Brexit Facts4EU.Org Summary

1. The UK trades with 213 countries around the world

Brexit Facts4EU.Org has analysed the latest trade figures by country, from the Office for National Statistics.

© DIT/DBT 2025

• The UK traded with 226 countries and island states in 2023
• British companies did business all over the world
• From A to Z, Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, Brexit Britain is commercially active

2. The UK now has free trade agreements in force with 99 COUNTRIES AROUND THE WORLD
This is 36% more than the EU

The EU claims to have 79 but please see the section on the EU below for the detail of why this number is unreliable. Even if all 79 were valid, this is still significantly less than Brexit Britain has achieved in just four years.

© Brexit Facts4EU.Org 2025 - click to enlarge
[Sources: EU Commission and the UK’s Department for Business and Trade, accessed 04 Dec 2025.]

In the UK’s total of 99 countries we have not included the eight US states which have agreements with the UK. The combined economies of these eight states totals over $7.3 TRILLION dollars. This is more than the combined total of 23 out of the 27 EU member countries.

© DBT 2025 - click to read more

Whilst technically not being full trade deals they focus on services, which cover 80% of our economy. They are also arguably more valuable than many of the EU's 'trade deals', some of which are mostly political statements to some very poor countries.

3. The UK’s Developing Countries Trading Scheme

The Developing Countries Trading Scheme is a major milestone in growing free and fair trade with developing nations. It applies to 65 countries, offering lower tariffs and simpler rules of origin requirements for exporting to the UK. The scheme helps countries to diversify their exports and grow their economies, while British households and businesses benefit from lower prices and more choice.

As the Department for International Trade put it when this was announced in 2022 :-

“We are using our status as an independent trading nation to go beyond what is offered by the European Union.”

“The Developing Countries Trading Scheme cuts administrative costs for businesses by reducing more tariffs and bringing more countries in scope of the most generous tariff reductions. It also cuts red tape for developing countries, for example by simplifying rules of origin requirements for the least developed nations. This helps the world’s poorest countries to export to the UK and play a more active part in fast-growing global supply chains.”

4. The EU’s “Trade Agreements in Place”

In the map below, only the maroon countries have a trade agreement 'in place', according to the EU Commission.

© EU Commission 2025

The EU claims to have 79 trade agreements in place. Unfortunately this is misleading as some are not what they seem. Facts4EU has analysed the list and found :

• Some of these agreements have been suspended for years
• Some were already part of the EU’s Customs Union
• And some are part of a larger EU member country and therefore a de facto member of the EU

We have conservatively reduced the EU’s claimed number to 73 trade agreements, for the reasons above. We could have gone further and eliminated the ‘Stabilisation and Association Agreements’ (SAA’s) with the six Western Balkans countries from the total (and some others). These are predominantly political deals designed to draw the Western Balkan countries into EU membership, by the donation of large annual sums paid for out of the EU budget.

The UK taxpayer no longer has to pay for the EU Commission's profligacy, thanks to Brexit

Thanks to Brexit, the UK is no longer paying for this organised bribery. Here is what the EU Commission itself says about these deals.

“The SAAs are tools which provide for the economic development and political stabilisation of the countries in the region, and for the creation of a close, long-term association between the EU and the Western Balkan countries. In effect, the SAAs constitute the legal instrument for alignment to the EU acquis and progressive integration into the EU market. The SAAs established a free-trade area for a transitional period, which has now ended for all but Kosovo*.”

- EU Commission Directorate-General for Trade, extracted Sun 05 Jan 2025

It is worth noting that only 29 EU trade agreements out of the 73 are actually designated by the EU itself as being “in force”. The majority are in various stages of development or application, awaiting actions for many years.

5. The benefits to businesses and to consumers in the United Kingdom

British businesses across the country are selling to and buying from countries right around the world. Where there are free trade agreements in place they are able to benefit from lower or zero tariffs and in some case to benefit from no quotas being applied.

If readers want to learn the facts we can strongly recommend reading this. That link gives access to 12 reports we first started back in 2021 and it brings everything up to date with the UK's signing by Kemi Badenoch last summer and formal accession on 15 December 2024.

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