Wednesday 20th February 2019

(5 years, 2 months ago)

Lords Chamber
Read Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Lord Hannay of Chiswick Portrait Lord Hannay of Chiswick (CB)
- Hansard - -

My Lords, does the Minister not recognise that it was a little odd to produce three rather theoretical options but not to test them against the present situation? Why did the Government not do that? That would be the normal thing to do. Could it have been that they were frightened to show that all these options were a good deal worse, some of them very much worse?

Lord Bates Portrait Lord Bates
- Hansard - - - Excerpts

In some sense they did that, because the analysis benchmarked against the status quo—our membership of the European Union. It then went through the options and said that, over a 15-year period, if the White Paper model were accepted there would be a 0.6% impact on GDP, 2.1% modelled on White Paper sensitivity, 4.9% on a free trade agreement and 7.7% on no deal.