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In July, a few days before his surprise appointment as Brexit secretary, David Davis wrote a detailed article for ConservativeHome about the approach the government should adopt to EU withdrawal. In it, he confidently predicted that new trade deals with countries outside the EU could be negotiated quickly, within two years.
So be under no doubt: we can do deals with our trading partners, and we can do them quickly. I would expect the new prime minister on September 9th [at this point the Tories still thought members would be voting in a lengthy leadership election[ to immediately trigger a large round of global trade deals with all our most favoured trade partners. I would expect that the negotiation phase of most of them to be concluded within between 12 and 24 months.
So within two years, before the negotiation with the EU is likely to be complete, and therefore before anything material has changed, we can negotiate a free trade area massively larger than the EU.
My formal advice is that, and this is from the UK side, the UK is unable to negotiate or sign an agreement prior to the formal exit from the EU. We can certainly have preliminary discussions and that’s part of what I’m doing here this week. Preliminary discussions around what a post-Brexit Australia-UK trade deal might look like.
Based upon what we’ve been told, if article 50 is present in Q1 or Q2 next year [the first or second quarter of the year] and then the two year year window in relation to that, so you would expect it is at least two and a half years off.
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Sig Nordal 