The meeting in Brussels on Thursday was announced in a statement by the government of Gibraltar, a British enclave in southern Spain.

According to the statement, in addition to Gibraltar's Prime Minister, Fabián Picardo, the Foreign Ministers (MFA) of the United Kingdom and Spain (David Lammy and Jose Manuel Albares) and Commissioner Maros Sefcovic, who leads, at the European Commission, the EU's overall negotiations with the London Government for the new relationship between the two parties following Brexit, will be at the meeting.

The governments of Madrid and London have resumed talks for an agreement on Gibraltar between the European Union and the United Kingdom.

The foreign ministers of Spain and the United Kingdom, Jose Manuel Albares and David Lammy, met in London, in the first meeting between the two since the inauguration of the new British government in July.

According to Albares, the meeting served to discuss "the future agreement on Gibraltar", among other bilateral issues.

Lammy, for his part, assured that the new British government wants, like the Spanish one, "to provide prosperity and security to the people of Gibraltar with a new treaty that cements the relationship with Spain and the European Union".

Gibraltar is not included in the trade and cooperation pact that London and Brussels reached at the end of 2020 following Brexit, so a separate agreement is needed.

There have been around 20 rounds of negotiations between the EU and the UK on Gibraltar since Brexit, with no agreement having been reached so far.

At the end of May, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said he expected an agreement in the coming weeks, but the call for elections in the UK and the fall of the previous British government have stalled the process once again.

"We have reached [in the last six weeks] important agreements on Gibraltar with the European Commission and the United Kingdom. Agreements that make us believe that we are very close to achieving a historic milestone on this issue," Sánchez said on 22 May, in a statement to the plenary session of the Spanish parliament.

Regarding the content of the agreements, he said only that they will bring "more legal certainty, more economic opportunities and more everyday facilities" to those living in Campo de Gibraltar, the Spanish territory that borders the British enclave of Gibraltar.

In November 2022, Spain and the European Commission proposed to the United Kingdom the creation of a "zone of shared prosperity" in the Spanish region of Campo de Gibraltar, which includes the elimination of the fence (physical border) of Gibraltar, as revealed at the time by the Government of Madrid.

270,000 people live in Campo de Gibraltar and many of them cross the border daily to work in Gibraltar, in British territory.

According to a statement by the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs in November 2022, the aim of eliminating the physical border is to promote the mobility of people and goods and create a "zone of shared prosperity".

"This requires Spain to control, on behalf of Schengen, the external borders of Gibraltar", the same note added.

The "Gibraltar Fence" or simply "the Fence" is the name given to the international border line in Gibraltar, just over a kilometre long, physically marked with fences and a border post, which requires checks on people and goods to be crossed.

According to the Spanish Government's 2022 statement, the proposal, in relation to customs issues, is to "guarantee the freedom of movement of goods between the EU and Gibraltar, without this increasing the risks to the internal market" of the community bloc, in particular in terms of unfair competition or "illicit trafficking, such as tobacco".