UK and EU May Delay Youth Mobility Deal to Save 20 November Summit

By Daniel Okafor

The deadline for a UK-EU youth mobility scheme could be pushed back by six months to guarantee that Andy Burnham's "reset" summit on 20 November succeeds, diplomats have said. The deferral is now on the table because three core disputes remain unresolved, and failure at the summit would damage the prime minister's promised new vision for Britain's long-term relationship with the EU.

EU ambassadors in Brussels on Wednesday heard that the UK still insists on international tuition fees, quotas and an NHS surcharge for EU students. That stance has fuelled fears the summit could collapse.

What is holding up the deal?

The numbers explain the deadlock. The UK wants a cap of about 50,000 a year on EU citizens entering for work, travel or study under the proposed youth experience scheme (YES) visas, according to sources. Some EU member states want the cap set as high as 500,000. Others want no cap at all.

The UK also insists that YES visa holders pay the £1,035 NHS surcharge to cover potential doctor or hospital visits. A 25% discount has been suggested, it is understood.

Negotiations on two other files are almost complete. A food and drink trade deal and an agreement on the emissions trading system are close to done, diplomats say. There is near-agreement on a demand from the National Farmers' Union: crops grown using fungicides yet to be approved in the EU could be sold in the bloc under a transition arrangement inside the sanitary and phyto-sanitary agreement.

Only the youth mobility scheme remains deadlocked.

Why are tuition fees the thorniest problem?

UK universities are pressuring the Labour government to keep full international student fees for EU citizens. Those fees can reach £69,190 a year at Oxford.

One diplomat said there was an "emerging consensus" in Brussels around a European Commission proposal to strip tuition fees from the package entirely. A joint statement on 20 November would commit both sides to negotiating a solution by May 2027.

The landing zone was thought to sit between home fees of £9,790 and average international fees. But universities outside the elite 24-strong Russell Group have told the UK government they cannot afford to drop fees for EU citizens.

How real is the risk of failure?

Several diplomats say the bloc remains divided on whether to remove tuition fees from the table. There are also splits over how a cap would work. UK officials fear voters, particularly in "red wall" constituencies, would see a cap as opening the gates to workers from economically less wealthy countries such as Bulgaria. A proposal to cap figures per country has been suggested, though no one has detailed how it would work in practice.

France is still arguing for an "all or nothing" approach, keeping all three topics on the table. If the UK cannot agree on tuition fees now, 17 months since the last EU-UK summit, one French argument runs, "why would they do so in six months?"

Other member states see it differently. They want to move past the three "significant but modest" issues toward deeper economic, security and defence ties, and cannot risk a failure on 20 November.

"YES is politically, emotionally and diplomatically very important. But if we can get an agreement at the summit by removing one element from the agenda it is a price worth paying," one diplomat said.

A fourth issue also remains open. Talks on reintegrating the UK into the EU's energy market will continue after 20 November, as expected, because significant barriers have emerged. They include state aid rules and oversight frameworks, notably a role for the European Court of Justice.

On the sequencing question, no agreement has been reached either. "A lot of member states were in favour of keeping the trio of issues together and not breaking the agenda up, but there are others that think it is acceptable to decouple them and there is no agreement yet on which approach to take," one diplomat said.

The next fortnight will show whether negotiators defer the youth scheme, drop tuition fees from the package, or gamble on France's all-or-nothing bet.