Yet to release un-redacted copies of Brexit impact assessments
A day after the government submitted lawmakers a hard copy of a report with parts redacted, Brexit secretary David Davis has now been accused of treating Parliament with contempt after withholding information about the economic impact of Brexit from MPs.
MPs voted at the start of the month for a motion which required the Government to provide the committee with Brexit impact assessments relating to 58 different sectors of the British economy.
But the Department for Exiting the European Union removed some material from the dossier before making it available to the committee on Monday. Following this, the committee has demanded that Davis appear before it as a “matter of urgency” to explain his actions.
Davis has earlier stated that he was withholding the information because he had “received no assurances from the [Brexit] committee regarding how any information passed will be used”. However, MPs on the Brexit select committee who were supposed to be handed over the reports after a unanimous and binding vote of MPs.
Hilary Benn, the chairman of the committee, has rwritten to Davis to tell him that the decision to remove information from the reports before handing them over was “both contrary to the instruction given to the Government in that motion and to the clear expectations that I set out to you in our discussions”.
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