A demonstration in support of the European Union outside the Houses of Parliament in London, June 28, 2016.ANDREW TESTA/The New York Times
As Britain begins the process of extricating itself from the European Union, the government has discovered it's sadly lacking a key resource: trade negotiators.
Britain hasn't negotiated a trade deal in more than 40 years, because all of the negotiating has been done by the EU. Now that it's leaving the EU, there's a frantic search to find anyone in the civil service who knows how to put a trade deal together. And the government may have to turn to Canada for help.
This week, a parliamentary committee examining the implications of Brexit was told that there were just 20 people in the entire public service (439,323 employees in 2015) who have experience in trade talks. That compares to more than 600 at the EU. Canada had close to 200 officials and outside lawyers working on the Canada-EU trade deal, and that was only at the federal level. Each province and territory had its own team.
"The fact is that finding these capabilities across [the British civil service] is going to be a challenge," Sir Simon Fraser, the former permanent secretary at the Foreign Office, told the committee. "We will be negotiating with professionals in other governments and international organizations who've basically spent most of their careers doing this. So it's quite a demanding challenge for these people to learn these skills and the techniques of negotiation."
He added that the government will have to turn to others for help.
Sir Christopher Meyer, a long-time British diplomat and former ambassador to the United States, said the government will need to triple the size of the Foreign Office to cope with the added demands of the pending trade talks and expanded international relations.
Ross Denton, a London-based trade lawyer with Baker & McKenzie, said Britain will be looking to hire trade experts from places such as Canada and New Zealand, which have long histories of negotiating agreements. "Subject to there being an overarching concern that New Zealanders or Canadians may not be batting as hard as they could be, I think they are going to have to do that," Mr. Denton said. "Frankly, everybody is going to get asked [by the British] 'How do we do this?'"
And the British won't have much time.
Once the country triggers the exit mechanism in the EU Treaty, Britain and the EU will have two years to negotiate a "withdrawal agreement." They will also begin negotiations on a trade deal, which won't be easy since they are already at odds over whether Britain can have free access to the EU market without agreeing to the unfettered movement of people, something the Vote Leave campaign opposed. Two years won't be nearly enough considering Canada has spent seven years negotiating a far less complicated agreement with the EU, and it still hasn't been ratified.
And that's not all.
Britain will also have to figure out what to do with around 50 trade agreements the EU has signed with other countries, such as South Korea, Mexico and South Africa. Those deals will no longer apply to Britain, so it will have to negotiate new ones.
Then there's the issue of the World Trade Organization. Britain has to untangle itself from the EU at the WTO, something that could involve input from the other 160 countries that belong to the WTO.
All of that comes as the British government will be plowing through thousands of EU regulations that have been incorporated into British law in order to determine which ones still apply.
"Even if you get rid of the intellectual issue of 'how the hell do we do all that,' you've then got to say 'who's going to do that?'" Mr. Denton said.