‘Trade deal must lift both India and UK’
BADENOCH NOT IN A RUSH TO SIGN AGREEMENT DESPITE DIWALI DATE
A TRADE deal between Britain and India might not contain everything that the services sector wants, UK trade secretary Kemi Badenoch said on Tuesday (4) as a deadline to complete the deal approaches.
Prior to stepping down as prime minister, Boris Johnson set a target with India’s prime minister Narendra Modi to complete a free trade agreement (FTA) by Diwali, which this year falls on October 24. “We want something comprehensive, but it has to be right for both countries,” Badenoch said at the Conservative Party’s annual conference.
“(The deadline) is not arbitrary ... it was set quite a while ago. But doing a trade deal is not a simple and easy thing. So what we want to do is something that lifts both countries. It may not be everything that the services sector wants. I am not in a rush to sign trade deals. I want good deals with these countries. We need to make sure that every deal is great for the UK,” she added.
India’s commerce and industry minister Piyush Goyal said last month that negotiations for the proposed free trade agreement between India and the UK are progressing at a faster pace.
Prime minister Liz Truss has prioritised a trade deal with India as part of an Indo-Pacific tilt, and Britain has announced postBrexit agreements with Australia and New Zealand. Johnson previously said a deal with India could double trade and investments between the countries by the end of the decade. India and the UK trade mostly in services which accounts for about 70 per cent of the overall trade. Both countries also aim to increase their bilateral trade to $100 billion (£87bn) by the end of this decade.
Badenoch was appointed trade secretary by Truss last month and acknowledged that she was still getting up to speed on trade issues, but experts in her department had been working hard.
She said any deal that was agreed could also be expanded at a later date.
“Just because we have a free trade agreement, it doesn’t mean that we can’t do even more later. So that’s the message that I would send to the services sector,” she said.
“There’s a lot of good stuff that I think that we can get, but the focus has to be on a deal that is good for the UK and India, not any specific, particular sector alone.”