Gina Miller calls on Government to release 50 secret Brexit reports to MPs

Gina Miller has called on the Government to release 50 secret reports detailing the effects of Brexit on different sectors of the British economy to all MPs.

Ms Miller, who was responsible for hauling the Government to court over its refusal to consult Parliament to trigger Article 50, told The Independent she believed the reports contained the ramifications of a no-deal Brexit and Downing Street’s official legal position on the potential revocation of Article 50.

She claims that without the release of the documents to MPs they would have to vote "blind" should a no-deal scenario arise in the coming months.

It comes after David Jones, a former Brexit minister, confirmed in a letter that the Department for Exiting the European Union (DExEU) had “conducted analysis of over 50 sectors of the economy”.

DExEU has already been threatened with legal action over its refusal to publish the reports by lawyers acting for the Good Law Project alongside Molly Scott Cato, a Green party MEP. They have given the Government 14 days to make the dossier public or face a challenge in the High Court.

And last week 120 MPs wrote to the Brexit Secretary David Davis demanding he publish the secret advice on the effects of Brexit, as politicians accused of him of keeping “not only Parliament but the public in the dark”.

But ministers have, so far, resisted calls to publish the conclusions of the investigations in full – arguing that some findings “would undermine the Government’s ability to negotiate the best deal for Britain” if made public.

“I have to say I’ve always been of the opinion that the Government should publish all the reports that they have done,” Ms Miller said. “Their view is that gives away their negotiating position but it’s not true. The reports are not going to say what it is you’re going to negotiate, what is says is these are the consequences.”

But rather than releasing them to the public, Ms Miller believes the secret dossiers should be released to MPs across all parties.

She added: “These reports should be made transparent. There are two questions here: are they made visible to the public or are they made visible to MPs? Because we are not in a world of direct democracy, we’re in a world of representative democracy and if we have that then actually every party, every MP in that House should have sight of those documents.

“At the moment most of them are pushing for them to be made public and I don’t think necessarily a good thing because that then can be used to fuel whatever position different people, pick and choose and take them out of context. But I do honestly think that the MPs should have sight of them – all MPs across parties.“

She added that her suspicion was that the dossiers contained scenario planning for a no deal – an outcome favoured by some leading Brexiteers. “The other thing I think they don’t want to share is that somewhere in one of those 50 documents is probably a legal position on the revocability of Article 50,” she said.

“I could bet my bottom dollar that in those 50 sector reports, WTO comes and it specifies and it touches on – to greater and lesser degree – what no deal means and that’s why they are not publishing them.“

Ms Miller said that if the Government fails to release the documents and Parliament is asked to vote on a no deal “in the short term” then they would be “voting blind in effect”.

Labour MP Stephen Doughty, a leader supporter of Open Britain, which campaigns against a hard Brexit, also told The Independent that the Government’s refusal to publish the documents “only heightens suspicions that they reveal the destructive consequences a hard Brexit would have for jobs, prices and our wider economy”.

He continued: “The Prime Minister’s ideological choice to wrench this country out of the single market and the customs union is putting trade with our biggest economic partner at risk, threatening Britain’s prosperity.

“It’s time Ministers stopped hiding the facts from the public. They must come clean with the British people and release these studies, so that MPs and voters can be fully informed about the full consequences of this Government’s headlong rush towards hard Brexit.”

A Government spokesperson said: “As we have said before, we will be as open as possible subject to the overwhelming national interest of preserving our negotiating position.

“The full list of sectors will be published shortly.”