Asked by: Baroness Morgan of Cotes (Non-affiliated - Life peer)
Question to the Department for International Trade:
To ask the Secretary of State for International Trade, which nations that have trade agreements with the EU have agreed to continue those agreements with the UK after the UK leaves the EU.
Answered by George Hollingbery
Discussions with all partner countries have demonstrated a commitment to finding a pragmatic way to ensure continuity of our existing international agreements.
As part of the Withdrawal Agreement, the EU agreed to notify its treaty partners that the UK be treated as a Member State for the purposes of EU international agreements during the Implementation Period (IP). This includes trade agreements.
A number have already publicly welcomed this approach (Library deposit of 13 September DEP2018-0926 provides a list of countries). Others are, understandably, waiting for the notification to be issued before responding formally.
The Government will continue to do the responsible thing and prepare for all eventualities with partner countries, including a ‘no deal’ scenario. However, when we reach agreement will depend on the progress of these ongoing discussions. The Government will inform Parliament and the public when agreements are signed.
Asked by: Baroness Morgan of Cotes (Non-affiliated - Life peer)
Question to the Department for International Trade:
To ask the Secretary of State for International Trade, whether analogous estimates to those used to arrive at the statistics published in the reports by his Department and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in March 2017 as UK Trade and Investment Highlights have been made for EU member states.
Answered by Greg Hands
Data on the value of trade between the UK and EU member states are available from publicly-available sources such as the Office for National Statistics, Eurostat and UN Comtrade.
Asked by: Baroness Morgan of Cotes (Non-affiliated - Life peer)
Question to the Department for International Trade:
To ask the Secretary of State for International Trade, what the methodology is by which the jobs estimates referred to in the reports by his Department and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, published in March 2017, as UK Trade and Investment Highlights were collated.
Answered by Greg Hands
UK-US Trade & Investment Highlights is a report demonstrating the depth of the current commercial relationship between the UK and the US in each of the 50 states. For each state, an estimate of the value of goods and services exported to the UK was derived by combining (a) manufacturing exports data from the US Census Bureau, (b) agricultural output data from the US Department of Agriculture, (c) services exports data from the US Bureau of Economic Analysis and (d) data on the geographical concentration of services exporters from Moody’s Analytics. Estimates of direct and indirect jobs tied to these exports were then estimated using industry-specific employment survey data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.