The four freedoms, ten years on

Inside the EU, a lorry from Leeds could drive to Lyon as if it were going to Luton: no customs forms, no checks, and one set of rules for what a product had to be. Since 1 January 2021, goods going between Great Britain and the EU cross a customs border.

Measured in 2024 prices, the UK sold £193.3bn of goods to EU countries in 2015 and £182.6bn in 2025. With the rest of the world the figures were £194.2bn and £206.0bn.

So in 2025 the UK sold less to the EU than in 2015, and more to everywhere else.

A chart like this cannot say how much of that was leaving the EU. The pandemic, the jump in energy prices and the slower world economy landed in the same years. And from 2021 the figures for EU trade come from customs forms rather than a monthly survey, so Office for National Statistics says the series has a break there.

HM Revenue and Customs splits UK trade between the nations. Each chart is the share of that nation’s goods exports bought by EU countries, worked out by us from HM Revenue and Customs’s two published figures.

Keeping the land border on the island of Ireland open was a commitment of both sides, so the withdrawal deal left Northern Ireland following EU rules for goods. That arrangement, the Protocol, was reworked in 2023 as the Windsor Framework. Goods cross from Northern Ireland into Ireland as they did before; it is goods arriving from Great Britain that face checks.

Northern Ireland’s firms sold £2.7bn of goods to Ireland in 2015 and £7.8bn in 2024, in cash terms. Most of the rise came after 2021.

Free movement let a Spanish nurse take a job in Swansea, or a British plumber move to Spain, with no visa and no employer sponsor. It ended on 31 December 2020. Since then, EU citizens moving to the UK have needed a visa under the same rules as everyone else, and British citizens moving to the EU have needed whatever each country asks of outsiders.

People who had already moved could stay. EU citizens living in the UK applied to the EU Settlement Scheme: by 30 June 2026, the Home Office had received 8,941,726 applications from 6,450,400 people.

In the year to June 2016, 322,000 more citizens of EU countries arrived than left. In the year to December 2025, 42,000 more of them left than arrived. The turn came in the year to June 2022, the first year in which more left than arrived.

Over the same years, migration from outside the EU rose sharply, peaking in the year to March 2023 at 1,047,000. So the UK did not end up with less migration overall; it ended up with migration from different places.

The withdrawal deal protects British citizens who were living in an EU country before the end of 2020, for life. Anyone moving since then is treated as an outsider. Short trips changed too: since October 2025 the EU’s new entry and exit system records British visitors at its borders.

Because British citizens were EU citizens until 2020, they needed no residence permit before then. At the end of 2025, 919,297 British citizens held a valid residence permit in an EU country, according to Eurostat.

Services are the things the UK sells that are not goods: banking, insurance, law, accountancy, software, advertising, holidays for visitors. They are most of what the UK sells abroad. Inside the EU, a firm licensed in one country could sell to customers in all of them. Banks called this a “passport”.

The passports ended with the transition. So did the automatic recognition of professional qualifications. The government’s own guidance says: “No recognition arrangements have been finalised through this agreement to date.” Some professions have deals between their own regulators.

Services exports kept growing, to the EU and everywhere else. EU countries bought 36.6% of them in 2015 (£94.4bn of £257.5bn) and 36.3% in 2025 (£189.6bn of £522.8bn). Those shares are our arithmetic on ONS’s figures.

Services held up better than goods in most readings. Many cross no border at all, because they travel by email, video call or software, so there are no customs forms to fill in.

Free movement of capital means money can cross borders: to buy a company, build a factory, lend, or invest in shares. The EU’s rule is unusual. Its treaty bans restrictions “between Member States and between Member States and third countries”, which means countries outside the EU get the same openness as members.

So leaving changed less here than anywhere else in this piece. The UK still gets the EU’s openness as an outsider, and the 2020 trade deal keeps money moving for the trade and investment it covers.

Foreign direct investment is money a company or person abroad puts into a UK business they own or control a real stake in. The amount held by investors in EU countries rose, from £440.8bn at the end of 2015 to £762.3bn at the end of 2024. Investment from outside the EU rose faster, so the EU’s share fell from 42.7% to 35.8% (our arithmetic on ONS’s figures).

The Department for Business and Trade counts something different: new investment projects and the jobs they bring, not money. It recorded 735 projects from EU countries in 2016-17, out of 2,265, and 404 out of 1,020 in 2025-26. Projects from everywhere fell, and those from outside the EU fell faster, so the EU’s share rose, from 32.5% to 39.6%.

Of the four freedoms, the movement of people changed most and fastest. Net migration of EU citizens went from hundreds of thousands a year to below zero, while migration from the rest of the world rose.

Goods changed in a way a share cannot show. The EU still buys about half of the goods the UK sells abroad. But measured with price changes taken out, the UK sold £182.6bn of goods to the EU in 2025, against £193.3bn in 2015, while sales to the rest of the world rose. Northern Ireland, still inside the EU’s rules for goods, went the other way.

Services kept growing, and the EU’s share of them barely moved. Capital changed least, because the EU’s rules never closed its doors to outsiders in the first place.