Brexit takes the spotlight

As the political fallout of the Chequers agreement rolls on, shedding the Foreign Secretary and Brexit Secretary in its wake, the government published its Brexit proposals on Thursday.

The new Secretary of State for Exiting the EU, Dominic Raab, introduced the ‘EU Exit: Future Relationship White Paper’ as a ‘new and detailed proposal for a principled, pragmatic and ambitious future partnership between the UK and the EU in line with the policy agreed at Chequers last week’.

Raab said the government’s proposals would ‘safeguard the constitutional and economic integrity of the UK’ and would protect ‘our economic interests by minimising the risk of any disruption to trade’.

‘[T]he government propose an innovative and unprecedented economic partnership based on open and free trade, maintaining frictionless trade through a new UK-EU free trade area for goods, underpinned by an ongoing common rulebook covering only those. Our approach minimises new barriers to service provision, allowing UK firms to establish in the EU and vice versa, and provides for mutual recognition of professional qualifications,’ he said.

Law Society president Christina Blacklaws said the government would be judged on the outcome but that the white paper was at least pointing in the right direction: ‘The white paper clearly states the benefits of civil judicial co-operation to both UK and EU and the fact businesses benefit from legal certainty in situations where disputes arise. It also acknowledges the importance of clear rules to resolve disputes and that the future relationship with the EU should protect that and ‘weaker parties’ in disputes involving employees and consumers.’

Peter Watts, a partner in Hogan Lovells Brexit Taskforce said: ‘The white paper starts to pencil-in some of the details of the UK Government's position but…it raises as many questions as it answers.

‘For businesses there will be a range of specific concerns and questions but the overriding impression will be the amount of work that still needs to be done. Even if these proposals can win sufficient favour in principle to enable a withdrawal agreement to be signed before 29 March 2019, it seems inevitable that many important details will remain outstanding. That will mean that many months of the "transition period" are likely to be taken up with continuing negotiations meaning that the practical window for transition could well be much shorter than 21 months.

‘Not the “beginning of the end” but perhaps the “end of the beginning” of Brexit.’