The UK-Turkey Free Trade Agreement was signed today as International Trade Secretary Liz Truss and Turkey’s Minister for Trade, Ruhsar Pekcan, met on a video call.
The deal will secure existing preferential tariffs for the 7,600 UK businesses that exported goods to Turkey in 2019, ensuring the continued tariff-free flow of goods and protecting vital UK-Turkey supply chains in the automotive and manufacturing sectors.
🇬🇧🇹🇷 Just signed a trade deal with Turkey covering more than £18bn of trade.
✅Ensures vital continuity for business
✅Supports 1000s of jobs in automotive, steel and manufacturing across 🇬🇧
✅Paves way for more ambitious deal in the futureTrade = jobshttps://t.co/cf6hc7VRwr
— Liz Truss (@trussliz) December 29, 2020
In a statement the government said : “The deal will secure existing preferential tariffs for the 7,600 UK businesses that exported goods to Turkey in 2019, ensuring the continued tariff-free flow of goods and protecting vital UK-Turkey supply chains in the automotive and manufacturing sectors.
Both countries have also committed to working towards a more ambitious free trade agreement in the future, which will go further than the existing deal and will be tailored to the UK economy.
Today’s agreement will ensure preferential trading terms for UK businesses that exported more than £1bn worth of machinery, and iron and steel exports worth £575m, to Turkey in 2019.
It also ensures UK businesses can continue to import under preferential tariffs, compared with no agreement. This supports UK importers of textiles, where the annual increase in estimated duties would have been around £102m under WTO terms. Tariffs applied to UK imports of washing machines and televisions will remain at 0%, compared to up to 2% and 14% respectively under WTO terms…”