Worldwide Free Trade - Question

Part of the debate – in the House of Lords at 2:53 pm on 16 April 2018.

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Photo of Baroness Fairhead Baroness Fairhead The Minister of State, Department for International Trade 2:53, 16 April 2018

Let me take that in two parts. On the relationship with the EU, it will clearly remain a very important trading partner for us. We need to make sure that we have as frictionless an environment with the EU as we possibly can. We believe that the freedom to be able to make free trade agreements with other countries will allow us to have the trading agreements in the future that can boost our trade further. Regarding those qualitative assessments that we made as part of the impact assessment, we looked at one report from Head and Mayer which had looked at 159 academic reports about the benefits of FTAs. All I can say is that from that information, while it depends on the scale, the relationship and the supply side, the median increase is around 32% from a free trade agreement.