Building the Brexit team

FEW challenges the British civil service has faced would boggle the bureaucrat’s mind as much as Brexit. While unscrewing the legal nuts and bolts that fasten the country to the European Union, officials will have to survey British industries to discover what protection motorcycle manufacturers and salmon fisheries might require from foreign competition and what access they need to European markets. Then they must negotiate more than 50 trade deals, to replace the ones Britain will forfeit by leaving the EU. Some wonder whether the “Rolls-Royce” of government—which has shrunk by one-fifth since 2010—has the horsepower for the job.

The scale of the task will depend on what sort of Brexit the new prime minister, Theresa May, negotiates. Under the maximal form of withdrawal, civil servants would painstakingly have to copy, or scrap, 12,295 EU regulations. They have already started to map out every British law that derives from the EU.

Mrs May has promised a new ministry for Brexit to co-ordinate all this, the first task-specific Whitehall department created outside of wartime. A new department of up to 1,000 staff may reassure the public that something is being done but, as the Institute for Government, a think-tank, points out, it will bog down mandarins at a time when there is more important work to be done than sorting out new e-mail addresses. Nick Wright of University College London believes that funding boosts for existing departments, particularly the stripped-down Foreign Office, would make more sense.

Whatever the new ministry looks like, the most pressing issue is expertise. Much of the Brexit bureaucracy can be handled by Britain’s 393,000 existing civil servants. But some outside help will be required, particularly when it comes to trade. When Britain joined the European Economic Community in 1973 it handed over control of trade-deal negotiation, as all member states must. As such, only about 20 civil servants in London now have experience of these complex tugs-of-war, according to an initial government review. The EU, meanwhile, has a crack team of around 600. It will be “very difficult” for Britain to catch up, says Pascal Lamy, a former head of the World Trade Organisation (WTO). The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills recently advertised for 300 negotiators and trade specialists.

The private sector stands ready to help. But besides the expense, bringing in an army of management consultants would raise questions of confidentiality, says Emily Jones of Oxford University’s Blavatnik School of Government. Any consultancy’s other clients would love a keyhole into the Brexit negotiations; in the finance industry alone, £12 billion ($16 billion) of business rests on the outcome, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers. Doubts of allegiance also surround foreign nationals. New Zealand, the first rich country to sign a trade deal with China, has offered to loan its experts. But the top team should be British, says Sir Simon Fraser, a former diplomat.

The wiliest strategy might be to poach trade negotiators from the European Commission itself. Some 32 Britons work within its Directorate General for Trade. Recruiting them may be easier for the fact that Brexit is likely to stall Britons’ progress up the Commission’s career ladder. Yet Eurocrats enjoy reduced-tax salaries and have put down roots in Brussels. Still, says Miriam Gonazález Durántez, a lawyer and former EU trade negotiator, it is their doors that Britain should be knocking on. Next it could approach Britons working in the WTO. If Britain is to leave the negotiating chamber with its pockets unpicked, their ilk is sorely needed.