13 November 2017

Financial Times: UK has 2 weeks to clear Brexit logjam, say EU business leaders

[...] Thirteen representatives of the continent’s leading business groups, including Germany’s BDI, France’s Medef, VNO-NCW of the Netherlands, and the UK’s CBI, were invited to Downing Street on Monday to meet the prime minister, Brexit secretary David Davis, business secretary Greg Clark and Treasury officials.

Downing Street said the meeting was held to discuss “opportunities” around Brexit, but Emma Marcegaglia, chair of BusinessEurope, which groups together Europe’s employer organisations, said the message the groups gave was that, without agreement on a transition period and a move to the next phase of negotiations by December, companies would start taking their investment out of the UK.

“Companies in Europe don’t trust that there will be a solution in the next months and everybody is doing their contingency plans considering the worst[-case] scenario,” she said. “We have lost completely one year, we are still at the beginning.”

Carolyn Fairbairn, head of the CBI, said there was “real unity” between the message given at the meeting from her organisation and the other European business groups.

“This is real crunch time. The transition period needs to be agreed in principle and we need progress in the next two to three weeks,” she told the FT.

“We have a European united voice [that says] we want as soon as possible a decision on this transitional period,” said Pascal Kerneis, managing director of the Brussels-based European Services Forum, who attended the meeting.

“Time is very short and we called to have a decision by December.”

Attendees at the meeting told Mrs May that a transitional period of two years would not be sufficient.

[...] The prime minister is open to the idea of a transition deal lasting until the end of 2021 — six months before the last possible date of the next general election — but has had to back off in the face of opposition from foreign secretary Boris Johnson.

Mrs May said the transition should last “around two years”, after Britain leaves the EU in March 2019; Mr Johnson has subsequently said the cut-off date should be the end of June 2019. [...]

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