Theresa May is preparing for a "headache" in Parliament as the two-year process of triggering Britain's divorce from the EU begins.
Ministers privately admit they are almost certainly going to have to put a draft law through Parliament to kick off formal EU exit negotiations in anticipation they will lose a landmark legal fight in the Supreme Court.
Sky News has been told the "most likely" option would be a two-clause bill that would give permission to trigger Article 50 and also pull the UK out of a raft of EU agencies that regulate medicines, the nuclear industry and the environment.
Ministers had hoped the court would allow Mrs May to put together a short, three-line bill, focused solely on Article 50 and difficult to amend.
Leading Brexiteers are now privately conceding that the idea of a unamendable bill is not realistic, but want to limit their opponents' manoeuvring on the floor of the House.
A two-clause bill would give opposition MPs more scope to table amendments.
"The majority of MPs have made it clear that no-one wants to block triggering Article 50 in the House of Commons," Wes Streeting, Labour MP, told Sky News.
"However, a bill with more than one clause, particularly when that plans to take us out of a whole range of agencies, has the recipe to cause quite a headache for the Government in the House of Commons - because it does give people the ability to table amendments and cause trouble."
:: Article 50 court case explained
The Government is preparing to allow a couple of days of debate in the House of Commons before pushing through a second reading by mid-February in order to get the bill into the House of Lords by the beginning of March - a tight timetable designed to hit the Prime Minister's March-end deadline.
Mrs May is adamant that she will get the bill through Parliament by her self-imposed deadline and has drawn up various versions of the draft law because the "detail of the Supreme Court judgment will be crucial to the framing" of any bill.
In addition to requiring parliamentary approval to trigger formal Brexit talks, a senior source said the Court could well require ministers to seek permission to withdraw from any EU agencies the UK is a member of "by virtue of what is now the Lisbon Treaty and various acts of Parliament".
Mike Nyman, chief executive of the Nuclear Advanced Manufacturing Centre, told Sky News he was aware that the Government was preparing to get parliamentary approval to legally withdraw from agencies, including the European Atomic Energy Community (Eurotom),but said he was optimistic that UK-EU collaboration could still continue post-Brexit.
He said: "Collaboration of civil nuclear power has been very beneficial for member states and we need to find a way of maintaining that collaboration to ensure cross-country learning and development of advanced technology or nuclear continues."
Mr Nyman said it was important that regulators in the UK and EU continued to collaborate in order to ensure UK participation in pan-European civil nuclear developments.
The highest court in the land is to give its judgment over whether the Prime Minister must give MPs and peers a vote on whether to trigger Article 50 - starting the formal process of leave the EU - next Tuesday.
The ruling is the culmination of a series of court cases over who has the authority to begin formal Brexit talks - the Government or parliament.
The High Court already ruled that MPs should be given a vote on kicking off the process.
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