13 February 2019

The Guardian: UK has rolled over just £16bn out of £117bn trade deals

The government’s push to roll over EU trade deals from which the UK currently benefits has yielded agreements covering only £16bn of the near-£117bn of British trade with the countries involved.

Despite frenetic efforts by ministers to ensure the continuity of international trade after the UK leaves the EU on 29 March, the international trade secretary, Liam Fox, has so far only managed to secure deals with seven of the 69 countries that the UK currently trades with under preferential EU free trade agreements, which will end after Brexit.

Fox’s department has yet to sign agreements with several major UK trading partners – including Canada, Japan, South Korea and Turkey – while sources have said that sufficient progress is unlikely to be made before the Brexitdeadline in less than 50 days’ time.

Canada, Japan, South Korea and Turkey alone accounted for goods exports worth £25bn in 2017 and imports of merchandise worth £28.6bn, with the UK currently able to access these markets on preferential terms as part of membership of the EU.

Fox sought to downplay the significance of the deals in parliament on Wednesday, saying all of the countries involved only accounted for about 11% of total UK trade in 2018, with the smallest 20 nations worth less than 0.8%.

Answering questions on his department’s progress, he told MPs the best way to avoid disruption was to ratify Theresa May’s withdrawal agreement, which would maintain Britain’s current trading relationships for the duration of the two-year transition deal, until alternative arrangements could be made.

“As with all international negotiations, and indeed any negotiations, they will go down to the wire. And I would expect nothing different from these agreements. That’s the way that countries do business,” he said.

Details have however emerged of the scale of the challenge. According to a document obtained by the Sun, progress has been ranked by officials using a traffic-light system, which shows most deals are far from completion.

Only a handful are shown as green and able to enter into force by March 2019. The majority are in amber and red, where deliverability is either off-track or significantly off-track, while some major trade deals, including with Japan and Turkey, are coded in black as “not possible to be completed by March 2019”. [...]

Full article on The Guardian

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