David Davis has revealed the government has not assessed the impact of Brexit on different key sectors of the British economy.
The Brexit secretary told MPs on Wednesday “there is no sort of systematic impact assessment” as he was “not a fan” of economic predictions.
Davis had told parliament in October the government had prepared documents that examined the impact of Brexit on the economy in “excruciating detail”.
And in June he told the BBC’s Andrew Marr show: “In my job I don’t think out loud and I don’t make guesses. Those two things. I try and make decisions. You make those based on the data. That data is being gathered. We’ve got 50 – nearly 60 – sectoral analyses already done.”
But asked by the Brexit select committee today whether he had conducted impact assessments on areas of the economy such as car manufacturing or aerospace, Davis said: “no to all of them.”
“You don’t need to do a formal impact assessment to understand that if there is a regulatory hurdle between our products and a market it will have an impact,” he said.
“The assessment of that effect is not as straightforward as people imagine. I am not a fan of economic models because they have all proven wrong.”
He added: “We will at some stage do the best we can to quantify the effect of different negotiating outcomes as we come up to them.”
The committee session came after MPs won a battled to force the the government hand over its 58 studies into different sectors of the economy.
Davis said an “impact assessment” was a formal Whitehall term for a document and they did not exist when it came to Brexit.
“What we tried to do is give you as best we could,” he told the committee. “Without hindering our negotiating position and without compromising commercial confidentially or sensitivity.”
Lib Dem committee member Wera Hobhouse accused Davis of “misleading Parliament” over the studies.
“It is unbelievable that these long-trumpeted impact assessments don’t even exist, meaning the government has no idea what their Brexit plans will do to the country,” she said.
“Ministers must now urgently undertake these impact assessments and ensure people are given the facts.”