Press Release: BritishAmerican Business Statement on the U.S.-UK cooperative framework for Large Civil Aircraft

London/New York – In response to today’s announcement that the U.S. and the UK have agreed on a plan to resolve the 17 year large civil aircraft dispute, BritishAmerican Business (BAB) CEO, Duncan Edwards said:

“The decision to suspend tariffs for 5 years and set up a Working Group to do away with this longstanding trade dispute entirely is very good news for our transatlantic community. Throughout the past two years these tariffs, while WTO-compliant, have been an irritant to UK-U.S. trade and investment at a time when energies should have been fully devoted to further strengthening a bilateral relationship that is worth over $13tn in foreign direct investment.

“We hope and expect that the Working Group will consult with industry regularly and extensively in order to reach a permanent and sustainable solution.”

BAB Director of Policy and Trade, Emanuel Adam, said:

“Finding a solution to removing these damaging tariffs has been a top priority for our community since the tariffs were first imposed. We have worked tirelessly to show that the dispute was disproportionately harming smaller businesses in local communities; businesses who struggled to absorb the additional costs of doing business across the Atlantic. Solving this dispute is an important development of our ambition to create a trading environment that is conducive to the many companies who are keen to turn their transatlantic ambitions into reality.”