The government’s impact assessment of EU withdrawal on energy and climate change has been slammed for an “absence of analysis”.
A host of impact assessments, covering different sectors from aerospace to tourism, were published yesterday (21 December) by the House of Commons’ Exiting the EU Committee.
Parliament’s Brexit committee published 39 of the government’s sectoral analyses on the impact of leaving the EU on the British economy.
Their publication follows a tussle between the select committee and the Department for Exiting the EU, which was sparked by a vote in the Commons that the reports should be made available to MPs and the public.
Brexit Secretary David Davis had previously said the reports contained “excruciating detail”, but the assessments have been widely panned for being long on description of the UK’s economic relationships with the EU but containing little analysis of withdrawal from the trading bloc.
Commenting on the energy and climate change assessment, Richard Black, director of the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit, said: “For reports that purport to analyse the impact of Brexit on different sectors, what leaps out at you is the total absence of analysis. Search, and you do not find.
“If a GSCE student turned this in as a summary of key statistics, they’d merit about a B+ for effort. But you’d like to think that senior ministers and their civil servants would be some way above that standard.
“We are due to leave the European Union in just over a year’s time – and judging by this set of documents, David Davis’s department hasn’t a clue what impact that will have and what the key challenges are for our electricity system, for North Sea oil and gas, or anything else relating to energy and climate change.”