John BERRIGAN
* Director General, European Commission, Directorate-General for Financial Stability, Financial Services and Capital Markets Union – DG FISMA.
Olivier GUERSENT
** Director General, European Commission, Directorate-General for Competition – DG COMP. Contact: Olivier.Guersent@ec.europa.eu. The authors wish to acknowledge the important contributions of Paulina Dejmek-Hack and John Golden to this article.
While the EU-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement and the Withdrawal Agreement, including the Protocol on Ireland/Northern Ireland, set a solid foundation for the future relationship between the EU and the UK, it by no means matches the level of economic integration that existed while the UK was a member of the EU. This is a natural consequence of Brexit and the UK's choice to leave the EU where it was fully integrated into the Single Market. This decision has had an impact across all sectors of the economy, including in both competition and financial services policy, creating frictions and barriers to trade which did not exist while the UK was a member of the EU. Nevertheless, the EU's objective is to have a stable and positive relationship with the UK based on the Agreements we both signed and ratified.
In December 2020, after a period of intense and complex negotiations, the European Commission reached an agreement on the terms of the EU's future engagement with the UK. The EU-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement (Official Journal of the EU, 2021a)1 is a state-of-the-art free trade agreement and sets a solid foundation for the future relationship between the EU and the UK. However, the Trade and Cooperation Agreement by no means matches the significant advantages that the UK enjoyed as a Member State. By definition, free trade agreements cannot replace membership of the Single Market. The UK has left the EU's ecosystem of common rules, supervision and enforcement mechanisms. In contrast to traditional free trade agreements and reflecting the UK's choice to leave the EU where it was fully integrated into the Single Market, the Trade and…
