Britain’s Department for International Trade has admitted that it has only carried out “preliminary” modelling into a potential US-UK post-Brexit trade deal — and has refused to make the information public.
Liam Fox, the UK trade secretary, claimed in July last year that DIT analysis suggested that bilateral US-UK trade could rise by £40bn a year in real terms by 2030 “if we’re able to remove the barriers to trade that we have”.
But the ministry has turned down a freedom of information request to publish its economic modelling into the possible deal, saying it is exempt from disclosure.
It said that “premature” release of the analysis would be detrimental to the progress of future post-Brexit trade discussions. “There is limited public benefit in releasing analysis that is not complete,” it told Unearthed, an investigative journalism project at Greenpeace, which made the FOI request.
According to one official, the £40bn figure is understood to involve “basic” analysis which did not take into account any specific issues around the US market such as the difficulty of removing all non-tariff barriers.
The preliminary analysis suggested that a free trade agreement would boost bilateral trade by about £40bn by 2030 compared with having no FTA, a spokesman said. But he conceded that trade between the two countries would probably grow in either scenario. Trade between the two countries was £183bn in 2017. [...]
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