Newington's Director of Public Policy, Greg Rosen, argues that businesses with concerns about the Brexit deal should engage with backbench MPs.

For many businesses, engagement with the UK regulatory context over recent decades has been shaped by twin certainties: that firstly the UK Government had control over its policy, and secondly that one of the few inhibitions upon ministers was the framework of EU-agreed laws and regulations within which those UK Government decisions were made. 

Parliament tended to have barely a walk-on part, for despite the power and influence that the Select Committee system has helped build since its introduction in 1981 and the codification of its independence from the whips after 2010, it was rare for the views of backbench MPs to be the determining factor for government policy. Even the Lords, where rebellions have been more frequent and peers have greater time to scrutinise legislation, has rarely been prepared to actually force change on government legislation. That made public policy and regulatory engagement simpler for businesses, particularly larger businesses and those businesses with established trade associations for whom relationships with established Whitehall contacts and key ministers would usually ensure that points of concern were heard and understood.

Brexit changes all that. Not only is the scale and complexity of regulatory impact above and beyond anything Whitehall has faced in the working lives of most serving civil servants, but the political context adds a further level to the challenge of mitigating those risks. With many civil servants being suspected by Brexiteers of having been “closet Remainers”, there is a concern amongst officials to avoid being seen to bring unwelcome problems too forcefully to the attention of Brexiteer ministers.

Conversely, amongst the ministers who had campaigned during the referendum for Remain, there is a concern to avoid being labelled nay-sayers and doom-mongers by parliamentary colleagues. There is a pervasive belief amongst former-Remainer ministers that they must at all costs be seen to deliver a Brexit that “means Brexit”. Ministers are looking over their shoulders at backbench Conservative MPs and at their committee of shop stewards: the 1922 committee, which contains a strong contingent of Brexit champions.

This means that if businesses need the UK’s Brexit transitional arrangements to include specific minimum provisions, for example with regard to the single market, which conflict with other political priorities of ministers, it will be insufficient simply to rely on engagement with officials and ministers to secure those goals.  Government may struggle to include necessary measures if ministers fear that Brexiteer backbenchers and Conservative constituency activists “won’t wear it”.

While in the past businesses could rely on trade associations to put their case with vigour and political credibility, more than several have suffered reputationally from being branded as “Remoaner” campaign  organisations, whose ability to put their members' case is now tarnished, albeit sometimes unfairly.

For businesses who want to ensure that their concerns are acted upon within government, there is no substitute for direct engagement: with government itself, but just as importantly with backbench Brexiteer Conservative MPs. It is only through the latter that ministers can be reassured that what they might want to support would be politically acceptable.

Some political phrases have resonance decades after their annunciation. One such is that “politics is the art of the possible”, which came to be so associated with 1950s Tory almost-Prime-Minister RA Butler. For ministers, the potential detail of a Brexit deal is defined as being what is within the bounds of potential political acceptability to Conservative backbenchers. If businesses invest in making the case to backbench MPs about why their concerns are worthy of special treatment, they have a greater likelihood of being accorded such. If they don’t, they won’t.