UK must secure Brexit transition 'without delay,' TheCityUK says

The UK must secure a transitional period for after it leaves the European Union (EU) "without delay" and stem the flow of jobs out of the country, TheCityUK, a body representing its financial industry, said on Thursday.

British Prime Minister Theresa May will make an "open and generous offer" to the rest of the EU in a speech in Florence on Friday in an attempt to break the deadlock in  Brexit talks, the BBC reported, citing a Cabinet minister.

The fourth round of talks was delayed by a week to September 25.

"Many firms are already moving parts of their operations out of the UK," TheCityUK's Chief Executive Miles Celic said in a statement.

"When they're gone, it's hard to see them coming back. Even if the UK  and EU agree the best possible Brexit deal by 2019, without urgent clarity on transitional arrangements, business will assume the worst and act accordingly."

Referring to May's upcoming speech, Celic said Florence was once a powerful European financial centre that lost its position.

"We don't want to see the same thing happen to the UK," he said.

Britons voted in a referendum on June 23, 2016, to leave the EU. May triggered Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty in March 2017, which set off the two-year negotiation process to complete talks with the bloc about the terms of the withdrawal.

The UK wants to move talks on to trade, but the bloc is seeking to settle terms of the divorce first (specifically how much Britain will pay for commitments made before it leaves), citizens' rights and Northern Ireland's border with the Republic, which will become the only UK/EU land frontier.

EU leaders will decide in October if "sufficient progress" has been made for the talks to move on to where the UK wants to take them. If not, then a decision may not come until December, leaving just over a year to work out a complex trade deal.

"We can't say yet that we have made sufficient progress," Michel Barnier, Europe's chief negotiator for Brexit, said on September 7.

Verhofstadt in Ireland

The European Parliament's Brexit coordinator Guy Verhofstadt is visiting Northern Ireland and the Republic.

"Brexit," he told reporters in a clip posted on his Twitter page, "must ensure that the peace process and the Good Friday Agreement are secured and that there is no hard border.

"There is concern the issue is not sufficiently present around the negotiating table."

The EU has not offered any solutions over Northern Ireland because the "onus" is on the UK to provide them. 

The UK has said it would not seek a 'hard border' for Ireland. That would mean no passport controls or immigration checks would be carried out.

It has also said support for the 1998 Good Friday Agreement – which set the constitutional status of Northern Ireland and brought the province's Troubles to an end after 30 years of armed conflict – should be written into the Brexit agreement. 

The Irish border runs for about 500 kilometres and is crossed by tens of thousands of people each day. Trade between the UK and Ireland was worth €19.9 billion in 2015, according to the British Irish Chamber of Commerce's website.

Verhofstadt addressed a joint meeting of three Oireachtas committees in the Dáil chamber in Dublin on Friday. The Dáil is the Irish parliament.

(Alistair Holloway, alistair.holloway@wort.lu, +352 49 93 739)