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In recent weeks there has been a flood of statements made by ministers of EU Member States saying that the negotiations on the trade deal between the European Union and the United States – the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, or TTIP – were stuck.

Germany’s Vice Chancellor and Economy Minister, Sigmar Gabriel, said that negotiations were effectively dead in the water. However, Chancellor Angela Merkel does not share his view.

The French Secretary of State for Foreign Trade, Matthias Fekl, said there is “no longer any political support” in Paris for TTIP and that France plans to call for an end to the trade talks in September, so the negotiations can be restarted “on a good basis”.

Austria’s Economy Minister, Reinhold Mitterlehner, has said talks on an EU-US free trade agreement should be halted and started again after the US presidential elections in November.

These comments come after Dutch citizens signed a petition in April demanding a referendum on TTIP, nine days after the country’s ‘no’ vote on an EU-Ukraine association agreement.

In response, the European Commission has confirmed that negotiations are going ahead and that news about the death of the agreement have been exaggerated. EU finance Commissioner Pierre Moscovici said suspending free-trade talks with the US would not be “wise”.

As well as TTIP, the Commission is also striving to complete negotiations on another important deal, namely the Trade in Services Agreement (TiSA). There are serious doubts about whether this will be completed in the foreseeable future given the problems surrounding not only TTIP, but also the trade deal struck between the EU and Canada; in July the European Commission announced that EU’s 28 national parliaments would have to vote on this deal before it could be definitively adopted.

In this uncertain context, we will continue to work with our allies such as the European Centre of Employers and Enterprises providing Public Services (CEEP), the European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC) and the European Federation of Public Service Unions (EPSU) to make sure that public services are excluded from the scope of TTIP . You can read our joint press release here, released at the time when the European Parliament resolution on TiSA was adopted. We will also make concrete proposals on how the “gold standard” clause will work in practice to ensure that public services are excluded from the scope of trade agreements, regardless of whether they are supplied publicly or privately.