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The UK government needs to be “more ambitious” in its negotiations with the EU in order to boost the country’s flagging goods exports, the head of the UK’s largest business organisation has warned.
Shevaun Haviland, director-general of the British Chambers of Commerce, said she would keep pushing the government to build on the warm words of recent diplomatic exchanges on resetting UK-EU relations to deliver material improvements for exporters.
“We feel like the mood music is moving in the right direction. That’s good, but it’s not even nearly enough,” she told the Financial Times ahead of the BCC’s international trade conference in London on Thursday.
Haviland said the BCC would be looking to “apply pressure” on the government by hosting a meeting of UK and EU business and political leaders ahead of the EU-UK summit on May 19 that will formally kick off the reset process.
“We absolutely want them to be ambitious . . . they need to set the ambition high and move quickly with a clear timeline.”
Her intervention comes as Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer’s government is in the midst of a delicate negotiation with Washington to try to avoid the “reciprocal tariffs” due to be imposed by President Donald Trump from the start of April.
UK foreign secretary David Lammy will address the BCC’s conference and warn that Britain must grapple with broader economic flux. The “multilateral rules and institutions which were built to manage the global economy are not just facing challenges, they are under threat”, he will say, citing international climate finance and trade dispute resolution as crucial areas of dysfunction.
Declaring the “laissez-faire approach to globalisation, which ruled from 1989 to 2008” to be “dead and buried”, he will say he has instructed the Foreign Office to “turbocharge” economically beneficial relationships, including with the EU, US and China — which account for two-thirds of Britain’s external trade — but also deepen partnerships with markets such as Japan.
The move dovetails with wider reforms under way at the Foreign Office, including the creation of a departmental delivery board that will set hard targets for ambassadors and senior managers on trade and investment, migration and national security. Lammy is also planning to restructure the department, significantly boosting the UK’s diplomatic headcount overseas while reducing it in London.
Haviland said that the government must keep a “cool head” with Washington while doing more to back British exports around the world that have underperformed both EU and other G7 economies since the Covid-19 pandemic.
“The government needs to put more money into export support,” she said. “The government looks at it as a cost, but we’re telling them that it’s a return on investment because businesses that trade are more resilient, last longer, pay better and they pay more tax.”
A 2024 study by Aston Business School estimated that UK exports to the EU were 17 per cent lower than if Brexit had not occurred, a hit acknowledged by Cabinet Office minister Nick-Thomas Symonds in a speech in Cambridge last week on the EU-UK reset.
However, the government has said it will stick to its manifesto “red lines” on not rejoining the EU single market, entering a customs union with the EU or agreeing a youth mobility deal that would allow 18- 30-year olds on both sides to live and work in each others’ countries for two to three years.
Haviland said the BCC continued to press the government to take deeper measures to improve trade, including joining the Pan-Euro-Mediterranean customs area, removing safety and security declarations for goods and seeking a deal to improve professional mobility.
“We were with a chocolate business the other day. It exports to 50 different markets. It takes two days to get product to the US and sometimes it takes two weeks to get to France and Spain — still,” she added.
