British Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union David Davis announces Brexit negotiations update in London in March 2017 | Dan Kitwood/Getty Images David Davis: Norway model is one option for UK after Brexit Brexit secretary’s remarks are an unusually concrete admission the UK has weighed up membership of the European Free Trade Association.

Britain is considering joining Norway and Switzerland as a temporary member of the European Free Trade Association to avoid a potential economic cliff edge after Brexit, the U.K.'s Secretary of State for Exiting the EU David Davis said Friday.

Davis' remarks at a meeting of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in Washington are an unusually concrete admission that London has been weighing up a shift to the so-called Norway model after March 2019, but the minister cautioned that it was not Britain's preferred transition arrangement.

Faced with a scenario of tariffs and other potentially crippling trade restrictions if it crashes out of the single market and customs union in March 2019, Britain is scrambling to agree some kind of interim trading terms to maintain a foothold in Europe's free-trade area after Brexit.

At the meeting in the U.S., Iceland’s Ambassador to Washington Geir Haarde asked Davis whether he had considered joining EFTA to maintain single market access.

“It’s something we’ve thought about but it's not at the top of our list,” the British minister replied.

He added joining EFTA would involve two sets of negotiations, which could hold up a transitional deal.

"The reason for a transition is to give us a bit more time,” said Davis.“It’s not at this stage clear enough to know what the transition will look like, but adding in another phase of negotiation would not necessarily help that.”

British officials have stressed that they would prefer a bespoke deal tailored for U.K. interests, while EU officials see EFTA as a preferable readymade model. EFTA includes Norway, Switzerland, Iceland and Liechtenstein. All of those countries enjoy broad access to the single market. All of them apart from Switzerland are in the European Economic Area.

In Washington, Davis also said the U.K. is poring over the EU’s financial settlement request — the biggest sticking point in the stalled Brexit negotiations — with a team of “very good lawyers.”

“What we’ve been doing is, as you do if somebody provides you with a large bill, is go through it line by line, and we’ve got very good lawyers,” Davis said. “So it’s getting a bit tense, but it’s only early stages of this.”

“I have said from the beginning it will be turbulent. What we’re having at the moment is the first ripple — there will be many more ripples along the way,” he said, refusing to take the bait on whether the EU was trying to “blackmail” Britain, as International Trade Secretary Liam Fox put it Thursday.

Davis would not rule out the U.K continuing to pay the EU during a Brexit transition period after March 2019 in order to lessen the upfront lump sum payment. “I’m not ruling anything in or out,” he said.

But he dismissed EU claims that the U.K. is trying to “cherry-pick” benefits of EU membership while shedding the responsibilities and costs associated with it.

“I could give you a list of things the European Union is doing and say that’s cherry-picking … there’s no point in getting into a tit-for-tat exchange,” he said, emphasizing that both sides would benefit from a free-trade deal.

“This is probably the most complicated negotiation in history. And our enemy in a way is time,” he said.