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EU Wants To Make It Easier For Youths To Move To And From UK
By AFP - Agence France Presse
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ADDS UK statement, background
The EU said Thursday it wants to make it easy once again for its young people to live, study and work in Britain, and vice versa -- a freedom hit hard by Brexit.
When Britain formally left the European Union in 2020, one of the changes most felt by the bloc's citizens was that they could no longer move as they wished to the United Kingdom for study or work.
Now, the European Commission says it is time to repair that -- at least for those aged 18 to 30 -- and wants the 27 EU nations to approve talks after London expressed interest in youth mobility.
Britain left the European student exchange scheme Erasmus after Brexit, but the commission said that should the UK wish to rejoin, it remained "open" to the idea.
The UK government appeared to pour cold water on the proposal, however, preferring bilateral schemes with individual countries.
The Commission's proposal envisages setting university fees in Britain and the bloc at the same level for EU and UK students, as it was before Brexit.
According to the commission, tuition for non-UK residents at British universities now averages 22,000 pounds ($27,400) a year, compared to around 9,000 pounds for residents.
The EU said that by comparison the fees in the bloc's universities were "not that high".
Under the commission's plans, young EU and UK citizens would be able to stay in the country of their choice for up to four years and visa fees would not be "excessive".
Currently a young person from the EU seeking to study in the UK must pay £490 while a skilled worker visa costs between £719 and £1,639, it said.
There is also an extra cost for healthcare running into the hundreds of pounds that the commission wants to scrap.
Unlike visas for work or study, which are often limited to specific institutions or jobs, the idea would be that young people can be free to move between the UK and EU countries and undertake different activities.
Commission executive vice president Maros Sefcovic said Brexit had hit young people who wanted to study, work and live abroad "particularly hard".
"Today, we take the first step towards an ambitious but realistic agreement between the EU and the UK that would fix this issue. Our aim is to rebuild human bridges between young Europeans on both sides of the Channel," he added.
A spokeswoman for the UK government suggested it favours its current approach of brokering such agreements with individual countries rather than the European Union as a whole.
"We have spoken about wanting to reduce legal migration and also about wanting to support UK talent and skills and that's why we have a system in place whereby we have a number of agreements with individual EU member states where that works in our interests and we have that rather than a Commission-wide agreement," a spokeswoman said.
Some in Westminster viewed the Commission's announcement as an overture to Britain's opposition Labour Party, which is expected to pursue closer relations with the EU if, as expected, it wins a general election due later this year.
Labour leader Keir Starmer has ruled out Britain rejoining the EU but has pledged to renegotiate the Brexit deal.
Shadow foreign secretary David Lammy wrote in an article for Foreign Affairs magazine, published this week, that the UK should "develop closer foreign and security cooperation with the EU".
