 I'm Steve Pears, I'm a Professor of Law at the University of Essex and what I'm going to talk about is the way in which the movement of people might end up being regulated in an association agreement between the EU and the UK after Brexit. So, an association agreement is sort of standard type of agreement which the EU signs with non-EU countries. It has to be agreed unanimously by the EU and it usually has to be approved by national parliaments, but there are some limitations on that. It can be applied provisionally if all our member states want to do that so that kind of speeds things up. So it could be applied provisionally from the day of Brexit or whatever day is relevant after Brexit and the national ratifications take longer but the law would be applied straight away. And also when it comes to implementing it by adopting further laws on social security or migration perhaps it doesn't necessarily need unanimous vote for the things that come afterwards or national ratification. So there are ways of simplifying things a lot above and beyond the initial decision making. And the European Parliament has to consent to the original association agreement but then doesn't have a role when it comes to implementing it with further measures. So that's the basic idea of an association agreement. It doesn't have to be called an association agreement and there are cases in the past of an association agreement legally which wasn't called that because the other side didn't want it to be called that. So when the Swiss and North African countries at different times have had association agreements with the EU which won't actually call that. So we could go that way with the United Kingdom if they don't want to use that name on the UK side because some voters might be upset you could call it something else in the title but it would be an association agreement. You don't even have to have an association agreement. There are other types of agreements which the EU has with non-EU countries, with Russia and ex-Soviet countries and a number of countries in Asia. It has partnership agreements. It's also agreed partnership agreements with Canada, Australia, New Zealand. It's agreed on negotiating in recent years to go alongside trade agreements. So we could have something like that as well with the United Kingdom but either way whether it's a partnership agreement or an association agreement that would be probably the main mechanism of dealing with the UK's relationship with the European Union. It might not cover everything. There might be a separate deal for instance on criminal law and policing and foreign policy issues but it would be the main mechanism of dealing with the economic aspects of the relationship. So it will either be a comprehensive free trade deal like the agreement with Canada or it would be something bringing in the United Kingdom or keeping the United Kingdom within the EU's internal market like the agreement with Norway and Iceland, the European economic area. It doesn't have to be exactly the same as the deal with Canada or exactly the same as the deal with Norway. Lots of the EU treaties with other countries are different in different ways. They like to start with standard models but then they get to different texts by the time you sit down and negotiate. So what might it say on the free movement of people? Now the agreement with Canada might well say anything. If we go down the route of an agreement with Canada it probably won't say very much about the free movement of people. That would be the consequence of a decision to focus on movement of goods and services in a free trade framework which is less intensive than an internal market participation and would almost certainly mean no real commitments on the movement of persons. So that's one basic choice which the UK could make. Now what if it made the other choice and said let's have an agreement which is about single market participation. Not the EEA but ultimately something that will be somewhat similar to the EEA would be signing up to single market participation. But in the EEA and in the set of agreements with Switzerland the principle that does include fully the free movement of people and the EU position in the negotiations with the UK for the post Brexit framework at the moment is quite solid that it doesn't want to exclude the free movement of people from the single market. If we want to deal with giving us full participation in the single market of great interest to say financial services and car industry for instance where the Japanese business is investing in the UK upset. Well the single market is very important to ask for our continued investment because it greatly simplifies our trade from car manufacturers in the UK to the EU. It's greatly interesting to Japanese pharmaceutical industries. It greatly simplifies their exports in quite a large British export industry of pharmaceuticals from the UK to the EU. They warned they might not continue investment if we don't have single market participation. So if that's the case if you want to go down single market participation on those sorts of grounds of trying to secure continued exports to the European Union the highest possible level for a number of goods and services industries. The EU position is where you have to sign up for the free movement of people. Well that's a starting position. A lot of people assume that that's sort of an absolute but they have bunched on things before. So if you go back to the renegotiation of the UK's role in the EU that David Cameron negotiated culminating in February now obviously some a lot of people disappointed and thought it was a very weak renegotiations. But there is one point that would look at if you went back to those negotiations and look at all the newspaper articles and comments that people made during those negotiations. A huge number of people said the Polish government will never accept any kind of deal reducing benefits for Polish workers. That's a red line for them. It will affect them too much. Too many Polish workers here have too much to lose. They will not agree to that. That's horrible that it will never get to the Polish parliament from their Polish point of view. Of course Poland did accept that. All the member states did accept that. Many people said they would never do that. They did accept that. And from the point of view of people in the UK that wasn't much of a deal. The point of view of some of the member states that was a big concession that they made to the UK that benefits for workers in work benefits could be limited and that child benefits exported to children in Poland and other member states that could be limited too. There are little big concessions that are willing to make to the UK that the people predicted they wouldn't make. So what does that mean for the EU-UK relationship post-production? Well it may mean that the EU position is they won't negotiate on free movement of people who must accept it as it is, is a negotiating position that they would be willing to accept some limitation on the free movement of people as compared to how it is now. I mean it's not completely unrealistic or fantastic for the UK to have as a negotiating position. You want to continue in the single market but we don't want free movement to continue of people exactly as it has been up until now. Now I think it would be unrealistic to say we want no free movement of people but the rest of the single market participation. It wouldn't be so obviously unrealistic to say we'll accept the free movement of people with some limitations as compared to how it is now. They would be limitations that would be significant enough for the British government to be able to come back to parliament and to the British public and say well we now have regained control of the numbers of EU citizens coming into our country. Now what would that mean in practice? Well you would start by continuing to apply existing EU laws on free movement of people but you'd impose I think some kind of possibility of limits for the UK government. Of course it would be reciprocated member states of the EU would be able to limit in some way British citizens coming there to match what the UK could do in Britain for EU citizens. So what kind of limits are these? Well some people have suggested that we don't let EU citizens into the country unless they already have a job offer. Now I think immediately that is a non-starter. It's surprising really that that's even being discussed seriously in my opinion. Think of all the other people who can come and visit the UK without a visa like Americans and Japanese and Canadians. They don't have to have a job offer to come and visit the country. Now of course a lot of EU citizens who are always going to want to come to the UK as tourists or to visit family or for other short term reasons they say they're going to refuse to let you in unless you have a job offer is just peculiar. I think a long time at the borders process people individually and check whether they have job offers too. So that really isn't a workable idea because we're bound to have tourism other sorts of flows not related to employment into the country. So what we have to do is first of all negotiate with the European Union if this is feasible some kind of limits that we might be able to apply. Now they won't be at the border they would be at the employer level which of course is where we already enforce the limits that we have on non-EU citizens working. All those many hundreds of thousands of American citizens who visit the UK every year as visitors are prohibited in principle from working here. Now how does that work? What stops them going on and finding work illegally? Many of them don't want to do it but if they did do it of course employers in Britain are obliged to check people's nationality and to see whether they're entitled to work and they can be penalised if they hire people who aren't authorised to work non-EU citizens mainly who aren't authorised to work. So that's the way in which we check it. There's always be somebody working under the table but that's the way in which we obviously deter a large number of people who would otherwise consider looking for illegal work and staying in the country without authorisation after their authorised stay runs out from working. That would be the same type of approach that we take to EU citizens. Employers would have to check whether they are authorised to work before they offered them a job, before they included a contract. So what does that mean? What sort of restrictions might exist? Well we could simply try and negotiate on the basis that we could set numerical targets and they could possibly be triggered by criteria like a rise in the unemployment rate or possibly simply a general power that wouldn't be then subject to review or dispute whenever we wanted to set numerical quotas of some type on the number of EU citizens getting jobs Perhaps that could be open to some kind of flexible approach so it could be we would decide to give, let's say, power to the Scottish Government to decide that within Scotland they don't want to apply limits on the number of EU nationals or they don't want to get work contracts or they don't want to have exactly the same limits as would apply in the rest of the country. There's one way of addressing the Scottish Government's concern, for instance, about wanting to stay in the EU single market as they could have different rules on these issues and perhaps other different rules on other devolved administrations or a more flexible rule in London or things like that. So you could have regional differences, you could also have differences based on salary, so if you're offering a job which has pay for less than £20,000 that has some kind of limit on it, it would rather be covered by quotas or in some way you'd have to have a job preference, you'd have to prove to the Home Office that no British citizen could do that job and so on. So above that level you wouldn't have constraints or it could be based on skills that there be certain criteria such as having a master's degree or having an undergraduate degree and that you don't have controls on workers who need that degree as a qualification to their job, you would have controls on people who didn't have a degree or you could base it on occupation. We have no problem with doctors coming to the country, there's no need to have approval or limits on the number of EU doctors coming to the country, there might be other jobs of course for which you would want to have some kind of approval process. So there were various possibilities that could either be spelled out in the EU-UK agreement or there could be a general power to limit the numbers on each side which we could then change as we wanted to in terms of looking at what the economic situation is, looking at the public concern about the levels of debt migration and so on. You could alter those numbers over time. I think best to have flexibility there so as to be able to choose in different circumstances exactly how we might want to limit the total number of EU citizens getting work. So I think that will be a crucial question. Do we go for that sort of deal in the first place of single market participation with some limits on the free movement of people? Or do we just shrug our shoulders about the whole thing, go for a comprehensive free trade agreement with lots of maybe additional extra rules about some of the industries we're particularly interested in and try and deal with those concerns that way. Probably the single market deal will have a more favorable impact on the British economy as compared to a comprehensive free trade agreement that both be difficult to negotiate within a two year time frame although that article 50 time frame can be circumvented not only by the possibility of extending it but by a transitional deal let's say which keeps the UK participating in some EU laws for a while before it negotiates a final agreement with the European Union. So a technically have left the EU, continues to apply some EU law for another year or two or three until we get that final deal agreed and then it doesn't necessarily have to be ratified by national parliaments because an association agreement as I say or other types of EU deals can be agreed to be put in force provisionally. So those are the two basic choices we have to make, one of them involving important questions about EU-UK immigration and whether we want to have special rules on it. The other one probably would say very little and most I'd say a visa waiver agreement between the EU and the UK. And we'd be making at the time when we decided at the early stage we'd be making a basic decision on the trade-offs between the economic benefits of single market participation on the one hand and the political concerns that people have about the total number of EU citizens coming to the UK and the other. I think the economic argument points towards a single market deal, the political concerns that some people have about the EU numbers point towards a comprehensive free trade deal with less benefit for the UK economy instead. But then the real political calculation is can we try and have a compromise in an association agreement which says you have single market participation but which does allow for enough limits to be placed on EU citizens to satisfy at least some of the British people with concerns about those total numbers. Can we reach a deal, is it possible to reach a deal which has enough limits that will say ok we have effectively taken back enough control of those numbers to satisfy people who are concerned about that but still have single market participation. So that's going to be a crucial question. There are others about contributions to the EU budget and the way in which we might have to apply future EU law or have involvement in its negotiation. But that I think is going to be one of the single biggest questions that we face in the negotiations and which the government would have to decide on at an early stage.