Question
As the Council has declined to respond to an FOI request on this topic.
Can the Council advise me what actions they have taken in relation to preparing for a no-deal Brexit? Could this include any impacts on the provision of services to our local residents and any actions that may need to be performed by the Council should this event actually happen?
Minutes:
Question
As the Council has declined to respond to an FOI request on this topic.
Can the Council advise me what actions they have taken in relation to preparing for a no-deal Brexit? Could this include any impacts on the provision of services to our local residents and any actions that may need to be performed by the Council should this event actually happen?
Answer
I think I covered that in the speech at Council but I will reiterate it. Yellowhammer was restricted. In fact it was so restricted that I did not even know that we were working on it ourselves. In light of the Government releasing those details the Council has shared more information on its preparations.
The Council has established an Officer group of managers from across the authority to plan for Brexit. The group is now meeting weekly and that has been escalated. It is a matrix of a Government resilience planning and it actually started prior to the March date, as I said in Council.
The range of subject areas that the Council is preparing for includes (but not limited to):
· Supply chain disruption – school meals, personal protective equipment etc;
· Staffing – possible loss of staff originating from the EU27 (social care and RE3 have been identified as having the highest exposure to date);
· Data – potential that we are unable to access our own data on data stored within the EU;
· Major Projects – potential for construction projects to be delayed or over budget due to supply chain and currency fluctuations;
· Regulation – Trading Standards/food safety and environmental protection – possible capacity issues due to additional work required.
The planning environment has now included, as I announced at Council, Pauline and I and as we come nearer the date and, the event if it occurs then, that will be extended to the Opposition Members.
Supplementary Question
I am sorry I missed the Council meeting where you talked about this. Do you think that the Council has been properly resourced by Central Government to cope with “no deal”?
Supplementary Answer
Let me answer that question by really posing a question to you. It is the same as a question I posed to myself. We are not really in the forefront of the problems that might occur and therefore yes probably but I will not know until we completely elaborate the planning and what the planning without a withdrawal agreement means because there is a lot of very loose talk about what “no deal” means. But there is no such thing as “no deal” because there is a structure of agreements which are already there. So to answer your question completely we need to establish what the environment is which we are dealing with at the time and at the moment we are not that clear. If it happens at all.
Councillor Jones asked the following additional question:
It was interesting that you said that Yellowhammer was restricted so did you not know what was happening?
Councillor Halsall responded as follows:
You have asked a supplementary question did I know what was happening? I knew as much as you did quite honestly but I think that the Officers who were also restricted in the information that they could share even with myself have done a typically excellent job in filling out the blanks so we are not without a response if a response is needed.