Finance

Mark Carney is pushing for a post-Brexit Single Market transition deal

Mark Carney £5Reuters/Stefan Wermuth

Bank of England Governor Mark Carney backs plans for a transitional period to phase in any Brexit deal agreed, according to media reports.

Carney allegedly had dinners last week with business and finance leaders where he explained plans to maintain the UK’s single market status for two years after the Brexit, according to the Sunday Times.

The transitional period would start after the two-year deadline of Article 50, which the UK must trigger to start the process of leaving the European Union.

It’s not a new idea, and it’s also not at odds with Prime Minister Theresa May’s thinking.

At the CBI conference last week, May said she would try to avoid a “cliff-edge” in the Brexit process, allowing some leeway for a deal to take longer than the two years set out in Article 50.

“People don’t want a cliff edge, they want to know with some certainty how things are going to go forward,” May said at the CBI conference on Nov. 21. “That will be part of the work that we do in terms of the negotiation that we are undertaking with the European Union,” she said.

A transitional deal could maintain the UK’s single market status until at least 2021, if Article 50 is triggered next year as planned. Last week Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny told Sky News that a transitional deal between the UK and EU would be “inevitable.”

Kenny said: “I think it will be impossible to do the negotiations within the contemplated two-year period.

“That’s why I think there’s a growing feeling in Europe that there should be a transition period, and that the transition period will be longer than those two years – I think it will be.”

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