Trade deals on the table at a UK/EU summit in November could add £10 billion per year to UK trade by 2040, according to figures cited as Prime Minister Andy Burnham announced the summit in the Commons this afternoon.

That £10 billion is a projection, not a signed figure — it is what new agreements could generate, and it comes with a fifteen-year horizon. Still, it is the largest concrete number attached to the announcement, and the logistics sector has moved quickly to endorse the talks.

Who is backing the summit?

Ben Fletcher, Chief Executive of Logistics UK — the trade association representing more than 22,000 members across road, rail, sea, air freight, ports, airports and warehousing — welcomed the announcement, framing it as a growth imperative rather than a political gesture.

"If our country is serious about promoting growth, we need to make sure that the relationship with our closest trading partner is as strong and effective as possible," Fletcher said.

His argument rests on a measurable inefficiency: the post-Brexit trading arrangements still generate delays that hit importers and exporters on both sides of the Channel. Logistics UK's preferred remedy is a return to what Fletcher called the "safe, swift and efficient logistics supply chain we relied upon during the pre-Brexit years."

What do the delays actually cost operators?

Fletcher was blunt about the operational consequence. "The tangible benefit of this would be for logistics business not having containers and lorries sitting at ports for an unnecessary time," he said.

"As the old saying goes, time is money and the UK's logistics operators are spending too long waiting for goods to transit ports and airports, when they should be able to move seamlessly through."

No figure was put on the cost of that dwell time, and the source announcement did not include one — a notable gap, given the £10 billion upside is quantified while the current drag on the supply chain is not. For shippers and forwarders, the claim will resonate anecdotally — border friction has been a persistent complaint since the UK's departure from the EU — but the absence of a baseline number makes the potential gain harder to verify independently.

How big is the sector making the case?

Logistics UK's standing to speak is not in dispute. The sector it represents employs 8% of the UK workforce, contributes £175 billion in annual gross value added and enables more than £1 trillion of international trade. Those figures make logistics one of the few industries whose performance directly scales with the health of the UK/EU trading relationship.

"Our members remain committed to ensuring that the movement of goods to and from the UK is done as smoothly as possible," Fletcher said, while cautioning that "insurmountable delays" from current trading practices persist. "We look forward to working together to ensure the return to the seamless movement of goods that businesses were used to on both sides of the Channel."

What happens next?

The summit itself is the immediate milestone: Burnham's talks with the EU are scheduled for November. Whether the £10 billion projection survives contact with actual negotiation is a separate question — the figure assumes agreements are reached, ratified and implemented in full, none of which is yet assured. Fletcher's members, and the importers and exporters waiting on both sides of the Channel, will judge the summit by a simpler metric: whether containers and lorries stop sitting at ports.