India UK FTA won't include more Visas: UK Minister
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London, Jan 23: The free trade agreement (FTA) between India and the UK is anticipated to be finalized this year, but the British trade minister in charge of the negotiations has stated that it won't include any increase in the number of free movement visa offers for Indians.
Kemi Badenoch, who was in New Delhi last month to begin the sixth round of FTA negotiations with Commerce and Industry Minister Piyush Goyal, stated that the "deal by Diwali" deadline set by the former prime minister Boris Johnson last year was not realistic and needed to be changed.
The UK Secretary of State for Trade recently ruled out any significant parallels between the FTA the UK had signed with India and its FTA with Australia, one of the first trade agreements made after Brexit. "Because we didn't support free movement and didn't think it was effective, we left the European Union," Badenoch said. Regarding additional visa offers, Badenoch said that this is not a deal that negotiates any kind of free movement with India. The minister suggested that he would be open to making concessions on matters like business mobility, but he ruled out the possibility of Indians receiving the same kind of deal as Australians, which permits under-35s to live and work in the UK for three years. The reciprocal UK-India Young Professionals Scheme, which was officially introduced earlier this month, is thought to have overcome this obstacle by granting 3,000 recent graduates between the ages of 18 and 30 visas to live and work in either nation for up to two years. Badenoch said, "We have to make sure that each trade agreement we sign is tailored to the specific country. The kind of mobility offer I can do to a country like Australia is not going to be the same kind of mobility offer I can do with a country like India, which has got many times the population." "And what people from the UK want to do when they travel to Australia is probably slightly different from what they do when they travel to India, and vice versa as well," she told ‘The Times’. Badenoch reiterated the current Rishi Sunak-led government's more flexible approach, distancing it from the previous Tory government's approach of deadline-bound FTA negotiations that he called "unhelpful." "The 'deal by Diwali' mantra is one of the things I have changed since becoming Trade Secretary. I tell people it’s about the deal, not the day. I think that having a fixed day where everything needs to be completed is not helpful in a negotiation because the other party can run down the clock," she said.
When Johnson visited India as prime minister in April of last year, he set a Diwali 2022 deadline for the FTA. That deadline, however, was abandoned due to significant political turmoil in the UK, and most ministers have since been reluctant to set a new deadline. "I do think a deal this year. I don’t know when. But after a while, if things don’t conclude then people just move on, on both sides. I’m very keen to sign a deal this year," said Badenoch. India and the UK currently trade for about GBP 29.6 billion annually, according to official data from the UK government. Both parties formally began FTA negotiations at the beginning of last year, and after that October 2022 Diwali deadline was missed, Sunak promised to move "at pace" toward an FTA that does not "sacrifice quality for speed."