Statement
The United Kingdom has secured trade agreements with 64 non-EU countries, with which total United Kingdom trade was worth over £215 billion in 2019. The United Kingdom signed an Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) with Kenya on the 8th December 2020, our sixth agreement in Africa. This EPA ensures that all companies operating in Kenya, including British businesses, continue to benefit from duty-free, quota-free access to our market.
I welcome the International Agreement Committee’s report and their close interest in this important agreement. HM Government supports effective parliamentary scrutiny of trade agreements and will facilitate a debate in Parliament on this agreement in the weeks ahead. The United Kingdom’s overall objective is to secure a regional deal with the whole of the East African Community (EAC). With this aim in mind, we have continued to engage with EAC Partner States, including at the United Kingdom-Africa Investment Summit in January 2020 and since our exit from the EU to discuss this objective.
During our discussions, we put forward a proposal outlining our ambition to negotiate an agreement with the whole of the EAC. The EAC confirmed that some Partner States were not ready to enter into negotiations with the United Kingdom, but they recognised the need to provide stability and certainty for businesses and people involved in trade between the United Kingdom and Kenya. That is why we agreed to negotiate an agreement with Kenya in time for the end of the Transition Period, whilst remaining in dialogue with the EAC throughout the negotiations and ensuring that the agreement contains provisions to enable any state that is a contracting party to the Treaty for the Establishment of the EAC to accede to it in the future. During this process, the United Kingdom made clear that the negotiations were open for any other willing EAC Partner State to join. None did.
Whilst the United Kingdom had proposed a ‘no deal’ Transitional Protection Measure (TPM) to Kenya in 2019, this had only been developed to provide an additional 18 months to conclude trade negotiations with certain partners who faced the imposition of new tariffs in the event of a ‘no deal’ EU exit. However, as the Withdrawal Agreement reached between the United Kingdom and the EU in October 2019 included an eleven-month ‘Transition Period’ to December 2020, this gave additional time to conclude outstanding negotiations and the ‘no deal’ TPM was no longer appropriate. With respect to the EU’s Market Access Regulation (MAR), the United Kingdom-Kenya EPA, together with the United Kingdom’s Generalised Scheme of Preferences (GSP) framework, replicate, in respect of EAC Partner States, the effect of the MAR.
As a result of our work with Kenya, all EAC Partner States continue to benefit from duty-free, quota-free access as they did under the MAR. If we had not reached an EPA with Kenya, they would have been left behind, through no fault of their own – with the rest of the EAC continuing to benefit from the GSP framework. This was unacceptable to HM Government. No changes were made to the tariff schedules set out in the EAC’s agreement with the EU, in line with our approach to replicate the existing EU text as far as possible. Our intention is that our EPA is a stepping-stone towards even stronger regional integration in future.