Brexit: Theresa May to trigger Article 50 by end of March
The UK will begin the formal Brexit negotiation process by the end of March 2017, PM Theresa May has said.
The timing on triggering Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty means the UK looks set to leave the EU by summer 2019.
Mrs May told the Tory Party conference – her first as prime minister – the government would strike a deal with the EU as an “independent, sovereign” UK.
Voters had given their verdict “with emphatic clarity”, she said, and ministers had to “get on with the job”.
In a speech on the first day of the conference in Birmingham, she also gave details of a Great Repeal Bill which she said would end EU law’s primacy in the UK.
She attacked those who “have still not accepted the result of the referendum”, adding: “It is up to the government not to question, quibble or backslide on what we have been instructed to do, but to get on with the job.”