INSIDE BRIEFING EXTRA: When Brexit and Covid collide

Inside Briefing with the Institute for Government

Institute for Government

News, Politics, Government

4.6 • 252 Ratings

🗓️ 3 December 2020

⏱️ 66 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In January, the government will be doing battle on two fronts: dealing with a likely disruptive end to the Brexit transition period as the UK faces a new trading relationship with the EU while the covid crisis is still raging. Even if the UK government is able to deploy and manage its resources effectively, local authorities and businesses may still be overwhelmed. In this podcast, we will consider how the government should prepare for a difficult January including what the government can learn from its initial pandemic response and previous iterations of no-deal planning. Jill Rutter, Senior Fellow at the Institute for Government is in conversation with Dame Clare Moriarty, former Permanent Secretary at the Department for Exiting the European Union and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, Professor Jonathan Portes, Professor of Economics and Public Policy, Kings College London, Tom Riordan, Chief Executive of Leeds City Council, Alex Thomas, Programme Director at the Institute for Government. Audio production by Candice McKenzie #IfGBrexit See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to the latest IFG live podcast.
0:15.0	Today we're going to bring together the two big stories, if you like, of 2020. Brexit, which we all thought when we started the year, would be the thing dominating the news headlines.
0:27.6	After all, Brexit was done on the 31st of January when we terminated our 47-year membership of the EU,
0:34.6	but this was supposed to be the year when the government finalised what our new start,
0:40.4	as it likes to call it, would look like.
0:42.3	But that has been rather knocked out of the water in 2020 by the second big preoccupation.
0:48.5	Instead of focusing this year on Brexit, this has been the year of the pandemic.
0:53.4	We have to go back to the Spanish flu in 1918
0:56.3	for public health crisis of a similar dimension, back to the early 18th century for a bigger
1:04.4	economic hit. But we all know that as we move forward into 2021, we are simultaneously going to not just have left the political institutions of the EU, which we did on the 1st of January, but also leave the economic institutions, the single market and the EU's customs union.
1:30.9	Deal or no deal. That trading relationship will be very different and the implications and a lot of other areas as well.
1:35.9	So the government is trying to do that during a pandemic. Some people thought that the pandemic
1:41.1	would be a pretext to use that right we had back in June to extend,
1:45.8	but the government was determined to deliver Brexit this year, so it could move on to the rest
1:51.3	of its agenda. So what we're going to be looking at today is what does this mean? What will
1:56.8	confront government, business, the rest of us when the government tries to move us simultaneously
2:04.0	into our new future while still managing the pandemic, the new whammy, if you like, how to
2:12.3	manage that. Well, that's what we're going to be discussing today. I'm Joe Rutter. I'm a senior
2:16.8	fellow at the Institute for Government,
2:18.7	and I'm joined by a top panel of people who are going to use the next hour or so
2:24.6	to shed some light on these issues.
2:28.1	First up is Dame Claire Moriarty.
	...

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