Brexit

The government is commissioning a "detailed assessment" of the costs and benefits of EU migrants as it plans how to manage immigration after Brexit. A new set of rules is needed for when EU free movement ends in the UK.
An independent committee, tasked with drawing up the Government’s immigration policy post-Brexit, has been asked to look specifically at how EU migrants affect different sectors of the UK economy amid suggestions new rules could be made for different industries.

Research by think tank the Centre for London concludes that the looming EU exit could be a factor in reducing numbers of Europeans coming to the capital to work, a slowdown in job creation, declining business confidence and decelerating house price growth.

The report underlined an economic slowdown included deteriorating house prices and plummeting business confidence, coinciding with a drop in the numbers of Europeans registering to work.

British airline EasyJet said Friday it had applied for a new air operator’s certificate in Austria to allow it to continue flying in the European Union after Brexit regardless of the outcome of negotiations.

The application "will allow easyJet to establish a new airline, easyJet Europe, which will be headquartered in Vienna and will enable easyJet to continue to operate flights both across Europe and domestically within European countries after the UK has left the EU," it said in a statement.

Britain aims to stay in a good relationship with the European Union and continue cooperation on security and defence issues. What is your own opinion, will Britain be able to maintain a good partnership with the EU?

This is obviously the key question at the moment. We all hope that relations between Britain, the European Union and, of course, individual EU countries will remain cordial, though the negotiations are likely to be extremely difficult and complex, while there is a chance of tensions being raised and disagreements being voiced strongly at various points in time. What is important is that once negotiations are finished, we have good trading arrangements between the UK on the one side and the 27 EU countries on the other. At this point in time, it is impossible to know exactly what these trading arrangements are going to be.

Swiss bank UBS is weighing up whether to move banking jobs in London to Frankfurt, Madrid or Amsterdam to cope with Britain’s planned departure from the European Union, Chief Executive Sergio Ermotti said in an interview with CNBC.

With around 5,000 employees based in London, Switzerland’s largest lender has been preparing contingency plans even before British citizens, in a referendum, voted to leave the EU in June 2016.

"I think Frankfurt is a location of choice. There are different, other locations that could come into consideration," Ermotti said in the interview broadcast on Monday, according to a transcript.

Chief negotiator Guy Verhofstadt and leaders of four of the parliament’s main groups wrote in a joint letter to newspapers that Britain’s plans for the three million EU citizens expecting to remain in the U.K. post-Brexit "fall short" of what they are entitled to and what U.K. nationals are being offered in the EU.

EU Parliamentarian Guy Verhofstadt has called proposals put forward by the UK government a "damp squib" which would leave millions of Europeans with "second-class citizenship".

Deutsche Bank is gearing up to re-home many of its trading and investment-banking assets back to Frankfurt from London over Brexit, according to a Bloomberg report.

Germany’s largest lender would relocate most of the business reported in London to a so-called booking center in Frankfurt under the plan, said the people with knowledge of the matter. The strategy, which is still being finalized and would be reviewed if the Brexit scenario changes, will probably be implemented over the next 18 months; trading jobs and up to 20,000 client accounts could also be shifted, the source told Bloomberg.

Germany’s financial hub, Frankfurt, is trying to attract its share of the Brexit-driven banker exodus from London by appealing to "risk takers" working in the financial sector.

The UK is widely expected to lose financial passporting rights after its EU exit, which would represent a huge blow to its financial services industry. The EU’s passporting rules allow businesses to sell services across the union from anywhere within it and only require companies to be regulated in one country, rather than everywhere they operate.