UK-EU alignment and divergence: the road ahead

On Tuesday 24 February, academic think tank, UK in a Changing Europe, published their latest report, ‘UK-EU alignment and divergence: the road ahead’.

The report charts the UK’s regulatory journey over the last five years and the path ahead. It argues that the UK has made very little use of its “Brexit freedoms” to diverge from EU law since 2021, and that the Labour government is now pursuing ‘alignment’ with EU rules in many areas in an attempt to remove some of the trade frictions caused by Brexit.

The first half of the report is comprised of thematic chapters which gauge the scale of divergence across a range of sectors and ask why, in many cases, it may have fallen short of early promises. The second then considers the challenges the current, Labour government will face as it embarks on its agenda of closer regulatory alignment.

Tamara Hervey, Jean Monnet Professor of EU Law at The City Law School, City St George’s, University of London co-authored the report’s chapter on the medicines sector, and shared:

Just as Brexit engaged how people feel about health and the NHS, so does the UK’s reset of relations with the European Union. In this contribution to the UK in a Changing Europe report on EU-UK alignment and divergence, we show how the UK’s positioning of its smaller medicines market outside the EU seeks to meet the challenges of securing global supply, while protecting the NHS from unnecessarily increased costs. A closer relationship with the EU would be helpful going forward.