Question to the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, what preparations his Department is making for the UK leaving the EU without an agreement; and how much funding has been allocated to those preparations.

We remain focused on ensuring our smooth and orderly withdrawal from the EU with a deal as soon as possible. As part of this, we continue to prepare for all Brexit scenarios. We are continuing to make sensible decisions about the timing and pace at which some of this work is progressing. This includes working closely with our overseas network and other Government Departments to put in place a range of mitigations to minimise any disruption in the event of no deal.

The Treasury has allocated over £4.2 billion of additional funding to departments and Devolved Administrations for EU exit preparations so far. This breaks down as £412 million over the spending review period for the Department for Exiting the European Union, Department for International Trade and the Foreign & Commonwealth Office (Autumn Statement 2016); £286 million of additional funding for 2017/18 (a full breakdown of which can be found in Supplementary Estimates 2017/18); over £1.5 billion for 2018/19 (Supplementary Estimates 2018/19); and over £2 billion for 2019/20 (Main Estimates 2019/20). This funding is to cover all exit scenarios and is in addition to departmental efforts to reprioritise from business as usual toward preparations for the UK's departure from the EU. Work on no-deal exit preparations cannot be readily separated from other EU exit work, given the significant overlap in plans in many cases. The Foreign and Commonwealth Office also received £5.6 million of additional funding in 2018/19, for no-deal civil contingency planning.

We continue to keep advice on how people should prepare updated on gov.uk/euexit.