Youth mobility negotiations – UK in a changing Europe

Catherine Barnard and Denzil Davidson explain why negotiations on a youth experience scheme between the UK and the EU are so complex. 

A UK-EU deal on youth mobility or ‘youth experience’, was always going to be fraught. Stopping free movement of people was the issue that clinched victory for the Leave side in the Brexit referendum. Yet many think that limited-time work/study opportunities for young people should continue. However, there is a problem with legal competence – the power for the EU to negotiate a full-fat youth mobility scheme enabling young people to travel, study and, crucially, work. This blog explains the problem and considers what can be done.

The Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA), the current basis on which the EU and UK trade with each other, makes only limited provision for individuals to move between EU member states and the UK. They must be providing services on a temporary basis as, for example, independent professionals or short-term business visitors, and the type of business they do must be listed in the annex. So, researchers or consultants can move but musicians and artists cannot because their professions are not listed in the annex. Currently, anyone wishing to move from the UK to the EU or vice-versa to study or work must rely on the vagaries of the national law of the EU member state in question. Hence the call for a youth mobility scheme benefitting the 18-30s as part of the UK-EU reset to make this easier.

While the UK and the EU share a vision on the breadth (and benefits of) the youth experience scheme, they have different substantive priorities. For the EU, it is access to UK universities for EU students on the same terms as UK nationals i.e. at lower ‘home’ fees (something that was not in the 2025 Common Understanding between the EU and UK). For the UK, it is the opportunity for the young to work, study and travel and a potential, reviewable cap on numbers of EU nationals coming.

The UK already has highly flexible, albeit capped, youth mobility schemes with 13 countries. Armed with a visa (on payment of a £319 fee and the health surcharge of £776 p.a.) and with savings of £2,530, the young person is free to come to the UK for two to three years to study, to work, to travel or to do nothing at all (and to switch between these activities), with no requirement to be sponsored by an employer. This is the UK’s vision for the EU/UK scheme.

By contrast, the EU itself has no youth mobility schemes. It has Directive 2016/801 which allows third country nationals to come to an EU member state for research, studies, training and voluntary service pupil exchanges, and to be an au pair, but not to work more generally. Individual member states have their own youth mobility schemes and it is the national mobility schemes which allow individuals to come to, say, France to work.

Herein lies the rub. The EU can negotiate a deal with the UK only in areas where it has competence. Its mandate, while broader than five years ago, does not explicitly extend to work. Further, Article 79(5) of the Treaty on the Functioning of the EU (TFEU) reserves to member states the right to determine ‘the volume of admission’ of third country nationals coming to their countries to work. This includes not just numbers but other conditions, such as a labour market test or sectoral limitations.

The EU’s lack of competence is one explanation for why the UK tried to negotiate bilateral schemes with France, Germany, Spain after Brexit: it’s the individual states who can agree to the terms on work. However, the UK was blocked by the European Commission which objected to the ‘differential treatment of Union citizens’.

Yet, the 2025 Common Understanding said that a youth experience scheme should facilitate the participation of young people from the EU and UK in ‘various activities, such as work, studies, au-pairing, volunteering, or simply travelling, for a limited period of time’. The Commission now worries that it does not have the legal competence to negotiate this ‘full-fat’ deal. It is dependent on the member states to deliver on commitments about work and the fear is that under Article 79(5), France, say, could set the figure on UK nationals coming to work in France at zero. So, it seems that the Commission has stopped bilateral deals without having the power to negotiate an EU-wide replacement.

Is there any way out of the impasse?

The legal basis (i.e. EU power) to adopt Directive 2016/801 was Article 79(2)(a) and (b) TFEU. This gives the EU the powers to regulate (a) ‘the conditions of entry and residence, and standards on the issue by member states of long-term visas and residence permits’ and (b) the definition of the rights of third-country nationals residing legally in a member state. One argument would be that the reference to ‘rights of third country nationals’ should include the right to work. The Blue Card Directive 2021/1883, adopted under the same legal basis, lays down ‘the conditions of entry and residence for more than 3 months in the territory of the member states, and the rights, of third-country nationals for the purpose of highly qualified employment and of their family members’. But that does not deal with the problem of Article 79(5).

If the Commission and the member states will not accept full competence under Article 79(2), another solution could be a framework or ‘mixed’ agreement, whereby the European Commission negotiates on matters which are under national competence but any resulting agreement requires member state ratification for it to come into force. This is complicated by the British desire for a UK-EU youth mobility agreement to secure youth mobility for British citizens not only to individual member states but enabling them to move across the EU more broadly, at least between two or three states, a matter on which the Commission’s competence is also uncertain.

Alternatively, there is a Canadian model: Canada has bilateral youth mobility agreements with 21 EU member states but no EU wide framework. An agreement could be made on non-work mobility between the UK and the European Commission, with a commitment that bilateral agreements on work would follow. But this may be unsatisfactory in two ways: first, the EU could obtain its ask on study without the UK ask on work being guaranteed, so some form of carrot and stick needs to be built into the agreement together with a review mechanism, and, second, it could mean precisely the differential treatment by nationality that the Commission wishes to avoid.

Some political flexibility and legal creativity are, therefore, needed if a youth experience scheme is to be agreed in time for a summit in early summer. The UK, the EU and its member states will need to understand that the benefits of a youth mobility agreement will be balanced and will be delivered by all sides. And since the Common Understanding’s other work strands in agrifood (SPS) and emissions trading form a package deal with youth mobility, the summer summit may lack substance if that flexibility and creativity is not found.

By Catherine Barnard, Professor in European Union Law and Employment Law, University of Cambridge and Denzil Davidson.