Oral evidence: EU-UK Relations in Preparation for Brexit, HC 791
Wednesday 1 February 2017
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 3 February 2017.
Members present: Sir William Cash (Chair); Alan Brown; Steve Double; Richard Drax; Kate Green; Kate Hoey; Stephen Kinnock; Graham Stringer; Michael Tomlinson; Mr Andrew Turner.
Questions 49 - 91
Witness
I: Sir Ivan Rogers KCMG, former Permanent Representative of the UK to the European Union.
Witness: Sir Ivan Rogers KCMG.
Chair: Good morning, Sir Ivan. I ought to just begin by saying that we are going to ask some questions that really go back to our report on the conduct of the Council of Ministers, the way they vote and things like that, and also the role of UKRep and Coreper in relation to that, which are immensely important, because some people are under a severe misunderstanding that there is more majority voting than actually takes place, as you know.
A lot of this is done by consensus, and therefore some people would argue—and I certainly would be one of them—that decisions taken behind closed doors are not the most democratic way of passing legislation on the scale that pours into the United Kingdom Parliament, and therefore to the people, which of course is highly relevant to the questions we are discussing on the floor of the House today with the withdrawal Bill. Also, I will be asking you later some questions of a more personal nature, regarding your resignation and things of that kind.
I will ask Kate Green to ask the first question.
Q49 Kate Green: Good morning, Sir Ivan. Thank you for coming. Could I start by asking about the negotiations process? You have had an extensive experience of leading negotiations. What do you think are the key things that are needed to make international negotiations successful?
Sir Ivan Rogers: First of all, good morning, and thank you very much for the invitation to attend this Committee. Indeed, I do have extensive experience of negotiations, both G8 and G20, as well as EU. Obviously, you develop as a negotiator your own views on how you negotiate and the best way in which to deliver results in negotiation, and one of the things that I have consistently said to all of my staff, both here and in UKRep, is that you have to develop a negotiating style with which you feel comfortable. Different Permanent Representatives have had very different styles over the years.
In a negotiation like this, depending on the ambit of the negotiation we are talking about, if we get onto a broader trade and economic negotiation for what is our status outside the European Union and our relationship with the European Union, this will be an unprecedentedly large negotiation, covering large tracts of Whitehall and huge tracts of the existing acquis. Our destination is to be defined by the Government, by this House and by the other House. It is a negotiation on a scale that we have not experienced, probably ever, but certainly since the Second World War.
There is always a danger in generalising from specific experience that I have had, say, in budgetary negotiations, in tax negotiations, or in negotiations around JHA issues. They all have a specificity to them. This is going to be on a humongous scale; it is going to have enormous amounts of business running up various different channels, and they involve difficult trade‑offs for Her Majesty’s Government, and difficult trade‑offs for the other 27 on the other side of the table.
The key to any successful negotiation, in the end, is that both sides are invested in trying to find a solution to it. I do not want to sound naïve. Obviously, I would expect us and the 27 to be coming at this from very different angles and with very different objectives, but negotiations ultimately only culminate in deals if there is a determination on both sides of the table to make progress. That involves generating a momentum and generating an atmosphere so that even when you get into name‑calling and an extremely feisty atmosphere—which we undoubtedly will, both in exit negotiations and future trade and economic negotiations—there is still an appetite to proceed and finalise agreements.
At the risk of sounding rather glib, trade negotiations always start with people making pious and pro‑free trading comments, usually on both sides of the table. They usually end up in a fairly mercantilist fistfight, but most of them resolve themselves and end up with trade deals—not all, by any means, but they go through phases.
Q50 Kate Green: How much would you say that international negotiations depend on the multilateral relationships, and how much on negotiations with individual countries?
Sir Ivan Rogers: Again, it varies enormously. We are in the phoney-war period at the moment on both sides of the Channel; no negotiations have started, and the players are not on the pitch. The 27 will have to organise themselves, and they are in the process of organising themselves. You have seen already that at leader level and at sherpa level, they are organising themselves in order to be able to negotiate with us, and they will have a huge internal negotiation to go through.
It is not understood widely enough in this country that the 27 will spend an awful lot of time debating with each other, and producing agreed lines and agreed mandates for their own negotiator. The Commission will be their negotiator, but the 27 will have, in each area, to thrash out a common position that they then want to discuss with the British when the British are in the room. This is immensely complex. One of the reasons why the EU is tortuous and can be very slow on trade deals is precisely that.
I have been in the room negotiating on behalf of the UK, or speaking on behalf of the UK, on the negotiation of trade mandates. This is difficult stuff. All 27 start with different objectives and different priorities, and bring those to the table, and there is an internal negotiation to be gone through among the 27 before they reach a position. Now, there is a huge question for this country as to how much you invest in the relationship with the institutions and the key people at the Brussels end, and how much you invest in specific capitals, and which capitals, and how to do it. That is a very complex equation. The real answer is that you have to do both, intensively and repeatedly.
Q51 Kate Green: How important is confidentiality in that process, and how much could, as it were, be publicly understood? Is it helpful for certain matters to be understood publicly?
Sir Ivan Rogers: That is a very difficult question. I suspect that in this negotiation—although, as I say, it is not yet underway—confidentiality will be at a premium. An awful lot will leak. Brussels is very leaky, and all the institutions are very leaky; no disrespect to them, but I am afraid that is the truth. As I say, in the compilation of positions by the 27, on the basis of papers from the Commission, stuff will get out, and incessantly. You should all expect an awful lot of this negotiation to be conducted very publicly.
That does not always help as a negotiator, obviously. I totally understand, Sir Bill: when we come to the questions that you raised right at the outset, there is a tension between the need of a negotiator to have confidentiality, and to be able to engage and explore options behind the scenes without those being divulged and getting out, and the desirability of having full transparency to this House and, indeed, to parliaments across the 27 and the European Parliament, all of whom will have a role in the process to come.
Q52 Chair: I took the view, as I said just now, that I will leave some of the more personal questions until a bit later, but you said that it was going to take 10 years. Can you confirm whether, in fact, you actually said that, or was that a leak? Was it an intention that you thought to be able to get across a message, without anyone really knowing quite where it came from? Can you give us a bit more information on that?
Sir Ivan Rogers: I can indeed. I never said it would take 10 years. What I did report repeatedly, and have reported—let me just search for an exact form of words, because I wrote down what I wrote, if I can find it—was that if you talk to the senior people in both the Commission and the Council Secretariat, and the key member states, both in capitals and in Brussels, their assessment would be that any trade and economic negotiation would be a single negotiation, encompassing vast areas of the acquis. We can come onto that in more detail, but that, in itself, would probably only start late in 2017, if then.
I also wrote that if you look at the record of previous FTAs the EU has negotiated—the Prime Minister has now made clear that she thinks her intended destination is some sort of free trade agreement—it has taken an awful lot of time from the inception of those negotiations to the conclusion of them, and there is then a ratification process. I have the formula here somewhere, but I am not sure I can lay my hands on it. What I put in print was that my summary of the senior Beltway wisdom from the people I talk to on a daily basis was that the combination of a negotiation on the FTA and a ratification process in all 28 member state parliaments, the European Parliament and some regional parliaments—you have all just seen the Canadian Walloonian experience—would probably take until the early‑mid 2020s for negotiation. I think those were my exact words.
There is then a question about whether we are talking about mixed agreement. There are very, very complex legal questions to be gone through, which are probably too complex to be gone into here, but I never used 10 years. What I did—which is what ambassadors are partly there for—was to report what I was getting from the most senior voices around Brussels, at Commissioner level, senior official level inside all the institutions, and from key opposite numbers in the member states. I have not found a single person at a senior level in any of those organs who has diverged from that essential view.
I can come on later in the evidence process to explaining my retort to that, and why I have been saying to people that it is possible to go much faster with the UK. I can explain what my reasoning would be in how we would rebut that and how we would try to persuade European colleagues to go faster than that, but the consensus wisdom among the technocracy around Brussels and around capitals is that FTAs take a long time, and even with the best will in the world, if you got that negotiation off to a quick start during the second half of 2017, it would not culminate by October 2018. I can only give you a very honest summary of the wisdom I get from others.
Q53 Chair: This was reported by the BBC, of course, and it was dated 15 December, which was the day on which I wrote to you because I was concerned about this, and asked if you would come and see us. We did not get any reply at all, and then we had to follow that up with a further letter, of course, in January. Could I ask you this: is this reporting by the BBC based on off‑the‑record remarks and observations that you made to them?
Sir Ivan Rogers: No.
Chair: It is not.
Sir Ivan Rogers: No.
Q54 Chair: Where do you think it came from?
Sir Ivan Rogers: I have no idea. I know the origin of it, in terms of which bit of text from me it comes from, and I have just given you the more accurate account of what that bit of text said. I wrote that before the October European Council, for the Prime Minister’s first European Council appearance. It got to the BBC for 15 December, which I think was the day of the European Council; the issue exploded, and I was all over the screens on 15 December. Why it took two months to get there and by what route it got there, I could not possibly say.
To be very clear, I never leak. I never would and never have under any Government, and the origin of this has nothing whatsoever to do with me.
Q55 Chair: I only add that in the report it says, “Downing Street said he was relaying other EU members' views, rather than his own or the British Government's”, which strongly suggests that they thought that you were, in fact, relaying these views yourself. Secondly, a spokesman is alleged to have said, “It is wrong to suggest this was advice from our ambassador to the EU. Like all ambassadors, part of his role is to report the views of others.” On the face of it, it would appear that there is a view that, somehow or other, you were involved in presenting that information, but I take what you say.
Sir Ivan Rogers: I can categorically deny and rebut that. I had no part of relaying that information. This was a confidential letter from me of 14 October, I believe, in which I set out a scene‑setter for the new Prime Minister at her first European Council, at quite some length. What I always did in advance of all European Councils was to write a fairly voluminous—I am fairly notorious for writing at length—scene‑setter, as they are called in the trade, and part of that scene‑setter was to try to set out what I thought the prevailing wisdom was on Brexit, both process and substance. As I say, my recollection of that was that that came from a specific chunk of that letter of 14 October. I copied that in exactly the usual way to relatively few people in key offices in Whitehall, and I have no idea why then, two months later, it should then emerge.
However, what I said then is that if I were pressed to elaborate on where I thought the street wisdom was amongst the senior players, most would forecast that the conclusion would be some sort of FTA deal, because they had read the Prime Minister’s speech at party conference. They had concluded from that by what she said, both on borders and on jurisdictional questions, that we could not possibly stay in the single market or stay in the customs union, and that therefore where we were headed was some sort of deep and comprehensive free trade deal. That negotiation process for a deep and comprehensive FTA would be the most complex and comprehensive FTA ever negotiated between two negotiating partners, if that is where we are going.
To give you an example, Chairman, the EU‑South Korea deal took about three and a half years to negotiate. You could argue it took much longer than that to get to the starting line, but from the starting line to the conclusion of the negotiation was three and a half years. That is sadly quite rapid by European Union standards. That document is 1,400 pages of legal prose, and then 60 or 70 ancillary pages of a political agreement. The EU‑Canada document is even longer than that. It is about 1,600 pages of legal prose. You do not, with the European Union, at the speed at which the European Union and its member states move, easily negotiate something of that gravity and length in a very short space of time. EU‑South Korea took about three and a half years from inception to conclusion.
Q56 Richard Drax: Sir Ivan, good morning. You have certainly convinced me that I was right to leave the EU, from what I have heard so far, I have to say. May I just ask you then: one key thing in these future negotiations is what falls to be negotiated within Article 50. Is it just the division of property and liabilities? Is it the future relationship between the UK and the EU? How does one sequence these negotiations properly?
Sir Ivan Rogers: Thank you for that. On your first point about a reason for leaving the EU, that is, of course, one. One of the key cases for leaving is the nimbleness and agility that we would have as a single member state—or not a member state; on our own—to negotiate at speed, with only our negotiating priorities on the table. I am in no doubt that we will negotiate FTAs with other partners outside the EU faster than the EU could do it; I have no doubt at all, and I want to put that unequivocally on the record. That is my view.
The question is about the negotiating heft you have at the table, in comparison with being part of a wider bloc. The advantage of being in the EU is not speed or nimbleness; nobody has ever accused the EU and its member states of speed and nimbleness on trade negotiations. It is the size of the market they have. Why are the Canadians, the South Koreans or other partners interested in the EU market? It is sheer size and scale. Why did the Canadians not walk away from the table over Wallonia and other things? I hope that is an explanation. Evidently, post‑exit, when we have our own trade negotiating team and our ability to negotiate, we will negotiate with other third countries faster.
To come to your question, this is, of course, going to be the first argument between the UK and the other side of the table, and you are already seeing from Michel Barnier’s statements—I do not have them with me—the interpretation of the Commission and, if you look at the language that other member states are putting out, the 27, which suggests a clear sequencing: that Article 50 is purely about the withdrawal and exit process, and agreeing a withdrawal treaty, and that only after we have withdrawn could we get to the trade and economic negotiation and the mandate that the 27 would agree for that negotiation with us. That, as you know, is not the British Government’s view, and it is not our reading of what Article 50 says. However, it hinges on your reading of “taking account of the framework for its future relationship with the Union”.
As an ex‑diplomat—not that I was a diplomat, as you know; I am a Treasury man by origin—describing where the other 27 are coming from and what they think the next negotiation is about, they think it is about five things. They think it is about disentanglement of the UK from the EU budget and the financial liabilities question. They think it is about the acquired rights issue—that is EU citizens here and UK citizens elsewhere, and what their rights will be post‑exit, and whether those rights would be frozen in aspic for a specific number of people on the basis of their status at the point of exit, and how they are then refreshed thereafter.
They think it is about the really tedious stuff that, of course, always gets the European Union going, such as where agencies are located. For example, the European Banking Agency and the European Medicines Agency are currently located in the UK. Those will leave, and there will no doubt be a huge bunfight about where they end up, so that is the agencies issue. There is then the question of what happens to international treaties to which the EU and its member states, including the UK, are signatories. There are a lot of legacy issues there, right across the full acquis.
The fifth issue is the core where the argument is coming from, and that is transitional arrangements. I would argue, and have been arguing repeatedly for months—in fact, I was arguing this in principle well before the referendum, looking ahead to this possibility—that taking into account the framework means you cannot really have a proper withdrawal treaty negotiation unless you know where you are going, and the Prime Minister has now started to articulate where she is going. There obviously then has to be a negotiation about that, but how on earth could you draw up a withdrawal treaty without having constantly in mind where you are headed?
I have been arguing—and I am sure we will carry on arguing at every level—that this is all one ball of wax, and these two negotiations have to come together. You cannot say, “Only deal with the withdrawal treaty, technical, legal and financial issues first, and park the rest”, because everything you need to decide going in the withdrawal treaty is a function of where you are going to end up. I start from the end: “Where do we want to be?” We are getting clarity that where we want to be is in a free trading agreement with the European Union outside, but not subject to supranational jurisdiction, and with control over our borders.
There are obviously big questions about money and contributions, and for what, and over what period. However, it seems to me inevitable that these two negotiations in the end have to collide, but if you ask all my opposite numbers in Brussels at the moment, or ask the institutions at the moment, or, indeed, read Michel Barnier’s script at the moment, the constant repetition is, “No, we deal first with the withdrawal treaty issues”. The first argument will be between the UK and the EU 27 about what we are actually negotiating about.
Q57 Richard Drax: Can I just ask about the liabilities? We hear threats—and I can only assume they are threats; that is how I interpret them—of having to pay billions of pounds, or euros, to leave this club. So far as joining a club, you pay a membership fee, and you pay every year to be a member. When you leave, you do not pay to leave a club; you say, “Thank you very much indeed”, and you head off. Do you think this is a genuine, real threat to us, to pay all these billions of euros to a club that we are leaving, or do you think that is an unreasonable request to make at this stage?
Sir Ivan Rogers: It can be both genuine and unreasonable, if I may say so. It is genuine, and I hear it repeatedly, and have been reporting it for months. You have seen the coverage in various of our newspapers, so it is being said, and openly, by Commissioner Barnier and others in the Commission that the total financial liability, as they see it, might be of the order of €40 billion to €60 billion on exit. They do believe that.
I do not know the origin of that figure, but I think I can guess it. I am a bit of a budget bore—an expert—so I think I could guess where they are coming from and why they are going to mount up that figure. That is a predictably very hard line coming from the Commission and from some in the European Parliament, and from some member states. We will see whether, when the member states get together, they sustain that position and go as hard‑line as that, plonk that number on the table, and see whether that is a genuine pitch or just an opening bid. However, is there a big financial issue and financial debate coming about whether we owe anything on exit? Yes, there is; I can assure you of that.
Q58 Kate Hoey: Presumably, we could be just hard‑line too, and say, “Well, we probably will not be paying it”.
Sir Ivan Rogers: Indeed, and that gets you into the question that I think will come at some point this year—but it is not for me to opine—of the realism or otherwise of threats where, in the end, the negotiation goes nowhere. As I say, I think the first argument will be, “What are we arguing about? What are we negotiating about?” I am sorry this sounds terribly tedious and classically European Union, but it is. I think the first argument is, “What are we going to argue about?”
The EU 27 will meet. I do not know when the Prime Minister has in mind to file the Article 50 letter, but the process then will be that the 27 will meet at leader level. I cannot tell you whether that will be before the French presidential elections or afterwards. When I was still in UKRep, I had assumed that it would probably come after the second round of the French elections that the 27 would meet, and they, as you know, under the Article 50 process, draw up the guidelines. The Article 50 process is not really a balanced process between the one and the 27. The 27 are rather in charge of the process, set the parameters for the process and set their own guidelines. I think they will then say some rather predictable things. They have already foreshadowed some of those things in what they said on 29 June, and what they repeated at the December European Council.
There is an interesting question as to whether, at that point, they will put financial liabilities on the table. They probably will, in some fashion, but they probably will not stick a number on there. Again—and I can come to this later in my testimony if it is helpful; it is obviously extremely difficult and dangerous to generalise—I think the view from many will be that the implications for the UK of walking away without any deal on the economic side, without any preferential agreement, and walking into a WTO‑only world, are, from their perspective, so unpalatable that we will not do it. That may be a misreading of us, but I think that will become a major question during 2017.
I think the calculation on the other side will be that the UK will see that it is in its interests, in a whole plethora of areas, to have a future preferential deal with the EU, and that that will oblige us to think seriously about transitional arrangements that bridge us to that deal. A unilateral abrogation or desire simply to walk away from the table and say, “If you are sticking liabilities of that sort on the table, we are not playing”, is not a route that they think we will take.
Q59 Richard Drax: Just one final little point: I think what you said is that you do not think all the officials and politicians will sit down and say, “What is best for the many hundreds of millions of people in Europe?” of which we are very much a friend and ally. You do not think they will say, “Let us come to a deal that actually serves them best, because we are representing them, rather than play silly political games”. You think there is no chance of pragmatism, sanity, and common sense predominating in this debate?
Sir Ivan Rogers: I am tempted to give an unduly cynical answer to that, but I will refrain from doing so. There are serious‑minded people on all sides who think this is an extraordinarily important discussion to be having. They regret that the UK is leaving the European Union, but they want a close relationship with the UK, and they will be serious about trying to negotiate an outcome, so I do not want to sound unduly cynical. That is particularly true in the member states, but it is also true in the institutions, and lots of people I have known for many years across the institutions profoundly care about this; they will want a serious process, and will not want a disorderly and abrupt exit, or an inflammatory set of discussions getting out of control.
Equally, it is important that you understand that from an EU perspective, however much we dispute this and would not view it this way—and I understand exactly what you are saying about financial liabilities stopping when you leave the club—they will, and do, think, “You have exploded a bomb underneath the Multi‑Annual Financial Framework”. Many have said that to me. As you know, that is a seven‑year framework that runs from 2014 to 2020, and I was heavily engaged in negotiating it in 2011, 2012 and 2013. I will not go into the intricacies of EU budgeting, but it is a seven‑year process.
The mere fact of our exiting during the period of the framework causes them immense financial difficulty. That is part of the leverage that we may have in these negotiations, depending on what we are prepared to do. For example, I spoke to one opposite number, a Permanent Representative from a poorer central and eastern European member state; I will not cite the member state. He said to me, “If you leave and cease to pay your dues”—of course, I said, “Well, they are not our dues because we will have left, so we do not have any financial liabilities at that point”—the reality for them on the ground in Unnamed Capital is they have told their people that structural funds receipts of quantum X will be available until 2020. That figure, merely by dint of UK exit and us not paying anymore, is diminished by 10% or 12%, so they have to go to their own citizens and say, “Whoops, when I said you were going to get 100, you are going to get 88”.
I do not wish to divulge the advice I have given to this Prime Minister or previous Prime Ministers, but it is fairly obvious that I have said one of the big issues in the next couple of years, as the 27 approach this negotiation, is that they now have a big hole in their budget before the end of the MFF period. You may think, “This is great from our point of view, because it divides the net contributors—the Germans, the French, the Netherlands, the Nordics and others—from the southerners”, but, of course, one thing they can all agree on is that we are the rogues who have ceased to pay our dues.
If you are a poor southern member state, you are obviously hoping that if the UK disappears and fails to pay its liabilities, at that point the German taxpayer, the French taxpayer, or indeed the Netherlands taxpayer, will step in. However, you may be quite rapidly disappointed in that hope. If you are the German taxpayer, you are saying, “Why should we be on the hook for the UK having left, in order to bail out southern member states to which we are already transferring too much?”
My point is simply this: think of it from the angle of the 27. We have created a major issue inside the 27 with the hole that we will have created by exiting in the budget, and when you are a leader of one of those 27 coming to this table on a UK withdrawal treaty, money will be on your mind. I cannot tell you that they will all stick to €40 billion, €60 billion, or whatever think‑of‑a‑number is coming out of the Commission circles, but will they care passionately about this and be raising it with the Prime Minister over the next months? Yes.
Q60 Chair: Just one point on the question of the relationship, not just the money: the summit of the 27 quite clearly stated that access to the single market—and I am quoting—requires acceptance of all four freedoms. They know perfectly well that that is an impossibility. Furthermore, they do not talk about membership of the single market, because that has been discussed ad nauseam, but actually access to the single market. How do you interpret that? They talk about solidarity. Does it not really look as if, on those principles that they have enunciated and already stipulated, there is not any chance of this deal going any further than a few months? If they stick to that rule as a 27, there is no room for discussion.
Sir Ivan Rogers: I understand the point, Chairman. That is probably too gloomy a perspective. I think they do draw a distinction between membership of the single market and what that entails.
We may dislike that, but again, I am here as an ex‑diplomat, describing the wisdom of the others about what the single market consists in. They think it consists in a range of rights and obligations; they think the budgetary element is part of it; they think that supranational law‑making and supranational jurisdiction is part of it; they think state aid rules are part of it; and they think a whole range of things that we may, as Brits, not have thought of as intrinsic to the single market are intrinsic to the single market project. I have heard that repeatedly from Frau Merkel personally over very many years. It is a single ball of wax, and you either respect all four freedoms, are members of the single market, and accept supranational jurisdiction and everything that goes with it, or you are outside the single market.
In a sense, everybody has access to the single market. It is a slightly misleading nomenclature. Everybody, of course, can trade with the EU; the North Koreans can trade with the EU. The question is, “On what terms?” and the question is, “If you are in an FTA with the EU, how much worse is that for you in certain, specific areas than being in the single market?” We will not be in the single market; that is perfectly clear from what the Prime Minister said. I have been saying for ages—again, without revealing my advice in‑depth—that if that is where we are on the control of borders and jurisdiction, manifestly, we have to leave the single market.
That will have some consequences in certain areas. I can try to give the Committee some examples of that, if it is helpful. Let me perhaps give a financial services example. Patently, if we leave the single market, then passporting arrangements, as they are termed in the jargon—there is no passport per se, either in primary or in secondary legislation industry—we will not benefit from. That matters more to some trunks of the financial services industry than others, and it is dangerous to generalise. There is then the question of whether, if you do not have passporting rights, you can rely on so‑called equivalence? That is where the EU 27 can declare the arrangements of a third country—which is what we are about to become—equivalent to its own, and therefore allow firms trading with the UK access on privileged terms to the EU market.
The problems with equivalence—without, again, wishing to dive into excessive technicalities—are that is quite capricious; it is quite political; it is quite incomplete. There are various directives where there are equivalence provisions; there are very important directives where there are not equivalence provisions. Also, equivalence can be withdrawn relatively rapidly by the 27 at relatively short notice. If you talk to financial institutions—which I have repeatedly; I used to work for some financial institutions—that is a real problem for them, because, as I say, it is capricious, it is unpredictable, they think it is politicised, and they think at very short notice equivalence can be withdrawn from the jurisdiction, which lands them with a huge business problem.
If I think about this now as an ordinary citizen, as it were, from the outside, where would one ultimately want to go in a free trade agreement with the EU? You would want some sort of mutual recognition agreement that is balanced between the two sides and that gives the UK more predictability, more certainty, and more dual control over the arrangements you draw up. I have talked to the Americans repeatedly about what dealing with the EU is like from the outside, including on equivalence arrangements and financial services, and the honest answer is that it can be extremely difficult.
We would be seeking, I hope and think, in any deal that we strike over the coming years, something unprecedented for the EU, where we get a deeper FTA with more provisions on financial services that benefits our own financial services access, but, in my view, also benefit the 27. Part of this is persuading the 27 that it is not in their own interests to cut their own nose off here, and there are really important questions about access to the London market and access to finance on proper terms where we are going to have to persuade the 27 that it is in their interests to do an unprecedented deal for them on.
Chair: Indeed.
Q61 Alan Brown: Good morning, Sir Ivan. I want to go back to predicted timescales, in terms of trying to negotiate a free trade agreement. You have correctly said that the EU can be slow, because of the 27 member states protecting their interests, and at the same time one of the advantages of the UK coming out is that the UK can be more nimble in negotiating free trade agreements with other countries. However, does that not mean the UK is competing with the EU, so how can the UK keep the EU focused on negotiating with the UK to get a deal in a short timescale, when equally the UK is looking to make deals elsewhere where the EU will be wanting to make the same deals with Japan, China, New Zealand and Australia? Are there not competing sets of vested interests, and might it not, therefore, be in the EU’s interests to focus on a short timescale for a free trade agreement with the UK?
Sir Ivan Rogers: There are several very good questions there. There is more alignment of interests in dealing with third countries than that suggests, and there is more appetite on the EU side—and there can be on our side—to buddy up on these things. Even if we are living with different free trade agreements with key third-country partners, we may have the same interests in terms of market access into those markets, and levering those markets open. Our interests diverge to a degree, and as I say, one of the advantages of exit for us is that we will be free to prosecute our own interests rather than melding our interests with those of the other 27, but there is nevertheless a lot of common ground in dealing with closed and difficult markets where EU or UK companies do not have public procurement opportunities. We have the same attacking ambitions. Even on the subject of filing our own schedules at the WTO, there is a lot of common ground with the EU. Yes, it will be a difficult fight on various things—on tariff rate quotas—but actually, there is an interest for the EU in going together with the UK on the schedules issue, and not opening up problems for the EU side. There is more common ground than I think you are suggesting.
At the moment, before I left, regarding relations with DG Trade on these issues, we very frequently found ourselves in quite close alignment with DG Trade positions on a whole range of free trade issues and free trade deals. They are trying to open up an EU‑Australia deal, an EU‑Mercosur deal, an EU‑New Zealand deal, and they are trying to push forward with a trade liberalisation agenda, much of which we agree with.
I suppose part of your question, then, is getting at the transatlantic question. We are very early days in judging what the Trump Administration’s trade policy will be; we are starting to hear some flavour of that, but who knows where that takes them? Obviously, if the Americans are in the business of saying that there will be no deals with a trade bloc like the EU, and they will only be dealing with individual countries in terms of free trade deals, there is no such thing in the EU 27 as an individual country. They cannot strike an individual trade deal with Germany or France. It is not available to them, because there is a common commercial policy, so there, there would be a tension.
If we were able to move further and faster on a transatlantic free trade deal with the Americans, one, there will be some tension inside the EU about whether we do that and how far we go before departing, but I do think that is manageable. There may then be a question of, “Hang on; you are then delivering privileged access and a privileged relationship as an individual state, but there is nothing in this for the EU.” I cannot, at this stage, tell you whether that then triggers responses from some of the other member states, saying, “Well, if the Brits are in that mode with the Americans, maybe we then move forward as a bloc of 27 with the Japanese or the Indians or others, and do not cut the UK in on the benefits of the deal”. We are not at that point yet.
Q62 Graham Stringer: You famously said that you are not afraid to speak the truth to those in power. The decision on the Article 50 deal will not be solely determined by the Government. The Prime Minister has said that the House of Commons will have a vote. Like Richard, the more I listen to you, I am not only glad I voted to get out; I think we should get out very quickly. What would be your advice to me as a Member of Parliament in saying that we should vote for no deal, because it is better than a bad deal, or a deal that takes five, six or seven years to arrive at? I would want to leave now with no deal. What would be your advice to Members of Parliament who are thinking along those lines?
Sir Ivan Rogers: That is a very good and complex question. Let me try my best to answer it. As ever on these questions, you have to look at the real‑world consequences of exiting without a deal, and one of the chief objections which seems, to me, to have animated those who wanted to leave but also the British public on the EU is that it has become something they did not think they voted for in the first place; it is not just a common market and it has become intrusive, burdensome and complex, etc. There is a reality to that. You are not going to get from me a contrary view. It has become a very different beast, over the 43 years we were in it, from the thing that we joined in 1973. That is indubitably the case, and most continental European member states, although you may say it is more their elites than their publics, are more relaxed about that than we are. They view this as a process of formation of something, rather than the end state.
My point is that you do not disentangle yourselves from 43 years where the acquis communautaire has got into virtually every nook and cranny of UK economic and social life very easily or abruptly. You are positing, “Can we not just cut the strings and get the hell out of it? This sounds like a bad enterprise to be anywhere near for very long. Just do it.” My advice to you, as it would be—and was—inside the Government is that you have to work through every area, then, of British economic life, and work through what the default to WTO option really means and really entails, and where it really takes you.
I entirely understand both the political appeal of that, and the desire to get on with it and push on as rapidly as possible. The public have voted to exit; they want to see exit happen. I entirely understand that. The issue for me is how we maximise the opportunities from exit, minimise the costs, and minimise the disruptions and disturbances. The issue for all of you to examine on the costs of an abrupt exit is what then happens, sector by sector. How do I explain this best? I have given you the financial services example, but you can look at the aviation sector, the pharmaceuticals sector, the medicines sector, or the phytosanitary and food sector. You have to go through each of these areas.
We can, and you can, legislate, and will be legislating, on the great repeal Bill to ensure that there is not a gap in jurisdiction, or gap in law, in the UK. That is easily done, and the Chairman was responsible for an early cockshy attempt at how you would do that, and that is a kind of methodology for how you leave the European Union and ensure that things do not fall over in the UK the day after exit—say, 1 April 2019, or whatever. That is fine, and you can do that. It is an enormously complex legal process, both inside Government and, no doubt, for the House, but you can do that.
What you cannot do is legislate for what the other side does in terms of market access. An awful lot of market access and single market access is dependent on the certification and accreditation of authorities that have to be authorities of the country of a member state. We will cease to be a member state on a day, certainly, in 2019, and therefore it is not just a matter of changing our own legislation. At the point where we cease to be a member state, access to the single market in certain areas automatically lapses, unless there is a replacement legal agreement that has been drawn up. You can walk away by all means, but then UK‑licensed medicines that are okay in the UK are no longer okay on the European market, because you no longer have the authorisation and accreditation to go with it.
I am not saying that to be spine‑chilling. I am just saying that this is extraordinarily difficult stuff to go through. It crosses the whole economy. There will be differential effects in different sectors of the economy, but what it would need is a really stone‑cold sober analysis of what exiting to WTO would mean, at least for a period of years. If we did that, abruptly and unilaterally, then there would be no appetite on the side of the EU 27 subsequently to sit down for seven years and negotiate a preferential trade agreement, a free trade agreement, with us.
If we walk away, we have to be clear that we are living permanently—not permanently, but for many years—in a WTO‑only world. You then have to understand the implications of the WTO‑only world in micro‑detail. Of course, you can come out of the customs union and then develop a customs co‑operation agreement over a period of months and years with the European Union. If you had no such agreement, what would happen, and what are the risks, then, for the export of British goods into the European market? That is what one needs to know.
Q63 Stephen Kinnock: Many thanks, Sir Ivan, for joining us today. Contrary to some of my colleagues, everything you have said so far convinces me of what a massive risk our country has taken on 23 June, but there you are. I have two questions, one just going back to the issue of the exit cheque. As you say, Michel Barnier has mentioned the figure of €40 billion to €60 billion. Can you give us an assessment of how legally‑binding the UK’s liabilities are? If we were to refuse to pay that money, would the EU take us to court? If so, which court?
The second question is this: in terms of this immensely complex process that you have mentioned, it seems inevitable that some sort of interim deal will have to be done. How likely do you think it is that the EU is minded to give us a bespoke interim deal, or would they be more minded to simply say, “The EEA is there as a ready‑made model, the UK should transfer into the EEA,” and once that happens, at the end of the Article 50 process, we can then invoke Article 218 and begin negotiations on a comprehensive free trade agreement, which, as you have said, would probably take several years? The EEA would be a sort of departure lounge while we wait for the Article 218 process to be completed, which, of course, requires the ratification of 38 parliaments.
Sir Ivan Rogers: On the budgetary question, I am sorry if this sounds unduly cynical but my expectation is that the lawyers on the two sides of the Channel will not agree about either the extent or bindingness of the financial liabilities. As I say, I do not know the origin of the €40 billion to €60 billion, but I think I can guess. A significant part of it would be the UK’s share of the so‑called reste à liquider: that is the gap, in European Union accounting jargon, between commitments and payments, and that has ballooned to an absolutely enormous number, as the Chairman knows probably better than anybody.
We account in terms of payments, and we have always focused on the payments number, and successive Chancellors and Treasury Ministers have focused on the payments number and what actually goes out through the door from the Exchequer. Others are much more focused on the commitments number, and there is a gap. Ridiculously, the gap has grown, now, to more than €200 billion, and by the end of 2018, I suspect, will have grown to nearer €240 billion or €250 billion. If you just do a figure in the air, the UK’s share of that would be 12%; that alone would be somewhere between €25 billion and €30 billion.
I am hesitant to generalise—this is an active discussion going on in Brussels, in the member states, and in every finance ministry in the 27—but I suspect the others will think we might be on the hook for our proportion of the RAL, and will have their legal justifications for that. Certainly, the Commission theologians will. I do not know whether the member states will, or whether they will push their luck on that. It is important to distinguish: there are other components of it, like the pensions issue and pensions for Eurocrats. Others will think we are up for our share of future pension liabilities in an unfunded pension scheme.
Q64 Kate Hoey: Sorry, can I just come in on that, on pensions? Are we going to be liable for all the pensions of all the people from this country—perhaps some of them are MEPs and so on—for the rest of their lives?
Sir Ivan Rogers: This will come down to the question for Eurocrats and Commission employees, and the Commission pension scheme, as well as MEPs. This will be a complex question. I do not know; I am not familiar in detail with exactly how the Commission pension scheme works, but I can imagine where the others might come from and say, “Your liabilities do not cease, especially for that period where those people were officials—1972 to 2018, or whenever—when you were in the European Union. You cannot just walk away.” The others will, I think, argue that “You cannot just walk away from your liabilities and say you have no liability after 2019.” I am not saying this is right or wrong; I think there are lots of things that the other side will argue that will be profoundly wrong, and will be trying to present us with a much larger bill than we would ever want to pay, or think legally justified to pay, just to be clear.
Chair: There are all those chaps in the House of Lords, as well, are there not?
Kate Hoey: Yes, with conflicts of interest.
Sir Ivan Rogers: There are then other components of this. Again, my point would be that there is the legal question. You do not have to be too cynical to think that the Commission legal service and the Council legal service may not come to the same view as the UK legal service and the Treasury solicitors on this. In the end, this either becomes a negotiation where both sides have their own version of the law and the liabilities, and you thrash out a number, or one side or other walks, or there is a political negotiation about what number is or is not tolerable, and over what timescale and what that looks like. This will be an immensely complex part of the next six to 12 months if there is a negotiation on a withdrawal treaty. Money, and the acquired rights of citizens, will be big.
On your transition EEA point, if I may, again, we do not know. The appetite to do a bespoke interim deal would be, if I am candid, probably quite limited. People will say, “Well, you want a bespoke final deal. We should focus on the final deal and the final destination, and where we want to get.” You are then probably right that they will want either a cookie‑cutter or standard, non‑bespoke set of transitional arrangements to bridge us to there, and that may be wholly unpalatable to us. There is a big political debate to be had over that.
On your EEA model, as you know, there are people—if I can put it in referendum terms, both ex‑Remainers and ex‑Leavers—profoundly pro‑exiting the European Union who put that proposition on the table. I am thinking of people like Richard North and the “Flexcit” paper that he and others produced. They said, “You will need some sort of exit antechamber process before you get to full exit”, precisely because of the complexity to which I have alluded. Their argument was for using the EEA. They also argue that in the EEA, there is more flexibility to do things on free movement than there is inside the EU. There are people on all sides of this argument who argue that you would need some sort of transitional arrangement over, maybe, some years before you got to your ultimate destination, in order that you have a negotiation that tackles all of the complexity sector by sector.
One thing I have not made clear enough already, but that is probably implicit in what I have been saying, is that there will not be an appetite from the other side of the table to do loads of different, legally‑binding sectoral deals on a different timescale. It will be the classic European jargon of “Nothing is agreed until everything is agreed”. Therefore, they will think and say, “Well, you do not get anything on financial services and market access”—which they think we all care enormously about—“until you have also clarified where we are on medicines, pharmaceuticals, automotive, and so on”. There will be an appetite, and I would be surprised if some of that did not appear in guidelines from the 27, which says, “This is all one ball of wax and a single negotiation”.
Q65 Michael Tomlinson: Sir Ivan, good morning. It will not surprise you that I differ from Stephen in his outlook. Just to pick up the thread that Graham asked about, as well, earlier on, most Departments have an interest in Brexit‑related policy, and in your experience, how should that process be managed to allow all the necessary information to be fed into the negotiations, both at the right time, but also in good time as well?
Sir Ivan Rogers: That is a very complex question. As I say, this will be the single most complex negotiation the UK system will have conducted, and, I suspect, for the other side of the table as well. This is not like negotiating with South Korea and Canada; this is like negotiating with the US, but with even more politics than negotiating with the US, so it is huge.
It is not for me anymore, but obviously, my advice has been that you need a really top‑class negotiating team across each of these individual areas of the acquis, and you will need lead negotiators in each area who really know their onions and have a top‑class team capable of matching up against the other side. Some of this, obviously, emerged in my email. It is absolutely essential to get that right, and have top‑quality people on it who know their stuff and can run individual sectoral negotiations, and then report up both officially through the sherpa and ministerially up through David Davis to the Prime Minister.
The complexity of it is that, obviously, they will obviously be reporting inside their line Ministry. Whoever is in charge of agricultural market access or phytosanitary obviously has a reporting line up to the Secretary of State for Agriculture, quite rightly. Whoever runs the aviation chunk of this negotiation reports up to the Secretary of State for Transport. However, they will also have to have some direct relationship with the centre, certainly at sherpa level, and then up through the sherpa to, as I say, the Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union and the Prime Minister, because the trade‑offs can only really be made by the Prime Minister, or in a small Cabinet committee.
There will be trade‑offs. At certain points, when it gets rough on trade negotiations, the Prime Minister level will have to step in and say, “You know what? I care more about that than that. I may dismay the Secretary of State for X, but I am going to go hell for leather for that, because that is more important to me and the country than that.” We have to enable the Prime Minister to be able to take those decisions very seriously and very rapidly, because if we want a really rapid negotiation, we have to be geared up for a really rapid negotiation.
The governance of it is difficult on the UK side; you can imagine that it is immensely difficult on the 27 side. The 27 are already setting up machinery that enables Coreper at 27—Coreper without me or my successor—to meet on a weekly basis to discuss the withdrawal treaty, and then wherever we go on the future treaty. They will have a weekly rhythm. It will be governed by Coreper at 27. The person in the chair of that will be working for the President of the European Council; we regularly mentioned Didier Seeuws, the ex‑Belgian diplomat and Herman van Rompuy’s chef de cabinet. He will chair a process of the 27, and you will need, frankly, a combination of people who look a bit like me—the Permanent Representatives—but then sectoral experts from the capitals or from the permanent representations, brought in for each chunk of the discussion.
Of course, if you are Germany or France, you have a huge number of people already servicing this and already thinking about it in your capital, in order to be able to service that machinery in Brussels. The 27 in Brussels will have to meet whoever the Prime Minister nominates them to meet from the UK. A lot of this inevitably, I am afraid, has to be done at official level, because it will be unbelievably technical, difficult and complex in each of these areas. However, in the end, officials cannot decide anything and should not decide anything on their own. All of this has to be properly run, and officials have to be accountable to Cabinet committee machinery and to the Prime Minister for the positions they take in the room up against the 27 on each of these individual dossiers.
I hope I have made it sound complex, because it is complex. We can get it right. What I was trying to stress to my staff on exit—I can get onto the reasons for putting that in an email to my staff—was that UKRep people are fantastic, incidentally, but are also an amalgam of domestic civil servants, most of them from domestic Departments, Foreign Office civil servants, and locally‑based staff. They are certainly the biggest single collection of expertise on negotiating with the 27 that the country has.
They have enormous expertise and wisdom in each of these areas, built up from their time negotiating up against the 27 and dealing with the institutions, and they will have to play some role, I hope, in formulating UK objectives, thinking through where we are going, and thinking through where the other 27 are coming from, and then thinking through how we maximise our chances of getting the best possible outcome for the UK.
Chair: Could I just move on from that point? We are still in the EU. Since 23 June, the volume of stuff that comes to us has not slowed down; in fact, in certain respects, it has become more critical. We do 1,000 documents a year, and to use Ken Clarke’s analogy of the burrow that he came up with yesterday, it comes straight down the burrow and it lands in Wonderland. Wonderland is here in the House of Commons, because it goes through Section 2 of the European Communities Act, and it is in the pipeline, and it is of extreme importance to the people of this country, because we are actually being legislated for by this process.
We did a report back last year, just before the referendum itself, and we concluded from the evidence we had taken that it was estimated that the great majority of legislation is agreed without any debate at all at a ministerial level, having previously been negotiated by officials in the Council preparatory bodies, working groups and Coreper. It had been estimated that most decisions—around 70%—are, in practice, made before reaching a Council level, and are proposed by Coreper for adoption as “A” items.
You will understand this really serious problem about the democratic deficit, which just does not seem to have been generally understood. People think there is majority voting going on, but in practice an awful lot of it is done behind closed doors by consensus. We really need to move onto this question, to get your considered view about that, and I am going to ask Stephen Kinnock if he would ask the first question about relationships in the Council. This is a huge democratic question about the manner in which legislation is made. I would be grateful for your comments.
Q66 Stephen Kinnock: The Government’s explanatory memorandum repeatedly tells us that the UK will remain a member of the EU and engage fully in the negotiations until it exits. How robustly is the UK engaging in negotiations in working groups—which is where most negotiations happen, of course—in Coreper and Council?
Sir Ivan Rogers: I will try to deal with some of the Chairman’s observations as well, if I may. We are engaging very robustly, and there was no reason to change after the referendum. That was the message I gave to staff, and that was the message coming down from on high from senior Ministers. We wanted people to engage completely normally, and fight their corner in working groups, as I would in Coreper, because this legislation either would still or might still apply to us, and we still had our equities at the table. We were one of the 28 member states until we ceased to be. That has been the posture of UKRep ever since 24 June, and will remain so.
I would make a couple of observations on it. First of all, the role of UKRep has to evolve, and was evolving; I was trying to evolve it as rapidly as possible after 24 June. We have to do three things, really, in UKRep. One is the ongoing business, and we have to do it as professionally and robustly as we can until we exit, and protect UK interests and fight for UK interests. Two was to play a major part with an emerging new Ministry, which was set up in June in DExEU, growing like Topsy, but—with no disrespect to a lot of the people joining it, who are excellent people—an awful lot of them do not have a huge amount of EU experience.
I was saying to my staff, as, indeed, you saw in the email as well, that UKRep plays a very active, vigorous role, getting back to London all the time and engaging with domestic policy‑making staff, because UKRep has to take a bigger role in helping people formulate the right policies and right objectives, and they have the street wisdom and understand the negotiations.
The third thing, which is the ambition I had and I am sure my successor will have, was that we then have to be the best third‑country mission in Brussels, from the date that we are a third‑country mission, whenever that is. If that is spring 2019, then we have to look ahead to being a third‑country mission, like the Americans, Swiss and Norwegians. I was talking, well before the referendum, to all counterparts from third countries, trying to prepare that, thinking ahead to what the “best in class” for a mission outside the European Union looks like. That is a bit on the role of UKRep.
Obviously, one’s status in the room, both in Coreper and in working groups, post‑the decision to exit is different, and it feels different. Even though I have been around a lot, and people know me and have known me for years—sometimes decades—in this business, it already felt much less like 28 people negotiating around a table than it did before. A lot of more junior people in UKRep were experiencing that in working groups. It is not that you get personal comments: “Why are you taking the microphone? What has it got to do with you? You are not going to be there,” but there is a sentiment of, “For an awful lot of this, we are now moving this project on without you”. We are increasingly seeing leaders meeting at 27. I fought tooth-and-nail to prevent anything other than leaders meeting at 27, because the Council is the Council is the Council, and the Council is at 28, and therefore, there cannot be Council‑formation meetings at 27. That is extremely dangerous on anything legislative, because otherwise we are just cut out of the process and it is being applied to us, and we are not even in the room discussing it. We have held the line on that.
However, there is no question but that other member states are looking at us differently now than they were a year ago, because they are thinking, “You are going to be gone in a couple of years’ time, so why do we have to listen to your views on data protection? It will not apply to you, and you will be doing your own thing. That is what you want your sovereignty and autonomy for. Why do we have to listen to your views about the legislative arrangements that apply to the 27?” That is wrong, and as I say, I fought that very vigorously over the last several months. Any legislation going through the pipeline is still going through the legislative process that we all know, and many of us do not much like; it applies to the 28, and we have our rights and we have our voting rights. We have our right to say on the microphone what we want and what we do not want, but I am just giving you the spirit.
One of the things I was trying to address via my email—because it had been a repeated subject of discussion with UKRep staff through the autumn—was precisely that sense of “Our job is changing on us quite radically”. Frankly, my brightest and best in UKRep were saying to me, sometimes one‑to‑one and frequently in all‑staff meetings or other staff meetings, “If I am going to stay here and fight for the interests of the country on the exit negotiations and any subsequent trade negotiation, I need to know that that is what Ministers want and that is what senior officials back in London want, and I need to know that UKRep is majorly engaged and personally engaged in that; otherwise, I am going to be off.”
Q67 Chair: Do you not think that in an area where it is quite manifestly in our national interests—I think that the Ports regulation is an example, and I came over to Brussels to speak to you about that—there are circumstances in which we must make it absolutely clear that we would vote against it, which previously has not been the way of doing things, and to give reasons on the record—this came out in our previous evidence session before the referendum itself—so that Parliament and the public will know post‑Brexit where we are?
By the way, the EU will also know. When we get into the great repeal Bill, there will be positions that have already been struck, so that people have a clear idea: “We are not going to do this. It is not in our national interests. It may have been part of the acquis, but we are actually going to repeal it, and we are going to make it clear to all and sundry that that is the case.” Do you agree with that in principle?
Sir Ivan Rogers: I do, yes.
Chair: That is very helpful.
Sir Ivan Rogers: I have no dispute with any of that. My point is a bit of a broader one, as I say, on what those 150‑odd people in UKRep are there for, what they are most there to do, and where Whitehall’s attention is these days. My constant point back to London, which I am sure I have bored many of my colleagues rigid with, is, “You have to pay attention to the daily business”—exactly your point, Chairman. “You have to pay attention to the daily business and the daily passage of directives in multiple different areas”, because others are, frankly, looking at opportunities in the next couple of years to land things in directives and regulations that they know are going to cause us difficulty. I do not want to sound paranoid, but obviously that is going on, and we have to be on it. Again, I am not here to wash dirty linen.
Chair: Do, by all means.
Sir Ivan Rogers: Whitehall has a hell of a lot to do on Brexit, and at speed, and is building a new Ministry and a new Trade Ministry as well. We do not have trade negotiating expertise, because we have not had trade negotiators and we have not had to do trade negotiations since before 1973. We have a lot of things to do, and then we have all the internal UK‑specific questions: what are we going to do with our sovereignty and autonomy in individual areas?
I have to say, speaking as the ex‑Permanent Representative, in the six months after the referendum, I saw a diminution of Whitehall attention and effort on day‑to‑day dossiers. I am not criticising anybody—any Department, any Minister. I want to make that utterly clear. People are run off their feet and working enormously hard, both at ministerial level and at senior-official level, but I had many of my officials coming to me in UKRep saying, “We had no instructions in this area. I have nothing to say, because I am not getting anything back from the Department. I am not clear what I am saying on microphone and what our position is.”
It was becoming more difficult in the autumn, because people are so stretched with dealing with Brexit, and because departmental boards and Departmental Ministers are understandably going hell for leather for what they want the world to look like after Brexit. We were getting a diminishing quality and quantity of instructions through to UKRep on day‑to‑day dossiers that still matter to your Committee and matter to other Committees. I said repeatedly at mandarin level—and we were working on this, and DExEU were working on this, incessantly—“That is not good enough. You have to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time. You have to be dealing with these day‑to‑day dossiers. They matter every bit as much as they did, and until we leave, we are full members of the 28 and we have to make good on that.” I am just reporting, from the belly of the beast in UKRep, that the view from many of my troops was that we are simply getting less and less good quality from Departments, because they are inundated on Brexit issues.
Q68 Chair: Could I just give one example? We have a whole mass of documents on asylum that are directly relevant to the whole question of immigration. There are documents that are about two inches deep on the question—stacks of them—and we had to ask the Minister in, because we are concerned, in the light of what you have said and what I have put to you, that we appear to be continuing down a route that quite clearly will be ruled out post‑Brexit. We are in agreement about the fact that this is not only important, but that there needs to be a complete focus by Whitehall on the implications of this as we go forward.
Sir Ivan Rogers: Above all, people have to know and weigh up in each area how much it is going to matter. Is this something that we can or should let go, because it ceases to matter because we know it is not going to apply to us, or is it something where, as you say, we have to fight tooth-and-nail, because if we are not careful, we will be bound by it in some way that constrains our room to manoeuvre post‑Brexit?
Q69 Mr Andrew Turner: Could and should negotiations on EU law such as Coreper be more open? You heard earlier the comment about how public these discussions are. They did not sound very public to me.
Sir Ivan Rogers: Coreper is a very odd mix, really. It is semi‑executive and semi‑legislative, and it is not really like anything else I have ever done, or like anything we have here. One’s role is partly as a negotiator of a sovereign member state, up against negotiators of other sovereign member states and working through voluminous documents and trying to do deals, and some of it is pure legislative activity, because the Council as Council is one of the co‑legislators, and the Council then has to represent its own interests in the co‑legislation process with the European Parliament.
The big institutional development of the last 10 to 15 years, really, has still been the rise of the European Parliament and the rise of the trialogues process in legislation. Unless you are in the Presidency or in the trio around the Presidency, you are not in the room for the trialogues, so you can take a position in Coreper or in Council and you can try to hold the Presidency’s feet to the fire and say, “Up with this we will not put; these are our red lines and you cannot breach those red lines,” but they are the people negotiating with the European Parliament to produce a legislative outcome.
One of my regular mantras to my staff, but also to London staff, is that you all focus immensely on what happens in the Council, because your Ministers attend the Council and you reach a general approach in Council, but the general approach is a half‑time score. That is what I used to call it. You can be two up at half‑time, but then people can, by getting the right briefing to the right European parliamentarians, nick a couple of goals in in the second half during the trialogues process, and things that you thought you had established in the general approach and in Council can go away from you. Equally, the same can happen in reverse. We had to get smarter. I spent more of my life than any previous Permanent Representative with the European Parliament. We had to get smarter, and UKRep and Whitehall had to get smarter, at prosecuting our interests via European parliamentarians, including non‑British parliamentarians, to try to get the legislative outcomes we want. It is not all about the Council anymore. The European Parliament is an enormously key player in the legislative process, and, as the Chairman says, that legislation then applies to the UK.
Q70 Mr Andrew Turner: How much is the trade‑off between negotiations on one dossier and those on another?
Sir Ivan Rogers: That rarely happens that directly, because you are dealing in sequence in the room with a huge agenda, week by week, in Coreper. I agree that the bulk of actual deals on not terribly politically controversial stuff are done in Coreper. I would like to see more substantive discussions and debates in Council.
There are huge problems, Mr Chairman and other members of the Committee, with the way the Council operates overall that frustrate all members of the Council, because a Council of 28 can be a very laborious process, and a ritual exchange of speaking note‑type views by Ministers who are understandably a bit bored rigid when they go to it. They want a more political exchange at Council than they frequently get, so I would not give you an argument about too many of the deals effectively being done at the bureaucratic level.
Equally, part of the job of bureaucrats and technocrats like me or like my successors is to try to escalate the right issues politically and ensure there is the right political discussion about the stuff that really has politics in it, rather than the stuff that can be just dealt with by people like me or by my former staff at working group level.
Q71 Kate Hoey: Sir Ivan, can I take you back to the pre‑referendum negotiations that you were heavily involved with? Do you know whether any of the 27 countries ever really understood that there was a very big possibility that we were going to vote to leave? Did you ever say to them, for example, “By the way, things are looking”—I do not know whether you would say “bad” or “good” in your terms?
Sir Ivan Rogers: This is one of the many curiosities of the coverage in recent weeks. I was notorious in London and in Brussels for believing that this was basically a 50-50 shot. I said so repeatedly. I said so before the election. Bear in mind, I started in October or early November 2013. At that stage, most of my colleagues really did not believe that they would face a majority Conservative Government that was committed to a referendum, so for quite a long while, I warned them that I thought that was actually extremely likely to happen, and that if the Government was a majority Conservative Government, it would not only commit to a referendum; it would go through with it, and then it was eminently possible that it would be lost.
As I say, one of the curiosities of coverage recently is that I was notorious in Government for having thought for many years that it was reasonably likely that we would exit. I have been thinking about post‑exit Britain, and talking about this, for many years. Some of the fairer coverage in bits of the press points that out.
I told my best opposite numbers, my key opposite numbers, and the people I know best in member states, “Do not underestimate this. There is a very, very serious risk of this referendum being lost.” Now, do people believe it?
Q72 Kate Hoey: Did you tell the Prime Minister your views? I presume you did.
Sir Ivan Rogers: Yes. As I say, as emerges quite regularly, there were other, much more sanguine views elsewhere in the system, including in some parts of Number 10—I am not saying the Prime Minister directly—that the referendum would be won rather comfortably. I never thought that, and never said it. I said it was a 50-50 shot.
Q73 Kate Hoey: Do you think the negotiating strategy could have been different if, perhaps, the Prime Minister had realised or accepted your view that this could be a 50-50?
Sir Ivan Rogers: I have to be careful about saying anything about my advice to any Prime Minister; you will understand that. This puts me in a slightly difficult position, because it is obvious that various former colleagues have spoken at length about their views on this.
From an official’s perspective, I had no role, nor should I have had any role, in drawing up the Conservative Party manifesto for the 2015 election. We did not even see it before it got published, nor should we. Tom Scholar and I, who did the renegotiation, did not know what was going to be in the manifesto until it was printed. When it was printed, we then did a lot of work during the campaign for the election about “If the Conservatives get back in, what are they committed to in their manifesto, what does that translate to, and what would we do about it?”
I feel there is a very clear and direct link between what was in the manifesto for the election and what was in the David Cameron letter to Donald Tusk of, I think, 10 November 2015, which itemised his four baskets and then specified what, within those four baskets, he wanted. You can believe that was the wrong stuff, or not enough of the right stuff, or completely beside the point. That is not, as an official, what I am there for. I took no view on that; that is not what I am there for. I was there, along with Tom Scholar and other people working for the Prime Minister, to say, “That is what you said in your manifesto. That is what we make of it.” We turn that into a proposition in terms of, “Where do you want to get in this negotiation?” and we then try to go and negotiate it.
I am well aware, because I was on the receiving end of that a lot—and I have been again in recent months—of the idea that somehow I had a major personal role in downgrading levels of aspiration. The levels of aspiration were set politically, as they should be, by politicians in a manifesto process. That was then translated into what we produced from the Prime Minister six months after the manifesto to Donald Tusk, and the following three months were spent in the most extraordinarily intensive negotiation process, trying to translate the Cameron‑to‑Tusk letter into substantive, legally‑binding outcomes. That is the process, and that is all I think I was there for, or could do.
Q74 Richard Drax: Could I just pick up very briefly on that point? Sorry, Chairman, for quickly butting in. While I quite respect that you have to keep certain things to yourself, I cannot believe, Sir Ivan, that with all the huge experience you have in EU matters, you did not tell the Prime Minister, “You have not got enough”, “That is the wrong thing”, or “We should get more”, or whatever. I just do not believe you did not give him advice on these issues. Now, you may not be able to tell us here, but I find it hard to understand that you, as such a highly‑respected figure in Europe, did not give our Prime Minister advice on what he was trying to achieve. I just find that very hard.
Sir Ivan Rogers: As I say, the template of what he was trying to achieve was set at the manifesto level via the manifesto‑writing process, and the objectives he set for a successful renegotiation were set in April 2015 by that manifesto. I do not think it was open to me then in May or June, or to Tom Scholar as sherpa, to go back to him and say, “Incidentally, that does not really look bold or radical enough”. That is not the job.
There were two key areas, really. All the areas were important, but in my view, two were most important substantively, and the first was the relationship between the 28 and the 19; in other words, “Is there a sustainable two‑tier Europe?” I do not wish to put words in the former Prime Minister’s mouth, but, in my view, what the former Prime Minister originally wanted would have been a treaty change, or set of treaty changes, and it became obvious during 2014 that treaty change on the timescale before his in/out referendum was not going to be deliverable.
What he was looking for was, really, a two‑tier Europe rather than a two‑speed Europe, in the jargon I would use: not a two‑speed Europe where you are trundling on a slow train to the same destination, but a two‑tier Europe where you say, “We are happy with a market‑based membership and living in an outer tier, but we do not want to be a member of significant chunks of the rest of your acquis”. You can like that or you can loathe it; obviously, your personal view is that is nothing like enough and we are far better off out, but his view of life, as I understood it and as I interpreted it, was of a two‑tier version where the UK could have a sui generis different version of membership from any other member state; could get the benefits, as he saw them, of being inside the single market, but not get sucked inexorably into a further project of integration. That is essentially where he was.
One of the two most important things, therefore, in his view and in my view was the relationship between the 28 and the 19 eurozone members. Were we moving towards a world where, automatically, the 19 would have a qualified majority and increasingly exercise it to override British interests in key areas, and the effective thrust of the project was being set by the eurozone members, as opposed to those of us outside? That was what the famous Section A of the document, about the relationships between the 28 and the 19, was about, and that was hand‑to‑hand fighting and a very big negotiation. I think there was quite a lot of substance in it, but it is gone.
The other big issue, obviously, and much the biggest political issue, domestically and on the continent, was free movement of people. As I have said to you, his clear view was that he wanted market access and market membership. He wanted to be in the single market, but he nevertheless wanted a tighter and clearer definition of free movement. You know he went for a proposition on access to benefits and, in particular, access to in‑work benefits.
Now, again, I do not want to go through a long history. Obviously, I wrote lots of notes at lots of times, both pre‑election and post‑election, on that. My recollection on the origin of the four‑year in‑benefit restriction—you remember the four‑year qualification period?—is that that came in the autumn of 2014 from Open Europe. I think they put a proposition on paper from Stephen Booth and Damien Chalmers—I may be wrong—which suggested that you could have a four‑year qualification for in‑work benefits for non‑UK citizens in the UK. Their contention was that it would be legally doable, it would require secondary legislation change, and it would be negotiable by the 28.
My view was that it involved direct discrimination, which was prohibited by the treaties, and therefore would entail treaty change. I did not believe—and I think I was proven correct—that it would be deliverable by the negotiation of the 28. Having experienced many of the conversations with other leaders, I am clear that something that was deliberately and directly discriminatory against EU citizens for UK citizens was not a runner. I did say that.
We then had other discussions—again, I do not want to go a lot further—on this track of, “Was it possible, under the treaties, to have numerical limits?” recognising that in the period after the A8 countries had acceded, the main accession of 2004, we had not operated transitional provisions, a decision taken by the then Prime Minister, Tony Blair. Therefore, was it possible, either for some period or permanently, to reintroduce some sort of quantitative limit, and would that be legally permissible? Again, I am not a lawyer, and I am not there to opine on the law. I took lots of legal advice on it, and had lots of conversations on it. My view on it was that that was not negotiable while staying inside the single market, and I think that has been borne out.
I think, actually, the current Prime Minister has after all, effectively, just taken the same view, which is that you cannot stay in the single market and have numerical or quantitative restrictions on people. You cannot control your own borders and be inside the single market, so I think she is actually entirely agreeing with me. There was a lot of debate around that, and of course, I was intensively involved in that, but, as I say, I do not think my role as an official is to do anything other than take what the senior politicians had decided was the Conservative manifesto commitment for the scale and nature of the renegotiation, and try to translate that into legal text. That is what I did.
Q75 Chair: If I may say—because we are getting towards Prime Minister’s Questions—I would just like to put one point, before I come to Steve Double, and that is, of course, that our Committee was following all of this extremely closely. You, no doubt, read our reports.
Sir Ivan Rogers: I did.
Q76 Chair: We came to a number of conclusions. We thought the referendum negotiations were inadequate for a variety of reasons, and also that we simply did not believe this idea that there were guarantees of treaty change. We do not need to go into that now, but I just want to get that on the record, because you know what we said.
Sir Ivan Rogers: I do.
Chair: That is now a matter of record.
Q77 Steve Double: It is quite clear that the referendum result was close enough that, if the renegotiation had achieved more, the result may have been different. I am interested in your view as to whether or not you think more concessions could have been achieved. If so, how could that have been done?
Sir Ivan Rogers: Just responding briefly to the Chairman, if I may, while I did read all of your reports, and I entirely understand and respect the position you took on the scale and ambit of the renegotiation, as I say, all one can do as an official is work with the instructions that one is given from the very top as to “These are my desiderata. Please go and make them happen.” That is what I did. The most difficult and contorted elements were the relationship between the 28 and the 19, which was an exceptionally difficult, vigorous negotiation for very obvious reasons—there were lots of economic interests engaged on all sides—and where we could end up on restrictions of benefits.
On the legal issue, I do not want to rehearse ancient history, Mr Chairman, but you know that the Prime Minister took the decision on an in‑out referendum in 2012. I was his sherpa at the time, and Jon Cunliffe was Permanent Representative. He asked us, only after having taken the decision for an in/out referendum, what sort of timescale we thought was viable on it. I said, as did Jon Cunliffe, “Evidently, none of this applies before the election, because this only applies if there is a majority Conservative Government”. We were in a coalition Government at the time, and the Liberals were not on board for that.
I said at the time—because this relates to the question that you have just asked me—that there is therefore a relatively modest window in 2015 and early 2016 before French and German elections start to freeze up the system, and there is no latitude to make institutional change. At the time, he was talking, as you know, to Chancellor Merkel and others about the possibility of some specific, surgical eurozone treaty changes in conjunction with UK‑related treaty changes. That looked quite an optimistic prospect in 2012 and 2013. She tried on the eurozone side—I will not bore you with the details—in various European Councils in 2013.
However, it became increasingly evident that the time was not right in 2015-16 for a major German or other push, in conjunction with anybody, for surgical strike eurozone treaty changes. The appetite in other capitals, the key capitals, and in the institutions for any kind of permanent institutional treaty change before the end of 2017 disappeared, so that was what the Prime Minister was faced with after 2015, having nevertheless in his manifesto given a commitment that there would be an in/out referendum, and that is what led us on to the international law decision.
I understand and respect your views on it. I have lots of views on it, which one day I might divulge but I cannot, here and now. That is what led us to the technology of the international law decision and the February agreement as something that would lead, ultimately, to treaty change. There was a cast‑iron guarantee, as we saw it, that it would, which would lead towards the two‑tier vision that I was talking about.
Q78 Chair: Just on that, as it happens, on 13 June, I received a letter from the Prime Minister regarding this issue of treaty change, which stemmed from a question put by Richard Drax with respect to whether or not it was really a viable proposition. That letter will also get into the public domain sooner or later, but has not done so yet. It related to the advice that our legal adviser had given them, which is incorporated in that report, but again, I just wanted to put that on the record as well.
Sir Ivan Rogers: If I could then come to your question—“Could we have got further?”—I do not think we could have got further on the free movement issue, for the reasons I have given, which the Prime Minster at the time tested. As I say, the current Prime Minister effectively seems to me to have taken exactly the same view, which is that it is incompatible with single market membership to have quantitative restrictions, set only by the UK, on free movement of people. I do not think we could have got further in some bust‑up or further night of the long knives in February 2016.
You are in the world of counterfactual history. If, then, despite having gone through a laborious negotiation in good faith on all the baskets that the Prime Minister set out as his ambition, he had said, nevertheless, “I have thought about all this, and this is not enough for me and I am going to walk away from the table”, what would have happened then?” By now, very little would have happened, to be honest. Things do not move very fast. I think there would have been a period of recrimination and blood‑letting that would have lasted quite some months. We would have effectively walked away and said, “If this is the best you can give me, it is not enough, and we will have to come back to this issue in 2017, or I will press the trigger on exit”.
We will never know. We cannot ever know. My view, genuinely, on anything that involved staying in the European Union and single market membership is that nothing better with quantitative limits and the UK’s own sovereign right to set its own numbers coming through borders was ever on offer. I do not think others can go there, or will go there, and they keep on saying it at every level. It may be frustrating. I am not saying, then, that the world is not evolving on free movement, and there are not preoccupations in other member states, but they are not the same preoccupations, and there is not the same desire for quantitative controls and control of borders in a sovereign way, which could have then given him a fair wind in 2017 to say, “Right, we have a different negotiation now, and much higher levels of ambition”. That is my honest assessment.
Q79 Chair: We are getting to the end of the session, so I just want to ask some questions that I indicated that I would at the beginning. The first question I would just like to get on the record is this: we had a lot of White Papers. I was very critical about those at the time. There were questions about the manner in which Project Fear was put together. I would like to take this opportunity to ask: were you in any way involved in the preparation of those White Papers and what many people regard as the misrepresentations that they contained?
Sir Ivan Rogers: The White Papers?
Chair: There was a whole series of White Papers that were published under the aegis of the European Referendum Act. They arose out of Sections 6 and 7 of that Act, and there was a lot of information that was put out in the public domain as part of the campaign. I just wanted to get it clear as to whether or not you, as ambassador to the EU at the time, were involved in that. We call it Project Fear as a general description.
Sir Ivan Rogers: There were a number of papers produced, and there was a referendum unit run by Matthew Gould, I think, in the Cabinet Office.
Q80 Chair: Were you feeding into it? Were you saying, “These are the things that we can say?”
Sir Ivan Rogers: I think you are primarily talking about the Treasury document, both the long‑term Treasury document on the long‑term model—
Chair: There were a whole series of them.
Q81 Kate Hoey: The one that went to the public.
Sir Ivan Rogers: I obviously saw and discussed the one that went to the public. There were multiple different factual products that were produced. I had no input at all, as I recollect, into the one that went to the public. However, for the documents that were produced that were informative documents, yes, a number of senior officials were engaged in, and there was a referendum unit.
Q82 Chair: Were you involved in this? Were you were advising them on what they could and should say in those documents?
Sir Ivan Rogers: We were playing the classic UKRep role as we play now, really, which is vetting them for factual accuracy and supplying comments and observations of “Is this right?”; “Have you got this proposition right?”; “Is that correct?
Chair: We do not have time to go into the actual detail.
Sir Ivan Rogers: No, but you know, Chairman, that there was a referendum unit set up in the Cabinet Office, which then was dismantled at the point that the referendum moved into its final four weeks, and that was under Matthew Gould, as I say, for a few months, generating a number of documents. There was then a separate Treasury process. I am not a modeller or a forecaster; I have nothing to say on the substance of what came out of the Treasury model. They modelled deliberately three stylised options. I now cannot recall what they were, but I am not a forecaster or modeller. I have nothing to say on the numbers.
Q83 Chair: You saw most of the material that was being put into the public domain. Is that fair enough?
Sir Ivan Rogers: Yes.
Q84 Chair: Did you tick it off, as it were?
Sir Ivan Rogers: As I say, I am not in a position to tick it off on forecasting or modelling. I cannot say, “That number looks a bit high. Do we really think it is a 7.5% impact on GDP over a 50‑year period?” Whatever my skill‑set is, it is not that.
Q85 Chair: The next question I wanted to ask is: why did you decide to resign?
Sir Ivan Rogers: I set it out very clearly and honestly. As you know, Mr Chairman, I started the job in November 2013. Let me put it this way: there were three possibilities for when I should quit. The first was that I should have gone straightaway after the referendum, and I was very prepared to, if people wanted me to.
Q86 Chair: Did you want to?
Sir Ivan Rogers: No, I did not want to. The only circumstances in which I would have wanted to is if I felt I could not work for a pro‑Brexit Government and deliver Brexit, and deliver the best possible Brexit. I do not have any principled objection.
Q87 Chair: Were you pushed or did you resign?
Sir Ivan Rogers: Can I carry on with my answer? I made that clear at the time, and the message came back from every level, including top levels, that people wanted me to stay on, and also wanted me to help in this phase, which I think I have, intensively. Just for the record, not only have I done the Permanent Representative job for the last six months; in the four months of the autumn, I took 25 trips back to London for official and ministerial meetings, averaging one and a half trips a week, so regarding my dedication to the cause of trying to get the show on the road, trying to get the analysis right, trying to contribute UKRep’s wisdom and my own wisdom to that analysis, and to the options to put in front of the Prime Minister, I was utterly committed.
I worked in the renegotiation more than 100 hours a week for 17 or 18 weeks running. I did exactly the same through last autumn, so my level of commitment was exactly the same. The only circumstances in which I would have offered my resignation on 24 June would have been if I thought I could not work for a Government that was committed to Brexit, and that is not the case. I am committed to Brexit. I think Brexit has to happen, has to be made to happen, and we have to get the best possible Brexit for the company, which means maximising the opportunities.
Q88 Chair: Do you like Brexit?
Sir Ivan Rogers: Even for a former official, that is not the issue. It is, “Can you deliver absolutely everything to make the best possible Brexit happen for the country in line with what Ministers conclude they want?”
Q89 Chair: You understand the purpose of my question, which is that there are huge issues of a historical and constitutional nature.
Sir Ivan Rogers: I agree.
Q90 Chair: Therefore, the fact that the British people made this decision is something that you are content with.
Sir Ivan Rogers: Yes. I am not elected by anybody. On what basis would I have a view? If you cannot work for a Government that is committed to a particular proposition, you quit, and you should quit. In circumstances where a different Government, committed to a different version of Brexit which said, “We would like to turn our back on the world, close our borders and have no free trade”, and was a non‑globalising, non‑free trade Brexit, I think I would have quit, if I can give you that answer.
I am an avid free trader. I am a free trade and sound money Treasury man by origin. That is what I believe in. A free‑trading, globalising Britain outside the European Union with a free‑trading relationship with the European Union and with multiple other players is something I am more than reconciled to and more than happy with. My view of what senior officials like me are there for is to maximise the opportunities out of Brexit, which are multiple, in multiple different domains—we have not really discussed that—and minimise the costs and the bumps on the road to exit, which could be very considerable for the reasons I gave earlier.
This is a humongous negotiation and project. I think it will take years to get to the other side of it. If we get it right, the country comes out the other side of it prosperous and healthy, and maybe, indeed, happier on sovereignty. If we get it wrong, there could be very, very severe complications over the short and medium timescale. That is my view. My point is that, as an official, I am not paid to believe what an individual Prime Minister believes. I have worked for multiple Prime Ministers, multiple Chancellors, and multiple Foreign Secretaries. I have loved working for all of them. I am not paid to believe what they believe. That is not what I am there for.
Q91 Chair: One last question: why did you time your resignation for the new year? Looking at the massive array of pre‑referendum mandarins who came to your defence as soon as the matters got into the public domain, did you have any discussions with them in what I call the December period, before the actual resignation itself?
Sir Ivan Rogers: No, I had no discussions with anybody other than my wife. To continue where I was, there are three options for exiting when you have already been there three years. The first is to go immediately: first, I did not want to; secondly, I was exhorted at every level not to and to be involved very heavily in building the new ministry, the new regime, transferring knowledge and delivering UKRep—and the best of UKRep—into it.
You could then go when I did, which was around now, and I think is the right time. My personal, very strong view—and I have said it in this note, and repeatedly in UKRep—is that the team that is there at the time that Article 50 is invoked has to be there at the end of this process, whatever this process proves to be. You need a unified team. They need to work seamlessly together. They need to be there in situ, and you need to have gone through it. My strong view is that this is the right time to go, because you need a new team in place who sees it through, and who knows how many years this will be? However, I think the right thing now is for the top two or three officials to be there permanently and see it through to an end.
The other time to have gone is obviously, theoretically, I could have been one of those officials seeing it through to the end. Goodness knows when that is; it could be 2019 or 2020. There were only ever three options. I thought about this long and hard, as you can imagine. I was thinking about it through the autumn, about what an appropriate juncture would be, wondering whether one should go and wondering, indeed, whether to draft a cockshy draft of what I thought an Article 50 letter would look like. However, I certainly was thinking that sometime around Christmas or before Article 50 invocation is the right time, so that a successor can be appointed and is running by the time the Article 50 letter is sent, so that they, then, alongside the sherpa, are going to be the two key officials who really have to run this process.
Chair: In conclusion, may I say it has been very interesting hearing your version of events, as you can see from the Committee’s response, and also that, as far as we are concerned, thank you very much for coming?
Sir Ivan Rogers: Thank you.