wait for the government to get its house in order,” he said.
The Department for Exiting the EU (DExEU) has identified 313 separate “workstreams” which will need to be completed and has focused on ensuring plans to deal with them are “up to scratch”, the report said.
Philip Rycroft, DExEU’s permanent secretary, told the committee in December that there was “a long road to go” to turn some of the plans into reality.
The report found DExEU has been “too slow” to ensure the plans are put into practice, warning that some “may not be sufficiently developed to enable implementation to start quickly”.
The committee called on government to provide a formal update by June and said DExEU should publish details of the workstreams by April.
Sensitivities about the negotiation process “must not be used as an excuse for keeping the public and Parliament in the dark” about how preparations are going, MPs said.
All departments should review their wider commitments by March this year and determine which must be ditched or delayed because of the burdens of preparing for Brexit, said the cross-party committee.
Details should be published in April of which projects have been “deprioritised” to make way for withdrawal preparations.
“Departments have still not faced up to the need to reprioritise existing activity to make space for Brexit,” said the report. “It is clear that prioritisation has not been undertaken with the speed or on the scale needed and we have seen no evidence that departments have stopped any significant work.
“This is worrying as departments do not have the technical, project or senior leadership capacity for Brexit alongside all their other planned activity.”
Neither DExEU nor the Cabinet Office have a “credible” plan to recruit the skilled people needed to deliver Brexit, the report found.
A government spokesperson said: “The government is committed to ensuring that the right skills and resources are available across all departments to deliver a successful Brexit.
“And we have repeatedly set out that we are determined to continue recruiting the brightest and the best talent from the public and private sectors and the capability of all departments is regularly reviewed.”