Question to the Department for Exiting the European Union :

To ask the Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union, what process the Government plans to follow for invoking Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty.

The first formal step in leaving the European Union is to invoke Article 50, which will start two years of negotiations. The Prime Minister has been clear that we won’t be triggering Article 50 before the end of 2016 and once we have a UK approach and clear objectives for negotiations.

Article 50 explicitly recognises that a Member State may decide to withdraw “in accordance with its own constitutional requirements”. It is for the Member State concerned to determine what those constitutional requirements are.