Question to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, 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.

As a responsible Government, we’ve been preparing to minimise any disruption in the event of no deal for nearly three years. We are putting in place a range of mitigations, which include assessing and reducing the risk of disruption to personal data flows to and from the UK in the event of a no deal through legislation, public and private sector communications and preparations for adequacy decisions from the EU.

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 £412m 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); £286m 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.