The new trading arrangements with the EU: UK-EU trade in goods in 2021

It has been over a year since the UK signed its single most important post-Brexit trade instrument – the Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA) with the EU – establishing a framework for the UK relationship with the EU in a wide range of areas. In this episode, we consider the full year of data now available for EU-UK trade in goods in 2021 and assess the impact of the Agreement. Bearing in mind that Covid-19 has ensured that everything has been but business as usual, clear trends are starting to emerge and questions are starting to be asked as to exactly what’s happening and why? Why have the 70-mile queues outside the port of Dover, which the Government postulated in 2020 as a reasonable worst case scenario, failed to materialise? Why has the UK failed so far to impose a full range of checks on goods coming into the UK and what might happen once they start to do so? And how have businesses by and large coped with the extra bureaucracy which being outside of the EU single market has entailed? To discuss all of these issues and more, Chris Horseman is joined by Professor Michael Gasiorek, Director of the UK Trade Policy Observatory, Emily Rees, Founder of Trade Strategies and Senior Fellow at the European Centre for International Political Economy in Brussels, Peter Foster, Public Policy Editor of The Financial Times and author of the ‘Britain after Brexit’ newsletter, and William Bain, Head of Trade Policy at the British Chambers of Commerce.