Britain Signs Its First Major Post-Brexit Trade Deal with 15 Years Life Span with Australia

· Scotch Exports to Match Wine Import

· Free Movement of Youth on the Anvil

The agreement will include a cap on tariff-free imports for 15 years, a measure intended to appease British farmers concerned about a flood of beef and sheep imports.

After just a year of negotiations, Britain and Australia have agreed “in principle” to a free-trade agreement, the governments of the two nations announced on Tuesday. The relatively swift deal will eventually eliminate tariffs between the two countries.

It is the first major trade deal that Britain has negotiated since it left the European Union last year.

Since then, Britain has been eager to prove that it’s an outward-looking nation, actively embodying its “Global Britain” slogan. But the urgency with which it is writing new trade agreements has recently come under attack by British food and agricultural groups that fear that the government will allow in products with lower production standards or make deals without sufficient consultation.

Full details of the agreement with Australia haven’t been published yet, but there will be restrictions on tariff-free imports for 15 years, a measure intended to appease British farmers concerned about a flood of beef and sheep imports from Australia.

The deal will remove Australia’s 5 percent tariff on Scotch whisky exports and tariffs on cars. Australian wine will be able to enter Britain duty-free. The agreement will also allow Britons under the age of 35 to travel and work in Australia more easily, the British government said.

“It is a fundamentally liberalizing agreement,” Liz Truss, the secretary of state for international trade, said in a statement. “That removes tariffs on all British goods, opens new opportunities for our services providers and tech firms, and makes it easier for our people to travel and work together.”

The deal was agreed on Monday night between Australia’s prime minister, Scott Morrison, and Boris Johnson, the British prime minister, at Downing Street in London, Mr. Johnson’s official residence. Mr. Morrison is in Britain after the Group of 7 meetings.

Last year, the British government estimated that the benefit to its economy of a trade deal with Australia would be no more than 0.02 percent of gross domestic product, or an increase of up to 500 million pounds (about $700 billion) compared with the 2018 size of the economy. In 2019, Britain exported about £4.5 billion of goods to Australia and imported £3.9 billion. The country’s economy depends much more heavily on its services industries; it exported £5.4 billion worth of services to Australia.

The deal “has political significance as opposed to economic significance,” said Michael Gasiorek, a professor at the University of Sussex and director of the U.K. Trade Policy Observatory. It is also part of the government’s efforts “to pivot more toward the Indo-Pacific region,” he said.

The Australia deal is a “gateway” for Britain’s broader trade ambitions, the government said, including joining the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, the trade pact signed by 11 countries after President Donald J. Trump pulled the United States out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Australia is a founding member of that agreement, and Britain’s process for joining began in early June.

In parts of Britain, the trade deal has had a frosty reception.

One of the main concerns for farmers in Scotland is that Australians use a cattle farming system that allows for larger-scale production, with more cattle in a smaller space than is permissible in Britain, said Scott Walker, the chief executive of the National Farmers Union Scotland. This could undercut Scottish beef farmers. He said that the Australian trade deal alone was not the biggest problem, but the fear that subsequent deals with New Zealand and the United States would grant those countries the same level of access.

“We see this as just the start of what could be huge difficulties ahead for the industry in the United Kingdom,” Mr. Walker said.

The free-trade agreement has been entirely negotiated since Britain formally left the European Union in January 2020. Britain has signed scores of other trade agreements recently, but these, such as one with Japan, mostly replicated pre-Brexit market access.

“Our big concern at the moment is that we’ve got a process of the U.K. government signing trade deals in the dark,” said James Withers, the chief executive of Scotland Food & Drink, an industry association. “We bear deep scars of that process with Brexit.”

British trade with the European Union has slumped this year, and the food industry and textile sectors, in particular, have complained that cumbersome paperwork, costly veterinary checks and rules-of-origin requirements are still impeding businesses.

This trade deal revives one of the tensions in Britain since it left the European Union: how much time should be spent easing frictions with its old trading bloc versus forging new relationships further afield. For Britain’s financial services sector this has been a key question.

About half of Britain’s trade is with the European Union, and the drop in trade could never be compensated for by joining, say, the Asian trading pact, Mr. Gasiorek said. “It’s clearly much more important to sort out our trading relations with the E.U. and to think closely about that relationship, but that’s not what the priority of this government is,” he said.

The Australian deal is important because it will set the standard for how much Parliament will be able to alter trade deals, said Sally Jones, a trade expert at EY. Even though the deal will have only a small economic impact, its provisions on digital trade, or sustainability, could have significant influence, she said.

Britain has spent the past week brandishing its credentials as a leader on climate change as the host of the Group of 7 meetings, and some industry leaders have raised concern that a trade deal with a country on the other side of the world would have insufficient climate-change protections.

In Australia, the deal has been welcomed by the meat and wine industries, two of the industries expected to gain the most from the agreement.

“It is just the tonic the Australian wine sector has needed as it moves quickly to reposition itself after the market into China was closed by the imposition of prohibitive tariffs,” said Tony Battaglene, the chief executive of Australian Grape and Wine, the country’s national association for wine producers.

“This is a great opportunity for the Australian red meat industry,” said Patrick Hutchinson, the chief executive of the Australian Meat Industry Council.

But there are concerns about the removal of a longtime provision that allows young British travelers to extend their visa for a year by working three months on a farm. The Australian horticulture sector has been struggling to find fruit and vegetable pickers after the backpackers that made up a significant part of its work force were shut out of the country because of Australia’s pandemic border closures.