Philip Hammond has set aside up to £412m of additional funding to help Whitehall deal with leaving the European Union following criticisms that the civil service cannot cope with Brexit.
The chancellor’s autumn statement said that the Department for Exiting the EU, or Dexeu, will receive £51m this financial year and an extra £94m from 2017/2018 until the UK’s exit is complete.
Additional resources of £26m each year by 2019/20 will be provided to Liam Fox’s Department for International Trade and the Foreign Office.
It follows concerns from senior civil servants and thinktanks that Whitehall does not have the staff or the skills to cope with the volume of work necessary to ensure that Britain leaves the EU.
The top civil servants’ union said that the money would do little to ease the problems because of impending cuts of 18% that were announced in 2015 by the then chancellor George Osborne. Dave Penman, head of the civil servants union, the FDA, said: “With no additional funding, departments will once again be asked to deliver ever more with ever less.”
Whitehall currently has a shortage of trade experts. Civil servants have not handled trade negotiations directly for 40 years because these were negotiated by the EU.
Extra money to Fox’s department will take its budget to just over £400m a year when combined with resources moved to the new department from UK Trade and Investment and the old business department.
Budgets for other departments will not change, as the chancellor announced that the 2015 plans would remain in place.
The Institute for Government, the Whitehall thinktank, said it was too soon to say whether the additional money would help Whitehall prepare for Brexit as the government had not yet explained how Brexit negotiations will be approached or what resource will be required.
“The government still has a huge number of commitments to deliver on top of Brexit. Despite emergency funding for prisons, today we saw little indication of how the chancellor will address the ticking time-bomb in other public services, like health and social care,” a spokesperson said.
Lord Kerslake, the former head of the civil service under David Cameron added to recent warnings that Whitehall was not sufficiently equipped to cope with the extra demands of leaving the EU.
It comes after a note for the Cabinet Office from Deloitte, a professional services firm, was published last week suggesting an extra 30,000 people could have to be hired to deal with the additional work.
