UK proposes EU customs deal
LONDON: Britain outlined plans for a future customs agreement with the European Union (EU) yesterday and an interim deal to ease companies’ Brexit concerns, proposals one senior EU official described as “fantasy”.
Prime Minister Theresa May’s government is keen for the discussion to move beyond the EU’s focus on a divorce agreement to consider how a new relationship could work.
The EU said it would “carefully” study the proposals, including measures for an interim customs agreement and two suggestions for a new trade partnership.
But the European Commission, the EU’s executive, again said it would not budge from its stance that progress on the divorce needed to be made first.
Guy Verhofstadt, the European Parliament’s Brexit point-man, underlined the distance between the two sides.
“To be in and out of the customs union and ‘invisible borders’ is a fantasy,” he said on Twitter. “First need to secure citizens rights and a financial settlement.”
In what it described as the first of a series of “future partnership papers”, Britain outlined two possible approaches to a new customs relationship with the EU after leaving the bloc and its customs union.
It described a “highly streamlined customs arrangement” that would borrow from existing systems while expanding the use of technology, or a new customs partnership that could mirror the EU’s requirements for imports from the rest of the world.
Britain also wants an interim customs agreement to allow the freest possible trade of goods by removing the threat of costly logjams at borders and to enable businesses to adapt to any future customs arrangement after leaving the bloc in March 2019.