Part of 3. Topical Questions – in the Senedd at 3:43 pm on 31 January 2018.
You will know, as a Government Minister, that you have to have the freedom to ask your officials to do blue-sky planning, including all options, including some which you may be horrified by, so that the Government, in private, can decide what to prioritise, bring forward, propose and make public. An early draft of ongoing analysis in support of the UK Government's Brexit negotiations and preparations looked at different off-the-shelf arrangements currently existing as well as other external estimates. It did not set out or measure the details of desired outcomes, which the UK Government says is a new, deep and special partnership with the EU, or predict the conclusions of negotiations. It also contained many caveats and was hugely dependent on many assumptions where significantly more work was needed to make use of this analysis and draw out conclusions. In fact, this leaked analysis of just three scenarios was therefore incomplete and partial. As a Government Minister, therefore, how do you respond to the clear duty that Government Ministers have not to publish anything that could risk exposing negotiating positions until they have concluded what their negotiation positions are and have reached the stage where such information would not compromise them when around the table with other parties?