Public Accounts Committee
Oral evidence: Implementing EU Exit: BEIS, HC 687
Wednesday 31 January 2018
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 31 January 2018.
Watch the meeting
Members present: Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown (Chair); Martyn Day; Caroline Flint; Luke Graham; Gillian Keegan; Nigel Mills.
Sir Amyas Morse, Comptroller and Auditor General, Adrian Jenner, Director of Parliamentary Relations, National Audit Office, Siân Jones, Director, NAO, and Richard Brown, Treasury Officer of Accounts, HM Treasury, were in attendance.
Questions 1-84
Witnesses
I: Alex Chisholm, Permanent Secretary, Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, Samantha Beckett, Director General and senior responsible officer for EU Exit, BEIS, and Emma Ward, Director, EU Exit Portfolio, BEIS.
Report by the Comptroller and Auditor General
Implementing the UK’s Exit from the European Union: The Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy (HC 608)
Examination of witnesses
Witnesses: Alex Chisholm, Samantha Beckett and Emma Ward.
Q1 Chair: Good afternoon everybody, and welcome back. We now move to the second of our two sessions today: “Implementing the UK’s exit from the EU: the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy”— known hereon in as BEIS. Today we are considering the NAO’s Report on BEIS’s preparedness for Brexit.
With one of the largest and most complex EU exit portfolios, the scale of the Department’s task is substantial. It leads the Government’s work on 22 economic sectors that will be affected by the EU exit, as well as having to deliver its business-as-usual work, including major policies such as the industrial strategy and Euratom. The work to prepare those sectors for Brexit is complex, involves a multitude of organisations and will take some considerable time to achieve.
As at November 2017, the Department had only 77% of the staff it needed this year to deal with those challenges. We will want to question whether the Department has the right people in the right place at the right time to deliver this mammoth task. We will also want to get some answers about the Department’s ability to deliver its EU exit portfolio alongside its business as usual, whether it has the resources and skills that it needs, and how it works with stakeholders to deliver a successful EU exit—a pretty large piece of work, Mr Chisholm.
Let me welcome our witnesses. Today we have: on my left, Emma Ward, who is the director of the EU exit portfolio; in the middle, the return of Alex Chisholm, who is of course the Permanent Secretary at the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy; and on my right, Samantha Beckett, who is the director general and senior responsible officer for EU exit within the Department. Welcome to all three of you.
Mr Chisholm, you have a mammoth job to do to make sure that your Department, in all its various guises, is ready for whatever the negotiations throw at you up until March 2018, and then during whatever implementation period is negotiated. Do you think that your Department will be ready?
Alex Chisholm: Yes, in short, but let me expand on that a little. This time last year, from the speech given by the Prime Minister at Lancaster House, we began to get a sense of the journey that we were on, and that was followed by the article 50 letter in March. At that time, we very much began gearing up, and made two quite important strategic decisions. One was that we would need considerable additional resources to do this. We could not possibly hope to fulfil all our existing statutory responsibilities and then deal with Brexit on top of that without additional resources. We bid successfully for additional resources of 350 people net—we reckoned it would take us 450 people; we recycled 100 and got 350 in addition.
The other important strategic choice that we made was that we could see that the work was going to be so big it could not be left just to the international group, which is the group that Sam Beckett heads up. We felt that, notwithstanding the capabilities of the people in that group, it was such a big undertaking for the Department that it needed to be distributed right through the Department, so every one of the groups in BEIS has different responsibilities for different aspects of the overall programme. With 68 different workstreams, that is the approach we needed to take, and we took that right from the beginning. That has helped us to get a real handle on this as a programme.
Q2 Chair: Of those 68 major workstreams out of the Government’s 213, 21 are critical, so what are you specifically doing to make sure that the timeline on those 21 is correct and proceeding as you would expect?
Alex Chisholm: We developed the workstream for that over the course of the summer and autumn. We obviously did that with a combination of, if you like, bottom-up and top-down. The people who had the responsibility for each of those areas developed plans. Those were then tested internally with people working on the programme management side, led by Emma Ward.
They were also tested externally, by so-called “critical friends”, who were very critical, and through a more formal process involving the Infrastructure and Projects Authority, external gateway-type reviews, and DExEU, the role of which is to make sure that all different parts of Government are going about this in the right fashion. All of those critical workstreams—the 21 were chosen according to a set of criteria developed by DExEU—have been tested for the robustness and viability of those plans.
Q3 Luke Graham: I will try to keep my questions quick and concise, because I am conscious of time; we will try to finish for 5 pm. Mr Chisholm, we are not expecting you to recite all of the projects you have highlighted now, but can you please write to us and detail the 68 workstreams, highlighting the 21 critical ones?
Alex Chisholm: That question goes a little bit above me, because it is obviously a position for the whole Government about what level of transparency to bring to the detail of the individual workstreams. I will certainly consult with colleagues in DExEU, but the level of information provided to Parliament on matters relating to Brexit as a whole is a live issue. It is being debated even as we speak this afternoon. I cannot make that commitment to you now, but I will certainly consult with colleagues in DExEU about what the overall approach would be.
Q4 Chair: That is very kind, Mr Chisholm. You will be aware that the Committee has asked the Government to let us have details of all 313, and we are awaiting a response from them on the matter. We do not want to prejudice the negotiations, but clearly the more that we can put in the public domain, and the more Parliament is aware of, the more reassurance we will give.
Luke Graham: If you let us know the outcome of your correspondence with DExEU colleagues, it would be very helpful. Coming on to the other 68 workstreams that you have, it is good that you have had critical friends have a look and robustly test them. Which of those have come out as the most challenging?
Alex Chisholm: We have identified a group of workstreams in which, however much work we do and however well we do it, there are some things outside of our control. To the extent that we can control them by putting resources in, developing good systems and testing the robustness, we have a very high level of competence. Where it is outside of our control, it is obviously less. Let me give an example of that from an important area such as nuclear safeguards. We have introduced timely legislation, which is before the House at the moment, to bring across the nuclear safeguards regime currently embedded in Euratom, to create a UK version of that and for that to be agreed with Euratom. We have also made a lot of plans and preparations for the Office for Nuclear Regulation to skill up, take on more inspectors, build new databases, etc. All of that is within our own control, but what is outside our control?
One thing, importantly, is the passage of legislation, which is in the hands of Parliament, not ourselves and the civil service. So too is the agreement of Euratom and the International Atomic Energy Agency. We also have a number of very important bilateral treaties, which also relate to the movement of nuclear fissile material, in particular with the US, Canada, Australia and Japan. Two of those countries require their own parliamentary bodies to vote for this. That is a perfect illustration of how we can do a lot of things which are in our control. The US Congress is not something I have any influence over directly, yet it will need to vote on this.
Q5 Chair: All of the traffic has been focused on what people we would be withdrawing from the EU, but in something like Euratom, where we are withdrawing critical people, do you envisage that we will be seconding them back to help the EU where we create gaps?
Alex Chisholm: Euratom is an unusual body, because the whole nuclear world is not as representative as the United Nations. Only nuclear countries have the personnel, the scientific training or the professional expertise to work in that area. If you met, as I have done, some of the European Union’s top nuclear bureaucrats—if you will excuse the word—you would find that lots of them come from outside of Europe. They come from countries such as Canada, Japan and others with this long history of nuclear, so it is not very typical. The UK has always, right from the beginning, been a strong nuclear power. We have always had our scientists, experts, inspectors and engineers working within the nuclear industry, both here and internationally, and that will continue to be the case.
Q6 Luke Graham: I appreciate that example. As a Committee, we are trying to get more transparency and understand the true risk to the Government and the public. Would you say that the Euratom example is one of your 21 critical workstreams?
Alex Chisholm: Yes.
Q7 Luke Graham: Just to go a little bit further, you have pulled up Euratom there, so we will just drill down a little bit deeper, if that is okay, because I think it is a very topical example. You talk about having to consult with a lot of external bodies and say that there may be some external factors that push you off course. How much longer would you require to implement the changes to Euratom and to implement the domestic agency?
Alex Chisholm: We are working on the basis that we need to be available and ready by March 2019.
Q8 Luke Graham: Are you confident that you will be ready for March 2019?
Alex Chisholm: Yes. I am confident that we are doing everything possible to ensure that we can deliver against that deadline.
Q9 Luke Graham: Everything possible—I understand. Knowing some of the restrictions you were outlining previously with the bilateral arrangements and some of the other external factors, what safeguards will you have for the industry if we get to March 2019, but unfortunately, for example, the American Congress has not passed something that they needed to and some partners in Europe or elsewhere in the world have not agreed to the exact terms of movement of materials? What safeguards have we got here at home?
Alex Chisholm: Everything that we can possibly do to ensure that, as an independent country, we have the necessary accreditation with the International Atomic Energy Agency. We are a member of that already, so we need to update our status and we are taking steps to do so right now. I should also emphasise that this is an area with a strong history of very positive co-operation, and that very much continues. We have very good relations with Euratom. As you will be aware from other inquiries, the French company EDF is building the new nuclear reactor for us at Hinkley, and it is making sure that the French Government and Euratom are working constructively with us.
Everyone has a very strong common interest here. Since we are talking about something as essential as controls over the movement of nuclear material and the safeguarding of that, it is not something that we think will enter into the tricky negotiation territories. Everyone wants a good outcome.
Q10 Luke Graham: Returning to the broader set of workstreams, you said that you are comfortable that Euratom will be finished by March ’19; however some of the BEIS reports, and the NAO Report, refer to wanting to have the transitional period to ensure that some of the workstreams are fully complete. Of the 68 workstreams that you have, how many will require the transitional period in order to be fully completed, taking into account the external forces you mentioned earlier?
Alex Chisholm: Obviously, with more time you can feel more confident. I also want to emphasise that while as a Department we have argued that an implementation period is very useful, that is not so much to be ready ourselves as to make sure that the private sector—businesses, academic institutions, scientists—have time to make adaptations.
Of all those workstreams mentioned, even within the 21 priorities, over a dozen require the development of new digital systems. We can design, procure, build and test those systems, but they will also have other people externally who are using them. With a longer time—a proper implementation period—that could be tested. People can be allowed time to do that. They can be told, “You will need to access this database in six months; do you want to have a few practices doing it?”, but if we are up against a hard deadline of March ’19, there is less opportunity for that testing.
Q11 Luke Graham: I appreciate that. I know that you still need to do some consultation to give us full information on the 68, but of those 12 workstreams that require the additional systems, what will be your confidence level come March 2019 that they will be able to go live?
Alex Chisholm: That is asking about the level of confidence I will have then. At this stage I feel very confident, and I hope that in 14 months’ time I am at the same level.
Q12 Luke Graham: I appreciate that. To look at it another way, how many of these 12 workstreams are looking more amber than green at the moment?
Alex Chisholm: None of them are looking red, and that is good. We are just getting into the process of defining all those system requirements, and we will need to be procuring for the first ones over the next two or three months. So I will have a better idea at that point of the deliverability of that in the necessary time, but currently all those workstreams are showing as being able to deliver on time.
Q13 Chair: Given the Government’s track record on the delivery of IT systems on time, and the fact that you have a very short time to create and deliver some of these IT systems, are you really confident that the IT is not going to be the impediment to meeting those 22 or 68 workstreams on time?
Alex Chisholm: I share the general view of the Chair that it is difficult always to feel confident that IT systems deliver on time. I used to work in the IT industry and the experience is that very often they do not. In our case, I do not think that we are really at the cutting edge. Some other Departments will probably have much more sophisticated new systems that they are looking to build. I am sure that some have given evidence to you already. Most of what we are talking about are simple database-type systems. For example, they are databases for nuclear safeguards or market surveillance, which is about products on the market, or trademarks. They exist already, and in a way, we need to create a UK copy or subset of those databases to ensure that we can continue to access them and keep a record, for example, of the funding of companies that receive Horizon 2020—referring back to our previous discussion. So they are mostly databases rather than big, complicated systems.
Chair: I understand.
Q14 Luke Graham: My colleague will go into systems and resourcing in a bit more detail shortly, so we will stay focused on the workstreams. Moving on to some of the performance management, how are you monitoring the performance of these workstreams just now? Specifically, what kind of tools are you using?
Alex Chisholm: I would like to bring in my colleague Emma Ward, on my right, because she runs our programme management function.
Emma Ward: I am happy to talk about how we are managing those workstreams. As Alex has said, we have built them bottom-up and top-down, and we now have a full suite of critical paths and delivery plans for all 68 workstreams. We have a governance system that monitors them on a regular basis, and we are in the process of continuing to refine the databases that underpin the collection and analysis of the information we are drawing. Obviously, 68 workstreams is quite a portfolio of projects, but they are looked at on a monthly basis by our dedicated EU exit executive committee, and we report to DExEU on a monthly basis on all those workstreams.
We also have reporting into the Cabinet Office. I know that you spoke to John Manzoni before Christmas. On the commercial and digital elements of those plans, reporting also goes to the Cabinet Office on a regular basis. We have tools and databases underpinning the collection of that information, and then a set of reporting that goes both internally and across Government.
Q15 Luke Graham: And are the tools you mentioned the standard corporate project management and portfolio management tools?
Emma Ward: Standard project management tools, shared doc systems—those sorts of tools.
Q16 Luke Graham: Great. When it comes to the monthly reporting, who specifically do those reports go to in the Cabinet Office and DExEU?
Emma Ward: I think you heard from Philip Rycroft before Christmas, along with John Manzoni. That is a set of reports that goes to DExEU, and the monthly reports will then go to Ministers across Government, but that is something that has been instated from January. That is an ongoing process.
Q17 Luke Graham: Just to press on that, so we are clear: when those reports go off, they are “Dear X” in DExEU and in the Cabinet Office, and then they will go up to Ministers. That makes sense, but are they going up to the Permanent Secretaries within those Departments? Who is it specifically? We are trying to join the dots right across Government, so it would be helpful to know.
Emma Ward: In terms of the monthly reporting into DExEU, it goes into their reporting team—my counterpart—but then the information goes to the Permanent Secretaries and Ministers on DPLD, the ministerial sub-committee.
Q18 Chair: Mr Chisholm, do all your Ministers see these monthly reports? Are they aware of the critical paths on these workstreams?
Alex Chisholm: Yes, and furthermore we discuss the EU exit programme with Ministers every week—sometimes a number of times a week, but certainly every week. That has been essential to us, and we have been operating like that for several months now.
Q19 Luke Graham: It is good to hear that there is such high frequency, especially if they are being discussed weekly. We spoke to some of your colleagues in HMRC and discussed some of the customs and border issues. They have the border planning group, which brings representatives from right across Government to ensure that things are being co-ordinated in the right way. You are sending reports in, but are there any groups you are currently chairing that have representatives from all Government Departments in them, so you can ensure that co-ordination is taking place?
Sam Beckett: The key co-ordination at the centre of Government is built around the tried and tested Cabinet Committee structures. There is the overarching EU Exit and Trade Cabinet Committee, which has three sub-Committees: one on Strategy and Negotiations, one on Domestic Preparedness, Legislation and Devolution, and another that talks about International Trade. There are other groups that support them at the centre. That is how we come together, usually under the chairmanship of someone from DExEU—often Philip Rycroft, but sometimes others. They meet at ministerial level, but on most of the ones chaired by officials I sit as the BEIS representative. We will also be represented on the border planning group, as a Department with a key interest. There are quite a lot of interlocked forums that co-ordinate across Government, and we are party to those.
Q20 Chair: Can I just come in there? This Committee has raised questions about it before, but that sounds like quite a complicated structure. The last time I was involved in a big Government operation, which was BSE, it didn’t work very well. Do you have a view on how well this pretty complicated structure is working to deliver this massive scheme across Government?
Sam Beckett: They refreshed the Cabinet Committee structure quite recently—towards the end of the year. It now has three sets of officials meetings that feed into the ministerial meetings. That refreshed structure is working very well. Other areas of co-ordination—for example, on business stakeholders—will bring together different groups. I think that is adding to rather than complicating our efforts.
Alex Chisholm: It is essential for us to be able to co-ordinate and consult. I wanted to emphasise that, as well as this intergovernmental machinery, there is a lot of outward-facing machinery. For example, the Minister of State for Science and Universities chairs a high-level group with science, research and business people, which meets every month as well. Our own Secretary of State co-chairs the business advisory group with the Secretary of State for Exiting the EU and the Chancellor of the Exchequer. In terms of the devolved Administrations, we have a particular EU exit forum; that meets in different parts of the country, again every month. We also have a group with our 55 partner organisations, 35 of which have a critical role to play within the overall delivery of this exercise; that too is meeting regularly. As you rightly say, it is a massive exercise.
Q21 Luke Graham: By the sound of it, that is an enormous amount of meetings, in terms of taking away the balance. My colleague will go on to resourcing and the recruitment of staff to make sure that you can accommodate that, so I will leave that to her. In terms of interdepartmental working, are you finding that DExEU are providing the support and planning that is required? Do you need any more?
Alex Chisholm: I would say, yes, DExEU are doing that well. They are also getting good support from the Cabinet Office, in particular the Infrastructure and Projects Authority, lending that more commercial and big programme management perspective. We have also had some challenges and input from external agencies to try to see whether we are approaching this in the right fashion. So far the evidence is yes, so I would give a positive answer.
Q22 Luke Graham: When you are looking right across your portfolio, you have eight major GMPP projects on top of the various workstreams that we have already outlined. In your own briefing, on page 16, you stress the need to balance the EU Brexit work with a substantial and pressing policy agenda. Can you assure us that BEIS is truly capable of delivering these eight GMPP projects along with the 68 workstreams and the industrial strategy simultaneously?
Alex Chisholm: That is what is asked of us, because as you rightly say, those projects are not things that we can simply set aside for the duration of the EU exit negotiations. One of those, for example, in relation to the smart meters implementation programme, is running at a rate of 400,000 smart meters a month. We cannot simply say, “Stop that now because we need to think about Brexit.” We need to carry on with that and deliver. A second example would be the building of the Hinkley Point nuclear reactor in Somerset. Again, it is absolutely vital that we give very close attention to that—I would be appearing back before this Committee if we were not doing that effectively. Those are mighty projects where we simply cannot afford not to deliver them on time.
I also wanted to highlight that, from a policy perspective, as they have made clear since the election, the Government have not only got the important work to do on EU exit, they have an ambitious agenda more generally across the responsibilities that we have—industrial strategy, clean growth strategy and new approaches to the protection of critical national infrastructure. We are also looking to reform the way the whole energy system works, with the help of Dieter Helm. We have had a fantastic report from Matthew Taylor about the world of work, again prompting a lot of changes to the way we want to be looking after workers’ rights and having a more forward-looking approach there. There is a big reform agenda even outside Brexit, so it has to be necessary for us to be very focused on both what is most important and also how we work and being very efficient within that. As I said at the beginning, we also recognised that we would need some additional resources, and so far we have been able to get those.
Q23 Luke Graham: I understand you have recruited more staff—again, my colleague will come on to that. You have outlined a very ambitious programme domestically, a lot of which I am sure Members here would support, but how are you going about the prioritisation? There are all the workstreams coming through from Brexit: the critical pathways, interdepartmental working and various Committee structures, and probably work groups that will cross Departments for those individual workstreams, which will add another layer. Presumably the Department has to sleep at some time. How are you prioritising these projects and what has dropped off as a result of Brexit?
Alex Chisholm: Because of the nature of our statutory duties and those important reforms, there is very little of that we can simply discontinue, or in the big projects that you mentioned. It is more to do with the way that we approach it. To give a few examples, when I wrote to the Committee I tried to explain about dealing with secondary legislation. We have, as I think Chair Meg Hillier said when this Report was produced, an awful lot of secondary legislation—maybe about 150 statutory instruments in the Department. We have also got about 120 to 130 more “business as usual” statutory instruments, which we also expect to need to do over the next year or so.
That is a terrific weight of work to try and put through Parliament, so we have tried to prioritise that. We have also tried to make sure that the way in which we present those makes it easier for Parliament to look at them in batches or bundles. We have been very good in our preparation, so that when we have a little window to publish something, we make sure we hit that. All those are techniques to make sure that we can deliver on time.
To give another example from a policy perspective, if you look at what we put out in relation to critical national infrastructure, we did it in two phases. We said, “Here is a group of protections that we can implement quite quickly through secondary legislation,” which we are in the process of doing; and then, “Here is another group that we would like to do, but we recognise it is much more fundamental and will need primary legislation, so we will consult on that, but that cannot be done over the next year.”
Q24 Chair: You raise the issue of primary and secondary legislation. You are putting through the Nuclear Safeguards Bill now. How many more pieces of primary legislation have you got to do in preparation for EU exit?
Alex Chisholm: That is the one that has been approved at the moment. There is a process of assessing all these bids for Bills from different Departments, and they try to assess that in relation to the primary legislation that is going through such as the EU (Withdrawal) Bill. So a lot of the legislative approach is hinged on the precise way in which the EU (Withdrawal) Bill is written. That is obviously receiving a great deal of attention within both Houses of Parliament, so that will make a difference to any future legislation.
Q25 Chair: Is there a serious worry that these thousand pieces of secondary legislation, of which you have 150, will be a problem to get through in time for EU exit?
Alex Chisholm: It is doable, but it requires a great deal of good work not only from the Government side, but good co-operation from Parliament. We are very much in the hands of the legislature.
Q26 Chair: Is there a timetable? Clearly, your 150 have to go in with all the other 850. Is there a timetable that has been established between each Department as to when the window will be?
Alex Chisholm: Not as such. I will try to explain that. Although I say we have a list of 150, that list will continue to change. They are not all agreed and written. Each has to go through a process of being agreed across Government, and people will say about some of them, “I don’t agree that that’s necessary.” Other ones that we had not thought of will be added, so it is quite a dynamic process. Overall, all of that gets through. Every Department now has its own legislation committee, a nominated senior person at director general level and has a nominated Minister. All parliamentary and business legislation—both primary and secondary—have to go through the PBL Committee to be assessed for urgency and readiness.
Q27 Chair: Are these pieces of secondary legislation relating to Brexit waiting? Can you not start them before the EU (Withdrawal) Bill? Is there a gap waiting for the Bill to go through Parliament?
Emma Ward: Our approach is obviously to do as much work as possible in advance: preparing the policy, drafting the SIs and publishing them where possible. The Department published a couple in the autumn. Because the SIs are in the main—at least half of them—reliant on the powers in the EU (Withdrawal) Bill, that Bill needs to complete its passage before those pieces of secondary legislation can be laid.
Q28 Luke Graham: You are confident that we will get there for 2019, but does your planning timeline include the extra time that will be required by the acceptance of amendment 3 to the EU Withdrawal Bill from the Government, for a sifting committee to review all secondary legislation? As of today, has that additional time required been budgeted for so that you will still hit the 2019 deadline?
Alex Chisholm: That depends on the decisions of that sifting committee. If they move things from the negative affirmation to the positive affirmation, obviously that requires more work, attention and time.
Q29 Luke Graham: That is my question—if it flips to the positive affirmation. Are you running two concurrent timelines that enable you to have the resources to switch between the two, to still hit 2019? In the worst case, if the committee says that it wants all 150 to be under the positive affirmation, will you still say, “That’s fine; we will redirect resources and we can still hit 2019.”?
Alex Chisholm: We have not done a scenario to try to show that all 150 need positive affirmation. Some of those are so technical: there is a reference to the UK as a member state, where you have to say, “Delete ‘as a member state’.” The idea is that that will require a lot of debate in Parliament over a period of weeks seems implausible. We have not actually tried to map that out.
Q30 Chair: I am sorry to labour this point but it is a very important one. You have come up with a number of 150, but have you really looked at whether some of those 150 could be combined, to reduce the number?
Alex Chisholm: Yes we have, but we have also found that sometimes when we have combined things, in the debate with PBL and indeed Parliament, people have said that they would rather it was in two separate parts. Certainly, we will try to do as much combination and bundling of things as possible, so things that relate to particular topics will come together. For example, we will have a group that relates to workers’ rights—we might to do all of that together. We will have another group that will relate to product regulation—we will try to do those as a batch. That is to assist Parliament and also to try to manage it within the overall timeframe.
Q31 Luke Graham: Thank you. It is good to hear that you are doing some planning for the sifting committee. Can you assure us that there will be enough parliamentary time, or at least that you are on the case to make sure that there is enough parliamentary time, to ensure that all the legislation is enacted?
Alex Chisholm: I am sure that the Government are on the case, but that is not something that we are providing for.
Q32 Luke Graham: Understood. If the sifting committee goes for far more statutory instruments going for larger debate, and that debate goes on longer than expected, do you have a fallback position for those 150? I appreciate that not all the 150 will require it, but for those that do, do you have a fallback position?
Chair: They are timed debates.
Luke Graham: Sorry, if they are unable to get through all the timed debates.
Chair: Each one is timed.
Alex Chisholm: I want to check that I understand the question. You are saying that, if we work out things that require the assent of Parliament, and if Parliament does not give that assent, whether we have a fallback. No, we do not have an alternative procedure to that. It requires legal form.
Q33 Luke Graham: Returning to some of the final prioritisation points, Ms Beckett, in one of the reports we have seen you responded positively to the IPA’s offer of support with prioritisation. What progress have you made with that?
Sam Beckett: Back in August last year, we had the Infrastructure and Projects Authority come in and do a gateway zero review. Its advice was to simplify our committee and board structure and to have more dedicated programme resource; it also had advice for us in producing an integrated assurance and approvals process. We have put all those things in place. That has streamlined the way we work.
I would not quite describe that a prioritisation; it is working smarter, with less complicated board structures. We put in place all the recommendations according to that timetable. Things are working well in terms of the workstreams reporting, which Emma went into a bit earlier. We have the Infrastructure and Projects Authority back at the moment to do a refresh of their work and to have a look again if they have further advice for us on handling our portfolio.
Q34 Chair: I have a question before we go on to the next session on personnel. Mr Chisholm, your Department produced an assurance plan for its EU exit, in November 2017. The plan was scheduled to be approved by the EU exiting programme board in December 2017. Was it?
Alex Chisholm: Yes, it was.
Chair: Thank you.
Q35 Gillian Keegan: We are going to move on to skills and resourcing. You identified that you needed 350 new people, and you have recruited quite a lot of those. What was the skills gap that you identified?
Alex Chisholm: I will start but I might call on my colleague Emma Ward to come in after me. We identified the skills needed. For this first phase of work, mostly we needed people with what we could call typical policy skills, such as analysing a range of options, evidence-gathering, an ability to sift through that, communicating to other people what the other choices were, seeing the wood for the trees and so on. Some of those people—probably quite a high proportion at the beginning—were coming from other Departments or elsewhere within the Department, because we were able to recycle people into this work. Over time—
Q36 Gillian Keegan: Does that not leave you or someone with a hole? Brexit is happening for everyone, is it not?
Alex Chisholm: We are a Department of nearly 3,000 people, so we were able to find that. We had about 100 people who we felt we could free up from other work. We had some vacancies as well and other people coming back to us to put into this very important work. We felt that we could not just take it all as simply additional. We have got 350 additional, but 100 we were able to reallocate to this work. Incidentally, we plan to continue with that approach. Next year and in any future years, we will continue to reallocate. It is something that we have said to our partner organisations: we have said, “Don’t simply take the costs of Brexit as being purely additional. You ought to try to use your own resources. This is an important national endeavour. You should try to put some people into this activity who were not working on European work before.”
Q37 Gillian Keegan: Going back to the point that my colleague was making earlier, that definitely points to some things being deprioritised, unless those people were just hanging loose waiting for something to do. I hope we don’t have that type of approach to public money.
Alex Chisholm: Yes, some projects come to an end. For example—
Q38 Gillian Keegan: How lucky! You had 100 people whose projects were coming to an end and they were just ready. Which projects were they?
Alex Chisholm: Just to give an example, in our previous session we were talking about the construction of UKRI. There has been a high-powered project team who have been working to ensure that that is set up.
Q39 Gillian Keegan: How many people did you have working on that?
Alex Chisholm: About 30 people. We also have an oversight responsibility in relation to some of that expenditure. That should free up about 30 people in April when the new body comes into existence. That is the type of opportunity we get to reallocate people.
Q40 Gillian Keegan: And then you have 350 coming from external hires.
Alex Chisholm: Yes, exactly.
Q41 Gillian Keegan: Of whom you have hired almost 300?
Alex Chisholm: It was 305 at the end of December. We are bang on track to get to 350 by the end of the year.
Q42 Gillian Keegan: What kind of skills and experience do they have? Are they experienced people or are they relatively new to the civil service?
Alex Chisholm: There has been a great mix. We have had new joiners, including a lot of people from the fast-stream scheme. We were also able to take people who had been runners-up in that scheme. Increasingly over time we have also tried to get some people with direct skills and knowledge of the EU institutions. We have hired a lot of people recently with project management skills, because this is a big project; some 20 or 30 people are coming specifically with project management skills. Looking ahead, the balance of resource will be fewer new people for policy and more people for delivery, more people with digital skills and knowledge of the particular sectors and more subject matter experts.
Q43 Gillian Keegan: That is where you might run into a bit more trouble. You may have heard that digital skills are required by pretty much everybody.
Alex Chisholm: Yes.
Q44 Gillian Keegan: And there are not many of them.
Alex Chisholm: There are a lot of them, but you are right—
Q45 Gillian Keegan: There is not enough for the demand.
Alex Chisholm: It is a hot area.
Q46 Gillian Keegan: The demand outstrips the supply, I would imagine.
Alex Chisholm: We are a relatively small employer in the overall scheme of things. What we have found to date—I am not saying that this will necessarily be the case a year from now—is that we have been pleased by the reaction we have got. We have been spoiled for choice for very talented people at different stages of their careers who want to come in and work for the Department. Sometimes that is on a permanent contract, but there are others on fixed-term contract or secondments. This is an exciting and important time to be working on this type of work. As a Department, we are right in the middle of this enterprise of renegotiating and leaving the EU. We have been pleasantly pleased by the number of people who want to come and work with us.
Q47 Chair: Can I build on one of the things that you said, Mr Chisholm? One of the things I am interested in across Government is how many of these people who are taken on by your Department and other Departments are likely to be needed once we have left the EU in 2019 or the transitional period has ended. Have you given any thought to that?
Alex Chisholm: We have. Our normal rate of turnover of staff is 14%. In the context of a year and a Department of 3,000, that means every year we would expect to lose 400 to 500 people and take that number of people on. That gives us quite a bit of swing space in terms of the number of people we have taken on so far, so we are not worried about their future or finding ourselves with people surplus to requirement.
At the Council in December we also saw strong endorsement of the UK position that it would be useful to have an implementation period. That means that although we will be ready if we need to be in March 2019, the more likely thing is that we will have ongoing work for people for at least the two years after that.
Q48 Chair: May we move beyond this financial year? You are virtually there—305 out of 350—until the end of this financial year, and obviously you will be discussing resources with Treasury, but how many people are you expecting to take on in the next financial year?
Alex Chisholm: We are still working that through with them, but it is good that we are doing it at this point in time, because in our first big Brexit year we only got the approval to do this because the necessary processes came after the start of the financial year, but now we are just coming to the end of January so we are hoping to have clarity on this in a matter of weeks. That will enable us to hit the ground running in terms of beginning to build up the recruitment that we expect to need in April, May, June and beyond.
Q49 Chair: Are you in a position to tell the Committee this afternoon what sort of numbers you envisage taking on?
Alex Chisholm: Unfortunately not, because that is still an ongoing process and we have not got any firm decision yet. Ministers have not been involved and we have not got feedback from the Treasury, so it is an ongoing process.
Chair: I guessed that would be the answer, but you will forgive me for asking.
Q50 Luke Graham: Just on the fast stream, of the 305 recruited, what percentage are fast streamers?
Emma Ward: Overall on fast streamers, the Department aims to bring in about 5% of its workforce, so every year about 150. Not all of those are on EU exit, but quite a number are—I do not know the exact figure on EU exit programmes—and in terms of direct entrants who are near misses, we have taken about 80 on to EU exit work. So both cadres are quite a good channel of recruitment for us.
Q51 Luke Graham: It would be good to get the specifics on that, because fast streamers I know are talented men and women, but they often do not have as much experience, whether in industry or other areas. As this is an area of such national importance, it is whether you have the right skill mix among that 305. By having the breakdown of fast streamers, split by the levels within that 305—director level and below—we will be clear about the skill level and spread.
One of the points you made earlier, the level of churn at 14%—
Gillian Keegan: Yes, it’s massive.
Luke Graham: Certainly, from a private sector point of view, that seems incredibly high. One thing that we have witnessed in some of these hearings is a lot of Permanent Secretaries and below who only stay in government for two or three years. There seems to be a lot of leakage of skills, where actually you want to be keeping people. It would be good to see from this Department, especially where everything is about strategy, that we have clear analysis of who we have working on these programmes and how we are going to keep them afterwards—though indeed, as we acknowledge, there will be a small percentage who do their job and leave, thank you, in 2019 or 2021.
Alex Chisholm: If I may, I will pick up on a couple of points. First of all, we were a new Department that was formed, if you remember, from the merger of what was BIS and DEC. At the beginning we had a terrific turnover, which is often the case when you have machinery of government changes. But that has gone down from, I think, nearly 20%, and it has fallen every quarter since then. So although I say it is 14% now, it was 15% last quarter and it is predicted to be 13% next quarter. I think the private sector average is about 12% and in the public service as a whole it is 8%, but not for London-based—the turnover of professional staff with high levels of skills working closely with the business and scientific communities.
Gillian Keegan: You might be including hospitality or something as well in that, but for this, where you cannot really exclude certain industries, it would be a lot lower.
Alex Chisholm: Your overall point about retention I absolutely agree with.
I also want to reassure you that, because of the recycling I mentioned, quite a lot of the 100 people we moved into EU work we have backfilled with people coming into the Department. That has given a nice blend of people with, if you like, fresh energy and new skills and attitudes, with people who know the ropes and are used to the way in which the Department and the EU institutions work.
The other thing that is clearly tremendously important is that we need a much larger group of people than has ever been the case before to be very knowledgeable about two things: first, the EU institutions and European procedures, because it is tremendously important to understand how they actually work—
Q52 Gillian Keegan: That is why I asked you specifically about skills and the type of skills you were looking for. That didn’t come up, and I was expecting it to come up.
Alex Chisholm: We have been recruiting people with European backgrounds, to add to the ones we have already.
Q53 Gillian Keegan: How many of the 305?
Alex Chisholm: I don’t know, in percentage terms.
Gillian Keegan: That would be good to have as well, because this is about the relevant skill sets—it is not just bodies.
Alex Chisholm: We have been using the people we do have, who are European experts, to train other people. We have a two-day EU negotiating and influencing skills course, which 130 staff have done so far.
Q54 Gillian Keegan: A two-day training course on negotiation and influencing skills?
Alex Chisholm: For EU negotiating skills, yes.
Gillian Keegan: That does not fill me with a great deal of joy. Two days of negotiation and influencing skills is like Janet and John—it is level 1.
Alex Chisholm: There are lots of people who would have done negotiating before, but it is specific to the European Union.
Q55 Gillian Keegan: How many? Maybe you could give us some details on EU experience and negotiating experience prior to—
Alex Chisholm: To the extent that we have it, yes.
Sam Beckett: The only thing that I would add is that BIS and DECC had quite a lot of staff working on EU issues, as both were Departments involved in sector regulation. We had quite a strong cadre of experienced staff with EU skills, many of whom had negotiating skills as well.
Q56 Gillian Keegan: The reason we are digging at this a bit is that it seems surprising that something that was not really anticipated, and that we all think is quite big, is a bit of a breeze—there were a lot of people waiting, and you had all the skills around and lots of people. It does not hang true that it is something that you would feel so confident about. I suggest that possibly you are confident because you are still in the “ignorance is bliss” phase—you have not yet got to the stage where the rubber hits the road and you have to get into the delivery and its challenges.
Alex Chisholm: I hope that my colleagues and I have given you a sense that we see it as a massive undertaking. We do not see it as a breeze at all. It is a huge change in what we are trying to do and a huge renegotiation of our key economic relationships.
Gillian Keegan: And it requires a lot of different skills, as you say, that we have not really had before, although we did have a lot of people hanging round who had the right skills.
Alex Chisholm: A lot of different skills, yes. We have devoted 450 people to working full time on this, but almost everybody in the Department is affected in some way. I am not one of those 450 and yet I give a huge amount of attention to EU exit at work, as you can imagine. It is a huge undertaking. To emphasise what my colleague Sam Beckett said, we have been a very European-facing Department. Using myself as an example, when I first worked in what was the Department of Trade and Industry, I was busy negotiating EU single market directives. That is a very relevant background to have for reversing that process.
Gillian Keegan: And we will get more details about how many people are like you within the breakdown of the skill set?
Alex Chisholm: Yes.
Q57 Chair: I am sorry to interrupt. To test your thinking on the skills required, clearly when we leave on 19 March 2019, or whenever it is, the EU will carry on developing and changing. Going back to my earlier question about seconding people back into EU institutions, is that part of your thinking? How do you propose that the personnel in your Department actually keep up to date with everything that is going on in your policy areas in the EU after 2019?
Alex Chisholm: That is a very intriguing question, if I may say so. Obviously, a high proportion of UK nationals work in EU institutions. Those institutions have offered some level of security for them around their jobs in future. When it comes to recruiting future recruits from member countries for the European Commission, for example, I presume that would not include the UK, if we have left.
Q58 Chair: That was not quite the thrust of my question, which was: how will you have people with sufficient skills in your Department who can keep up to date with what is going on in the EU? Is seconding your people back into EU institutions one of the ways that you are thinking about doing that?
Alex Chisholm: It is an option, but it would depend a little bit on how things play out more generally. If we are in a very friendly, collaborative, “let’s work together”-type mode, you can imagine that those types of secondments, particularly for people with relevant skills who are already in technical grades and so on, would be very useful and much appreciated. Certainly, we have a long history of seconding people, not just from central Government Departments but from institutions such as the Competition and Markets Authority, where I worked before. We would take people from DG COMP and second people into it. How that will work once we are outside the EU remains to be seen. It is bound to be different.
Q59 Gillian Keegan: What percentage of your resource base are consultants or people on short-term contracts?
Alex Chisholm: Very few, actually. We have had to take on some short-term contractors to work, initially, on project management, although we have now been able to recruit a lot of permanent people for that. Also, we have used some people to do the initial scoping work in relation to the digital demands, because, as a Department, we actually do not have a particularly big digital development team. That has not been necessary for the work we have been doing in the past. Clearly, if we are going to need to build out—or scope, even—a dozen systems, we will need to buy in some resource to do that. Those would be the main areas, I would say.
Q60 Gillian Keegan: What assurances can you give these new employees in terms of their future employment prospects, as Sir Geoffrey was talking about, post the end of this project?
Alex Chisholm: The vast majority of the people we have taken on have been on permanent civil service contracts, and we are able to cope with that. It is perhaps implied in your question, if I may say so, that you are thinking that over time, as we get nearer and nearer to the point of exit, and also when we have a clear sense of the end date of our overall involvement after an implementation period, it will make sense for us to take people on short-term contracts. Short-term contracts, incidentally, are ones which obviously, in many cases, do work very well for the individuals concerned.
Q61 Gillian Keegan: Have you got enough money? I think you got £35.1 million. Is that enough money to recruit the staff you need?
Alex Chisholm: When we first made that estimate, we did not know exactly how it would work out, but I have been pleasantly reassured—I think my Treasury colleagues were as well—to see that that proved to be a very good estimate. We found that we have been able not only to use those people very productively, but, as I mentioned before, to bring them in on time. Most of that cost has been on people, both for us and for our partner organisations. I mentioned that next year I expect a higher proportion of that will need to be spent on systems capital expenditure.
Q62 Gillian Keegan: On the systems side, you seemed, again, to think that that was not too tasking, really. You had to design, procure and test some systems—but they are kind of stand-alone databases, most of them.
Alex Chisholm: Most of the ones in the examples I gave were, yes. If we had to build trading systems, that is more complicated.
Q63 Gillian Keegan: Yes; and you have got that scenario built in your project plans, have you?
Alex Chisholm: It depends on the outcome of negotiations on things like the emissions trading scheme.
Q64 Gillian Keegan: Yes. That is kind of the big unknown, isn’t it? Maybe that is where the confidence is coming from, because, actually, depending on the outcome, the task would be rather different. How are you scenario-planning for all these different scenarios, specifically from no deal through to a more complex set of arrangements?
Alex Chisholm: That is a big part of what I again emphasise is a huge challenge here, because we are not working at this stage against a single scenario. We have to work against multiple scenarios, and we are required to do that. Our lives will be much simpler—and our confidence levels in the deliverability of those plans—when we move to a single-scenario world.
Q65 Gillian Keegan: I imagine they would be. But in terms of the plan, if I was doing this and I had a no-deal scenario, a scenario where everything is fine and it is all collaborative, and a scenario that involved a lot of workarounds and interoperability requirements for many different parties—maybe they are the three scenarios—I imagine that I would have rather different calls on resources for those three. I would have a plan which would say “I’ll need a load more people with this particular skill set if we are in that scenario.” Do you have those scenarios built out, and what is the range?
Alex Chisholm: What you say, I think, is broadly right: the particular resources that you need for different scenarios are going to vary. If you have negotiated, to use the example I used before, to remain a member of the emissions trading scheme—that is something, incidentally, which is not reserved to EU members only, so there are precedents and other non-EU countries belong to it—clearly, there is a wait to negotiate that but then that problem is solved quite quickly. If you had to build a whole new system yourself, it would be a much more substantial undertaking, and you would need different skills to do that—particularly people with familiarity in building trading systems. A third alternative is that if you found that you did not have time to build the trading system by the time you realised that it was necessary, you would have to find some workaround, as you suggest, to find a way to synthesise the effects of the trading scheme in a way which does not distort the market.
Q66 Gillian Keegan: Do your plans cover all of these scenarios?
Alex Chisholm: Yes, they do.
Q67 Gillian Keegan: So what is the range of resources? The 350, I guess—I don’t know which plan that is against.
Alex Chisholm: That goes back to the Chair’s previous question about how many resources we expect we will need next year. We haven’t tied that down yet, but when we have, it will be shared with Parliament.
Q68 Chair: Can I press you a little further? I think you have already given us an estimate that you will need another 100 new full-time staff in 2018-19.
Alex Chisholm: I don’t think that is an estimate that we recognise. I think when they were doing their staff work on this, they asked one particular person what they thought then. That question would have been asked in September. Knowing what we know now, that would be a significant underestimate.
Q69 Chair: And likewise the figure for next steps agencies?
Alex Chisholm: Yes.
Q70 Chair: Can you just lift the stone a little further? How close are you to agreeing with the Treasury your resources required to recruit whatever staff investment you need?
Alex Chisholm: I am hoping it is a matter of weeks, not months, because we are keen to know what we need for next year, so we can start recruiting as soon as possible. It is a large number of people.
We have made huge changes, although I didn’t impress your colleague with our training programmes. We have a lot of training programmes for people, in relation not just to EU influencing skills but to project management, parliamentary procedures and so on. That all needs to be planned for. We have a whole new induction method, so we can onboard people, to use the jargon, very quickly and efficiently and help them to understand how it is to work in a Government Department. All of that is a big undertaking, so the sooner we can start on it, the better.
Q71 Chair: I am sure that the NAO will hear very quickly what the resource allocations from the Treasury are. However, we may not necessarily hear your forecast so quickly. Given the Committee’s obvious interest in the skills within your Department, could we ask that you keep us updated when you have a firm estimate of what you will need in the next financial year? Also, sharing your progress towards recruiting them as you go through the year would be very helpful.
Alex Chisholm: As soon as we can share that with Parliament, we would like to do so.
Gillian Keegan: And the range of scenarios that you are assuming for those, because that will change quite dramatically.
Alex Chisholm: Quite possibly.
Q72 Gillian Keegan: You will need a plan for all three eventualities. Okay, let us move on to working with stakeholders. I think we went into other Government Departments and how you are integrating with them. Could you talk to us about the business advisory group and how you are involving business in your journey?
Alex Chisholm: I can start, and colleagues may want to chip in. Businesses have been very keen to beat a path to our door to talk about their concerns, in some cases, and the opportunities that they see from our EU exit in other cases. Right from the beginning of this whole process, we have been very open to that and have been very active in our consultation.
We have also tried to make sure that it is not just people who come to us but also people who we pick out; we recognise, for example, that we shouldn’t only speak with the business representative organisations or large companies with considerable Government relations resources. We have also made a particular point of reaching out to different parts of the country, and to entrepreneurial communities and others, to get their views on it.
A core part of our mission as a Department has been to gather business views and intelligence and to make sure that is shared with other parts of the Government.
Q73 Gillian Keegan: And how are you doing that? Do you have a system to help you? How are you actually going about getting those views?
Alex Chisholm: We have a whole series of levels for doing it. At the very top level, the Prime Minister herself has a business advisory council. There is also the EU business advisory group, co-chaired by our Secretary of State. We meet with all the business representative organisations every week. I asked for an estimate for this occasion, and we have seen around 2,000 stakeholder organisations, including 600 businesses.
We also find that even when our consultations or meetings are about another subject, such as science and innovation or industrial strategy, the concerns, issues or opportunities that people see in Brexit very often come up.
Q74 Gillian Keegan: So would you say you have a reasonably good understanding of the needs of business across all the different industry sectors as we leave the EU?
Alex Chisholm: It is certainly better than it was.
Gillian Keegan: That is a different low bar, I would imagine.
Alex Chisholm: It constantly changes, because business is updating its own ideas about the likely outcome and its impact on them. Not a day goes by without some new public information on that, as well as what people say to us. Another parliamentary Select Committee, the BEIS Committee, has been taking evidence on this from five sectors. It has been very illuminating to look at the impact on auto, aerospace, civil nuclear and food and drink. That all helps the information set that we have access to.
Gillian Keegan: Okay. We are running out of time, so that was my last one.
Q75 Luke Graham: Mr Chisholm, you touched on your conversations with the devolved Administrations. Could you say how you are consulting with those devolved Administrations across the United Kingdom—not just with the Administrations themselves, but with their various Assembly and parliamentary committees?
Alex Chisholm: Yes, we have been. Do you want to take that one, Sam?
Sam Beckett: Yes, sure. In BEIS, we have established a devolved Administration EU exit forum at official level. It has been meeting for about a year and has gone to the different countries for its meetings. That has been looking in more depth at a variety of issues and sharing information and plans. That is in BEIS itself, but there is also co-ordination with the devolved Administrations from the centre of Government. At the top of that is the Joint Ministerial Committee, and so on.
Q76 Luke Graham: Apologies; I am very familiar with those, but I am asking you specifically whether your contact is with the Assembly committees as well, or just with the Administrations.
Sam Beckett: It is with officials from the Administrations.
Q77 Luke Graham: Okay, so not from the committees. That is fine.
A lot of the area that BEIS covers is reserved rather than devolved, because a lot of the strategies stretch right across the United Kingdom. How much work has gone into progressing those UK frameworks? How far along the line have you got with the development of those frameworks?
Sam Beckett: That is something that is being led by UKGG, the UK governance group in the Cabinet Office. It is looking at the kind of UK-wide frameworks that need to be applied for the UK to function post-Brexit, once EU law is not directly applied.
Q78 Luke Graham: Okay. Just before I ask my final question, it occurs to me that there is one point that I should raise with you, Chair: I have a family member who is on a temporary contract with BEIS. I hope you will not see that as impacting on my questioning, but I just thought it would be good to put it on the record.
Ms Beckett, I understand from your last answer that the work is being led by UKGG. So in terms of the development of UK frameworks in specific areas, the simple answer is that not much work is being done by BEIS itself just now.
Sam Beckett: We have been discussing those kinds of issues in the EU exit forum with devolved Administration officials that I described earlier.
Q79 Luke Graham: But it is discussion rather than actual products just now.
Sam Beckett: Yes, discussion.
Q80 Caroline Flint: Following on from Ms Keegan’s question, last week I went over to DExEU to have a look at some reports. In particular, I read the report from the electricity and gas markets. When I came back, I looked at what was published online, to see what was redacted. The two areas that were not published, but which I had read and made some notes about, as you are allowed to do, were on sector views and stakeholder engagement. When I read those two reports, I could not see anything in them that covered those sections that could not be in the public domain. Was there a general view that you would not allow the Committee to publish those sections in each of those reports, given the evidence that you have just given to Ms Keegan and what the sector is already saying in the public domain anyway?
Sam Beckett: I think they were actually redacted by the Exiting the European Union Committee before publication.
Q81 Caroline Flint: And why was that, do you think?
Sam Beckett: I don’t know why they have done that. It may be because they were worried about something being commercially sensitive within that material.
Q82 Caroline Flint: I can assure you that there was nothing in what I read that was commercially sensitive. So would you have had no problem if those parts of the report—the sector views and the stakeholder engagement—were put in the public domain?
Alex Chisholm: We have not been making any judgments ourselves about redaction, because that is something that is done for DExEU on behalf of the Government as a whole as part of the negotiation strategy and in consultation with Parliament. We are not involved in that process.
Caroline Flint: Okay.
Q83 Chair: I have two final questions for you, Mr Chisholm. The first goes back to the mechanisms of getting the large number of statutory instruments agreed. Do you think the normal write-around process will be timely enough? We are talking not only about your 150, but 1,000 altogether. Do you think you will have to adopt a different system?
Alex Chisholm: Again, that is an excellent question. The ordinary through-put of Parliament is, as I understand it, about 1,000 statutory instruments, which does suggest that some innovation will be required in the procedures. That may well be necessary. More generally, we are finding that the overall EU exit task requires fantastically strong co-ordination within Government. The processes of individual Ministers deciding things and writing around to see if anyone objects may not, given the timeframes and how integrated the challenge is, be as suitable as they were before.
Q84 Chair: I finish with a really important question, which comes back to my first question about whether you will be ready on time. I am getting increasingly concerned that the Government as a whole will not be ready for an implementation period of two years after March ’19. Is your Department basing its critical path analysis on being ready for the implementation period of two years, or do you think it is likely that it will have to be extended?
Alex Chisholm: We have been basing our plans on the basis that we might need to be available, with everything working, by March ’19. As discussed earlier, I think it will be a more manageable process, not just for us, but particularly for the private sector in the UK, for scientific institutions, and—we would argue—for the European nations as well, if we had that implementation period. We are certainly not trying to add any additional time on to that period.
Chair: That is very helpful. Thank you very much, all of you, for your part in this session.