Copying EU trade deals for Brexit not that simple
A “COPY and paste” approach to turning EU trade deals into UK ones postBrexit may be more complex than first hoped, top lawyers have warned.
The rolling over, or so-called “grandfathering” of the 67 free trade agreements (FTAs) that exist between the EU and other countries, to form UK-only bilateral arrangements, might not offer a quick fix to avoiding renegotiation.
Philippe de Baere, of law firm Van Bael & Bellis, said such an approach misunderstood the complications involved with some trade deals.
Existing deals would need to remain as trilateral arrangements in many cases, De Baere said, if the UK wanted to be able to add value to imported goods and sell them into the EU.
Simply grandfathering the deals would be like “having access to both sides of the pitch but not being able to play football”, De Baere said.
He said that the UK would not be able to move goods as easily between other countries and the EU and vice versa, fundamentally changing the offer of historical FTAs and raising questions of how attractive it would re- main to non-EU countries.
MP Nigel Evans, a member of the international trade committee, believes that political goodwill will be sufficient to ensure minimal disruption to existing trading relationships between the UK and those countries it trades with under EU FTAs.
“If they [other non-EU nations] do need to renegotiate any of those FTAs they have [with the UK] when we leave the EU, then we can go further,” he said.
Non-EU countries would know that negotiating with the UK rather than the EU 27 would be a far more simple exercise.
“Canada took eight years to reach an agreement with the EU and it’s still not ratified,” Evans said.
Even in the event of a “no-deal” Brexit, the UK would be more attractive outside of the EU to the 120 countries put off by its bureaucracy from making an FTA, Evans pointed out.
MP Jeremy Lefroy, one of the UK’s 28 trade envoys, believes that a fixation on FTAs misses the point that such agreements are not essential to build effective trading relationships.