December’s Brexit deal left many issues unsettled and created a series of complex structures that will require careful management in the coming years, according to a new report from the Institute for Government.
It said the UK has the best part of a decade's worth of deadlines for agreeing elements of the future relationship, and that January’s row over vaccine shipments between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland “underlines the fragility of the UK’s new relationship with the EU”. The row saw Brussels threaten to invoke Article 16 of the Northern Ireland Protocol to safeguard EU vaccine supplies against export to the UK.
The IfG said prime minister Boris Johnson needed to decide how to support the new EU-UK Partnership Council set up under the Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA), as well as the 19 committees established to oversee the agreement and smooth the transition. The committee count is nearly double the number in the EU-Canada trade deal.
Report authors Maddy Thimont Jack and Jill Rutter said that although the UK government had wanted a Canada-style agreement with the EU, Brussels would never regard the UK as “simply Toronto on the Thames” and ministers risked more conflicts if relations were not managed well.
Their report listed deadlines for agreeing aspects of the UK-EU future relationship that continue up to 2028.
In Managing the UK’s relationship with the European Union, they applaud Boris Johnson’s decision to create a new Brexit and International Policy Unit in No.10 under Lord David Frost, announced at the end of January.
Thimont Jack and Rutter argue that the move was more practical than appointing a lead department for sorting out the UK’s future relationship with Europe, because there was “no obvious candidate” for that role.
They said the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office “does not have the capacity to grip the detailed minutiae of the UK-EU relationship” and lacked other relationships.
Thimont Jack and Rutter acknowledged the Treasury had the Whitehall-wide view for the role, and the clout. But they said giving the department the lead on future relations with the EU would have been a “big accretion of power” for the Treasury and “a stretch” for the chancellor.
They discounted the idea of the Department for International Trade being the lead department because it was not involved in negotiating the TCA and was “very much focused” on trade beyond the EU.
“It would have struggled to be seen as an honest broker between departments and would lack the institutional clout to hammer out compromises,” they said.
They added that giving oversight of the UK’s future relationship with the EU to a lead department would also have “raised the spectre of repeating the mistakes made with creation of DExEU straight after the referendum”. Their report said that DIT and the Department for Exiting the European Union had been part of a structure that was “not fit for purpose” when they were created in 2016.
Thimont Jack and Rutter said Frost’s new Brexit and EU Policy Unit would need to look across all aspects of the new relationship, including the Northern Ireland Protocol – which is currently the remit of the Cabinet Office – and any remaining central functions from the Transition Task Force.
“It will also need to link to other parts of the Cabinet Office managing the relationships with the devolved governments and the development of post-Brexit policy on trade, state aid and regulation,” they said.
Thimont Jack, who is an associate director at the IfG said, the vaccine row had shown how even in a bureaucracy the size of the European Commission, damaging blunders could still jeopardise the stability of “painfully negotiated” agreements.
“The government needs to move fast to put in place the necessary structures and processes to manage the hugely complex network of relationships set up under the TCA, both with the EU and internally, or it will find itself constantly firefighting,” she said.
“That is an essential element as well to reassure business that the agreement provides a stable framework for future planning.”
The report said Downing Street’s next pressing decision on the UK’s new relationship with the EU was who would be the nation’s ministerial representative at the new Partnership Council. It said “logic” pointed to Cabinet Office minister Michael Gove.
Other pending issues include setting up a new TCA cabinet committee to replace the existing “XS” Brexit strategy committee; deciding who will answer on TCA issues in parliament; and considering how to involve devolved governments in the structures set up by the TCA.