The UK government is launching a TV campaign to urge Britons to be ready for a no-deal Brexit, the country’s top civil servant said.
Cabinet Secretary Mark Sedwill told a parliamentary committee that the TV spots will be aired in advance of Britain’s scheduled departure from the European Union on March 29. They would complement radio advertisements that are already running.
The disclosure came a day after the UK government published an analysis that concluded the country is nowhere near ready to leave the European Union without some sort of transitional deal.
Sedwill denied accusations from members of the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee that the government had failed to to prepare the country for a no-deal scenario.
“Individuals, citizens and businesses are making their own judgments, the information is available,” Sedwill said. “We’ve been putting it out on the website for several months, that’s now been complimented by some radio advertising and we have plans to bring through some television advertising as well. So there is a communications campaign.”
The radio advertisement features a variety of voices asking how their lives will be affected by Brexit encourages listeners to visit the government’s Brexit website for information.
Asked for more information about the television commercial, the government Department for Exiting the European Union directed CNN to the Cabinet Office. Neither the Cabinet Office nor the Civil Service immediately responded to a request for comment.
The United Kingdom is hurtling toward exiting the United Kingdom without a deal, as a March 29 deadline looms. Senior civil servants appear worried that the British public isn’t facing up to reality.
“In the last four weeks two hundreds pieces of communications have been pushed out by the government, the question is whether people are reading or listening to it,” civil service chief executive John Manzoni told the same committee.
Manzoni and Sedwill both said news coverage of the Brexit process is affecting how people and businesses are preparing.
“They also look at the front pages and the news bulletins and they make a judgment,” Sedwill said. “If the news started to shift and people believed the likelihood of no deal — whether at the end of March or later — became greater, then we’d see a shift in the pattern of behavior. “
Manzoni said small businesses had to decide for themselves whether they want to spend the money to be prepared for a possible no deal. “Government can’t make the decision for them,” Manzoni said.
The risk of Britain crashing out of the European Union faded somewhat on Tuesday when May opened the door to delaying Brexit if UK lawmakers vote down the exit deal she has negotiated.
Sedwill said the extent of news coverage of Brexit “dominates the judgments that individual citizens and businesses make. And we have to accept that is the context we’re operating in until it is clear which pathway we are on.”
