The select committee worried that the government wanted to conceal alarming Brexit plans. But there were no plans at all

With its Brexit strategy hurtling off the rails, this could have been a timely moment for the government to reassure parliament about the existence of a well thought-out plan B.

Instead MPs were invited to take a leap of faith on Wednesday when the Brexit select committee asked David Davis to explain what had been done to assess the impact on British business of abruptly leaving the EU.

Theresa May finally gets DUP's Arlene Foster on the phone Read more

“I am not a fan of economic models because they have all proven wrong when you have a paradigm change,” said the Brexit secretary. Because the government wanted a comprehensive trade deal, he insisted, “the usefulness of [sectoral] impact assessments would be near zero”.

The committee had called Davis to give evidence because it feared a cover-up. Davis and other ministers had spoken previously of sectoral studies that helped assess the “impact” of leaving, so Labour asked to see these “impact assessments” fearing they contained some scary conclusions.

Davis took the committee on a semantic tour to explain why the 850-pages he has produced do not amount to what MPs thought they were getting. “Just because you use the word impact doesn’t make it an impact assessment,” he said.

But what started out as a fear that the government was hiding the warnings of civil servants, or that dodgy dossiers had been sexed up to say what ministers wanted, has turned out to be something far worse: the absence of any planning, nefarious or otherwise.

Whitehall insiders confirm that Davis is not wrong. One who has seen more than half the studies, says they were sent to the committee in an almost entirely unredacted form. They highlight the vulnerability of many industries by looking at their dependence on European markets or regulation but they do not attempt to forecast what could happen next.

David Davis says government has not assessed impact of Brexit for different sections of economy - Politics live Read more

Even more alarmingly, Davis attempted to excuse this black hole at the heart of government because this was all just too difficult to bother. “The real problem of conducting an impact assessment on say, financial services, is the sheer range of potential outcomes,” he said, saying it would divert precious resources.

Asked if the government had tried to look at regional impacts instead, he added: “You don’t have to do a complicated analysis to know that if the chemical industry is going to have a problem exporting its goods it’s going to have an impact on the north-east.”

What was produced had been rewritten a bit as events unfolded over the last year but only because the “first round weren’t all that good”. There was little assurance that subsequent attempts were any better.

MPs desperately sought another explanation. “[But] we were told there were smart people across government thinking systematically about what’s going on,” wailed Stephen Crabb. Perhaps there are other departments doing work that Davis was not aware of, tried another.

But the Brexit secretary could not even provide this assurance. The Office for Budget Responsibility had estimates. “I think I’m right in saying that they are based on outside analysis,” he said. “They do rest on each other.” Unfortunately the OBR recently revealed it did not have a clue either and left this section largely blank in the budget.

Nonetheless the Brexit secretary could not understand the fuss. “The audit trail you are asking for is quite extraordinary,” he told one particularly forensic questioner.

“I am really tight on time,” concluded Davis as he broke off giving evidence to hurtle back to the process of trying to take Britain out of the EU anyway. “This is a difficult time.”