Border officials recruitment ‘sped up’ for Brexit, says chief secretary to the Treasury

Speaking on Radio 4’s Today Programme, Mr Sunak said: “A lot of the money we are spending is going to go on things that would need to spend anyway because we are leaving the European Union, that means we’re going to be leaving the single market and the customs union, so of course that does mean changes to how we trade with Europe.”

He added: “At some point we will be leaving the European Union, hopefully by the end of October is our clear desire so we would at some point have to do that campaign to get traders ready for the changes they’ll have to do.”

Mr Sunak said: “We have already been investing in preparing our borders. We had £2.1 billion allocated for Brexit preparedness in the last financial year, and additional £2.1 billion this year. This comes on top of that. Part of that has already gone on our borders and HMRC.

“We have already got 500 new border force officials working. The 500 extra that we’ve announced today recruitment is already in process. The procedures have already been centralised, they have been sped up, and 250 of those will be on the front line at the end of October, with a further 250 to come over the coming months.”

Asked how many extra staff are actually in place, Mr Sunak said: “I don’t have the exact HMRC staffing arrangements in front of me. What I can tell you is the money from the Treasury has been allocated and deployed to all those departments.”

He added: “We don’t control what the French would do. I think some of the signs we’re seeing are reasonably positive. The French have announced tens of millions of pounds of investment themselves in Calais and in hiring more border inspectors on their end.”

Mr Sunak said spending the additional £2 billion today is important to make the UK “as prepared as possible” to “minimise disruption”.

He said: “We will have a fiscal event in the autumn because we will need to have a spending review, and the spending review is what sets out all departments’ spending plans.”

He added: “We would like to give people certainty as soon as possible. We are working, both the Chancellor and me, we’ve been in these jobs a few days, we’re working very hard on figuring out the exact timing of that and, hopefully, we’ll have something to say on that reasonably soon.”

Meanwhile, Gary Cohn, former chief economic adviser to US President Donald Trump, said a no-deal Brexit would be better than “the state we’re in right now”.

Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, Mr Cohn said: “Any forward progress at this point is good.

“This is another one of those economic geopolitical situations that has to be solved. And if it’s hard, soft, it has to be solved.

“And countries are more resilient than people think, and if you end up at the hard Brexit and say ‘We’re out, no-deal, we’ll be out on this day’ things will tend to happen, things will fall into place.

“You’ll have to get certain things done to make sure it works and then it will evolve over time.

“But it’s better than the state we’re in right now, where every month or every six weeks there’s a new drama and we just kick the can down the road.”