The British Irish Chamber of Commerce has welcomed the publication of the White Paper on Brexit by the UK as a basis for an agreement on free trade for goods.
The Director General of the British Irish Chamber, John McGrane, said he was encouraged by what he had read in the 98-page document published by the British government yesterday. "It has taken a long time but better late than never," Mr McGrane said. "This is a set of serious, constructive proposals that we think should be given serious consideration by the EU in the coming weeks."
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Mr McGrane believes the basis for an agreement on completely free trade, tariff free trade and condition free trade is about putting down a few basic rules which include regulatory alignment and a basis for dispute resolution. Critically, it would also agree a way of applying the common external tariff, ie. no different tariff than the EU would have," he said. "There's a very complicated basis in that - which will take a lot of work for the UK and EU to agree - but the basis of something is in that document," he said.
However the proposals from the UK on the services industry is different. Services include tourism, education, data businesses, health care services and financial services. Mr McGrane said the way the UK is coming to these things is recognising that services are delivered by people, and the offer that is in the package is around ensuring that the people who can deliver those services will be permitted to travel.
"This will be difficult for the EU because it means that other people will not be permitted to travel so the UK is proposing the conditional movement rather than free movement. That's going to be challenging but if we get a resolution on that, then we have the basis that protects goods as well as services. That's as much about UK services trading into the EU, but it's also about Irish services, including financial services, trading into the UK which is still an extremely valuable market for us," he stated.
The British Irish Chamber of Commerce said the proposals in the White Paper are serious, innovative in some places, and complicated in others. "At least we now know what the UK wants to achieve and we can get on with the work of negotiating 'a least worst Brexit'," Mr McGrane said. "As a business organisation representing businesses across the UK and Ireland - employing over 2 million people - our concern is to get the maximum in free trade in goods and services," he said.
The British Irish Chamber of Commerce has published a set of Brexit principles that have calibrated the value of trade at stake. The value of this trade is over €1 billion a week and it is over €70 billion a year in two-way trade. There are 400,000 jobs directly involved, split equally on both islands, and significantly more in the supply chain.
The Chamber has been laying out a set of principles that it believes can work. "We believe this paper comes very close to that set of principles, and we want to see our politicians equipped with the time and space to allow the negotiators hammer this deal down now that we know what the basis of the ask is from our friends in the UK," Mr McGrane said.
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