Brexit

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With products on sale at Buckingham Palace, Westminster Abbey and museums across the country – as well as in European capitals – Jeremy Shaw, the managing director of Derbyshire-based Heritage Playing Cards, has particular reason to hope the coronation will be good for the business he set up 30 years ago. The past few years have been anything but. First, the Covid pandemic shut all museums and their shops, meaning an almost total collapse in domestic and overseas sales. 

Then the country’s leading producer of heritage playing cards – whose popular kings and queens of England pack has been updated ahead of the coronation to include one of Charles III – saw its export business almost completely wiped out by Brexit. The effect of Britain leaving the European Union has destroyed 85% of his company’s trade with EU customers – which accounted for 35% of its total turnover. “Before Brexit, we got an order at nine in the morning and three days later it was sitting in a shop or museum in Paris or Brussels or Vienna,” said Shaw. “Now almost all of our EU customers have given up. The paperwork and the costs of getting packages over to the EU mean they think it is just not worth it. Brexit has been a complete and utter disaster.”

‘Brexit has been an utter disaster’: the royal heritage firm that can’t sell its wares abroad

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A recent report showed that British households have paid £7bn since Brexit to cover the extra cost of trade barriers on food imports from the EU. Researchers at the London School of Economics (LSE) estimated the impact of leaving the bloc on UK food prices and found that trade barriers consistently hampered imports, pushing up bills by an average of £250. The UK has the highest food inflation rate in the industrialised world, according to recent inflation data. The LSE researchers calculated the cost of food in the UK had rocketed by 25% since 2019, but this would have been only 17% without post-Brexit trade restrictions, nearly a third lower.

Brexit will be known as ‘historic economic error’, says former US treasury secretary | Brexit | The Guardian

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New public sector lenders created by the government since Brexit are investing two-thirds less than the UK was receiving from the EU’s European Investment Bank, a new report finds. Over more than four decades, the EIB backed UK projects ranging from the Channel tunnel and the Manchester Metrolink to offshore windfarms and upgrading the National Grid. The thinktank UK in a Changing Europe has compared the EIB’s record with the work of new Treasury-backed institutions including the UK Infrastructure Bank (UKIB). The EIB invested an average of £6.4bn in the UK between 2009 and 2016 in real terms, peaking at £7.5bn in 2016 – the year of the Brexit referendum. By contrast, the successor institutions created by the government, including the Leeds-based UK Infrastructure Bank (UKIB), invested £2.4bn in 2022 – a third as much as the EIB was spending six years earlier.

New UK banks’ post-Brexit investment only one third of lost EU funds | Banking | The Guardian

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Brexit has led to an £850m fall in the value of the UK beauty industry’s exports to the EU, according to a report by a leading economics forecasting organisation. The research, commissioned by the British Beauty Council, blamed customs delays and the increased cost of cross-border trade for putting a dampener on sales. Oxford Economics, which wrote the report, compared exports of beauty products to the EU against those to the rest of the world and found a drop-off to the single market bloc, while sales held steady elsewhere. The small businesses that make up much of the sector have been “disproportionately damaged” by trade barriers, the report found, while decreased availability of EU workers has caused a skills shortage.

Brexit ‘shaved £850m off beauty industry’s exports to EU’ | Brexit | The Guardian

The UK government is to diverge from the EU’s standards for monitoring water quality in England, it can be revealed. Campaigners fear the change of approach could lead to more pollution in England’s rivers and waterways if the new measuring methods are less rigorous. While in the EU, England was covered by the water framework directive (WFD), which meant a national chemical and ecological survey of rivers was conducted annually. After Brexit, the WFD was transposed into English law but the government removed the requirement to conduct annual tests. This is the latest example of the UK diverging from EU environmental standards. Recent analysis found that many toxic chemicals and pesticides banned in the bloc since Brexit are not outlawed for use in the UK. Ministers are also attempting to rip up EU-derived sewage pollution rules for housebuilders. In 2019, the last time the full water assessments took place, just 14% of rivers were in good ecological health and none met standards for good chemical health. The government has said it does not intend to deliver a complete update until 2025, the latest permissible date under the new WFD..

England to diverge from EU water monitoring standards | Rivers | The Guardian