Former Cabinet Secretary Lord O’Donnell says it will take ‘at least five years’ for the UK to negotiate a final Brexit deal with the European Union
FORMER Cabinet Secretary Lord O’Donnell says it will take "at least five years" for the UK to negotiate a final Brexit deal with the EU.
Speaking to Radio 4, Lord O'Donnell warned that Britain "certainly won't have to come to any arrangements in two years' time".
The former head of the civil service suggested that the UK could "symbolically leave" but ministers would have a lot of work on their plates to sort out the small print.
"We might well get to a point where we can symbolically leave but all sorts of details will still remain to be sorted out," he said.
"It will still be unclear precisely what the deal will be for all sorts of parts of goods and services for our trade, and certainly may well be unclear about what access we might have to their markets."
He said the entire process would take "years and years" to finalise.
“I can imagine it taking at least five years to get through all of the details. And I imagine some of the transitional arrangements may be longer than that,” he told BBC Radio 4's Westminster Hour.
Lord O'Donnell added that it was "blindingly obvious" that the UK needed a transitional deal to be put in place while a longer-term arrangement was worked out.
"I mean the idea that you can manage this carving out of a new relationship between the UK and the EU in 18 months let alone two years, there’s not a chance, there never was a chance," he said.
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He also said that an agreement could be impossible to ratify with other EU states.
Sir Ivan is said to have warned ministers that other European leaders expected Britain to put forward a free trade deal, rather than continued access to the Single Market.
Downing Street indicated today that the Government believes it will be possible to complete both the "divorce deal" and a new trade agreement within the two-year time frame set out under Article 50 of the EU treaties.
"The intention is that we will have a deal within the time frame we have set out which sees us exit the EU and allows us to trade with and operate within the single market," said a Number 10 spokesman.
But Government ministers say they don't know how long the process will take.
International trade minister Mark Garnier told MPs it is "very, very difficult" to work out how long any trade deal will take, pointing to the four-month period needed to secure an agreement between the United States and Jordan.
He added that comments from Britain's EU ambassador Sir Ivan Rogers were "words from interlocutors" rather than a definition of how long it will take to create a UK-EU trade deal.