Former leave campaigner asks experts why Brexit cannot take place without future relationship with bloc being settled

Michael Gove, the former cabinet minister and leading Brexit campaigner, has pressed experts on how the UK could achieve a “quickie divorce” with the EU regardless of the economic consequences, as he raised concerns that civil servants were over-complicating the process.

The former justice secretary, who led the Vote Leave campaign with Boris Johnson, questioned why the UK cannot just leave the EU without having settled its future relationship with the bloc after having sorted out “housekeeping” related to outstanding payments.

Speaking at the newly formed Commons Brexit committee, he said there was a tendency for civil servants to think any problem requires more civil servants and suggested “Occam’s razor” should be applied, meaning the simplest solution is the best one.

Gove queried the approach of Whitehall after a note by a consultant at Deloitte suggested the government lacked a plan for Brexit and may need to employ up to 30,000 more civil servants to deal with the process.

Gove said: “Can we simplify? What if I were to determine to simply leave the European Union, to trigger article 50 and to conclude the bare minimum in order to leave? What would article 50 actually require me to agree?

“For the purposes of this question, I am not worried about transitional arrangements, I am prepared to take the economic hit or to secure the economic benefits of not being inside the single market and being outside the customs union. I simply want the divorce on the quickest possible terms. What do I need in that quickie divorce?”



Social mobility 'getting worse for young people', says Social Mobility Commission - Politics live Read more

Speaking at the same committee, Sir Simon Fraser, the former permanent secretary at the Foreign Office, said the note appeared to exaggerate the problems but agreed there was not yet a central plan for leaving the EU.

“My understanding is that it is indeed proving to be a very considerable challenge in Whitehall to do this [drawing up a Brexit plan], that the government has not yet reached the point where … it is still in information-gathering mode and is not yet at the point of integrating that into a central plan. And that, I assume, will have to happen before the triggering of article 50 next year.

“And I agree that this is a huge burden, a huge additional load, for the civil service. This is an extraordinary complex range of activity across a wide range of domestic and international policies and it will definitely impose a great burden on the civil service.”

He said Gove’s idea of a “quickie divorce” dealing only with institutional issues but not the future relationship with the EU was possible but not the ideal solution.

Fraser argued it would be best to conduct article 50 negotiations winding up the UK’s membership of the EU at the same time as discussing future relations, but it was not realistic that this could be completed within the two-year timeframe. That would mean some kind of transitional relationship with the EU until the final deal is done, he suggested.

Catherine Barnard, a professor of EU law at Cambridge University, told the committee there was no quick solution to the problem of what to do about EU nationals staying in the UK.

She said there could be hundreds of thousands of EU citizens whose records do not show how long they have been in the country.



Fraser said the government will have to “put on the after-burners” if it is to trigger article 50 in the spring. “Not enough progress has been made – more needs to happen and time is relatively short if we are to have a negotiating position in three months’ time. The after-burners need to be put on,” he said.

However, he said the negotiations would inevitably reduce trade with the EU in the short- and medium-term, making negotiations much more complicated than previous trade deals.

“The article 218 [which sets out the EU’s rules for conducting negotiations with third parties] negotiations will not be free trade negotiations of the normal sort. Most [deals] are about increasing trade. This is about reducing trade within the EU. So the range of negotiation will go a lot further,” he said.

Hannah White, from Whitehall thinktank the Institute for Government, said May’s decision not to disclose the stages by which it plans to arrive at a point when it will trigger article 50 had been “unhelpful” for stakeholders.



“The point we have been making is that in the course of negotiations the prime minister has insisted she would not want to give a blow-by-blow account. What we think there could be much more clarity about right now is the process of getting to the position where the government is happy to trigger to article 50.

“We think the degree of secrecy about the process of getting to article 50 is unhelpful.”