This is a House of Commons Committee report, with recommendations to government. The Government has two months to respond.
The UK's EU representation: what has changed and how is it working?
Date Published: 24 October 2023
This is the report summary, read the full report.
During the UK’s membership of the EU, the Government’s official Brussels-based operations were conducted through the UK’s Permanent Representation to the European Union (UKRep). With the UK’s withdrawal from the EU in January 2020, UKRep was rebranded as the UK Mission to the European Union (UKMis).
We know that UKMis has had to adapt to the UK’s departure from the European Union. There have been structural and functional reforms to UKMis including staff numbers, budget, and a new emphasis on nurturing the UK’s relationship with European Free Trade Association states. However, any information about structural and functional reform is not readily available to the public on the website of Gov.UK. We recommend the publication of UKMis activities to their website, including updates on UK-EU relations, to have full transparency for the public, where possible.
UKMis has the responsibility of representing the interests of the UK’s home nations and the wider UK family, which consists of the crown dependencies and the Overseas Territories. Whilst those Crown Dependencies and Overseas Territories from which we took evidence expressed broad satisfaction with the UK Mission and UK engagement on Brexit related issues, they still face some critical issues, for example, the Falkland Islands are struggling with the imposition of tariffs. In contrast to the crown dependencies and Overseas Territories, Wales is concerned with a perceived lack of communication from the Government, particularly on devolved areas such as business (to the extent matters are not reserved), transport and housing. We have recommended more structured communication between the UK Government and the devolved nations, as well as a more formal structure for consulting the crown dependencies and Overseas Territories on EU issues that can be fed into UKMis.
The UK Mission’s work is not restricted to the UK’s institutional relationship with the EU, under the Withdrawal Agreement and the Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA). UKMis spends about 20% to 25% of its time on non-TCA related issues. This includes foreign policy and defence. This work is not readily known and we recommend that UKMis is much clearer about where non-TCA related work, such as PESCO, fits with the rest of its work.