Jon Lambe - United Kingdom ambassador to ASEAN

The United Kingdom will open a new mission to ASEAN in Jakarta on Wednesday as part of its expanded commitment to the Southeast Asian region. The Jakarta Post’s Dian Septiari sat down with the UK’s first ambassador to ASEAN, Jon Lambe, last Thursday to discuss what he wanted to achieve in his tenure. The following are excerpts of the interview:

Question: The UK wants to be one of ASEAN’s dialogue partners after it exits the European Union. But ASEAN has for years implemented a moratorium on new dialogue partners. What’s the reasoning behind this goal and what is your plan to achieve it?

Answer: For us the main objective is about the substance of the relationship. We have a deep engagement in this region already. We signed the Treaty of Amity and Cooperation in 2012 that underlines ASEAN relations. We became a dialogue partner of the ASEAN Capital Markets Forum in 2015; we’ve become a dialogue partner of ASEANAPOL, which brought together police and law enforcement agencies in 2019, we have secondees in the ASEAN Center for Humanitarian Assistance based here in Jakarta and we have a secondee in the ASEAN Cyber Center based in Singapore.

We have quite a significant ASEAN assistance program that we announced in January last year when [ASEAN Secretary-General] Dato’ Lim Jock Hoi was in London. We have a program supporting economic reform worth 19 million pounds (US$24.8 million) over four years and another supporting low carbon growth worth 15 million pounds over the same period.

So our relations are primarily about substance and we want and we expect that to grow further, and our minister [Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab] is very committed to the increased engagement with ASEAN.

It's no secret that we want to continue our dialogue partnership. […] We are already a [sectoral] dialogue partner so it's not 100 percent clear how the moratorium applies and that is something we need to keep discussing with ASEAN.

Would having a dialogue partnership would at least mean you'll meet at the ministerial level once a year in August?

Yes, the dialogue partnership will come with a structured engagement. The key element of that would be the attendance of foreign ministers at meetings each summer.

Our foreign secretary attended the foreign ministers meeting in Bangkok last year as a guest of Thailand, then the [ASEAN] chair, and he found that a very valuable experience. He was very impressed both by ASEAN and its convening power and its ability to bring people together from around the world.

So can we expect the UK to attend the next ASEAN foreign ministerial meeting?

These are not the decisions the UK can make. It's the decision of Vietnam as [current ASEAN] chair and how they want to engage people at the ministerial meeting; we are going to be engaging very closely with the Vietnamese as chair of ASEAN this year.

What is the next form of cooperation between the UK and ASEAN that we can expect?

The next step formally will start after we've left the EU at the end of this month and there will be […] negotiations with ASEAN. We have a very strong offer in many areas.

ASEAN has a very wide range of activities across its three communities [social, political, economic] and we will be negotiating and working with ASEAN and its members to agree on a plan of work so we can kind of line up the UK strengths with areas of particular interest with ASEAN and its members.

I expect [discussions] will take several months through the middle of this year, maybe a little longer, but we expect that there is a huge amount of possible cooperation.

ASEAN is in the process of finalizing the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) agreement as a means to integrate trade in the region, while the UK is in the Brexit process. How do you see future engagement between ASEAN and the UK on trade?

I think one of the features or particular benefits of the deal that the government has reached with the EU on the exit deal is that it gives the UK the freedom to agree on free trade deals on its own rights around the world.

That is something that's incredibly important for our government and Prime Minister [Boris Johnson]. We have a wide range of trade deals that we are focused on, some of those are about ensuring continuity from existing trade deals, some of them are new trade deals.

Our government and our country will be engaging very heavily in free trade throughout the next period and it's something that we think is integral to the UK’s view of the world.

I expect that would include a lot of engagement with ASEAN members individually and with ASEAN collectively as a group.

There are obviously many different potential trade deals in this region ranging from bilateral trade deals with ASEAN members, RCEP, the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership; the government has not decided exactly how it will engage with every single one of those layers, but I expect there will be a lot of interest and engagement.

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