‘Staggering’ cost of Brexit red tape for UK businesses revealed

UK businesses have been hit by a “staggering” £7.7bn Brexit red tape bill to trade with the European Union in just four years, new analysis reveals.

Post-Brexit paperwork has been blamed in part for a huge fall in trade with the EU, with M&S admitting it had to rent a warehouse just to store documents.

The Independent revealed last year that Brexit had created a “mind blowing” nearly two billion extra pieces of paperwork for businesses – enough to wrap around the world 15 times.

Now, official HMRC figures show UK traders’ costs topped £1.8bn in 2022 alone to cover the administrative created by import and export customs declarations.

Applying the benchmark cost of £48 for all of the 160.4m declarations filed between 2022 and 2025, the total comes to at least £7.7bn.

Andy Burnham is poised to sign a new agricultural foods deal with the EU later this month but this will only cut some of the costs, with most sectors of the economy still shouldering the extra burden.

Lib Dem Europe spokesperson Al Pinkerton, who obtained the figures and whose party carried out the analysis, said they laid “bare the crushing price of red tape holding our economy back”.

He said: “Billions of pounds that should be fueling jobs and innovation are instead swallowed up by Brexit bureaucracy.

“The prime minister himself admits that pointless paperwork shouldn't strangle business.”

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He called on Labour to sign up to rejoining the single market and customs union – both things Labour ruled out in its manifesto and which Mr Burnham has committed to sticking by – saying: “It’s time to stop letting Brexit red tape bleed British business dry."

John Powell, chief executive of the British Meat Processors Association, said there was a “fundamental misconception” that leaving the EU freed British businesses from having to follow EU rules.

“The reality is that if we want to sell our products into our biggest and closest export market, we have to meet its standards… what Brexit changed was that we now have to prove it with a mountain of costly paperwork, certificates and checks.

"Five years on, the promised alternative markets have come nowhere near replacing the EU trade we've lost.”

Emma Knaggs, deputy CEO, of the pro-EU group, European Movement UK, said the cost of Brexit was “an act of unprecedented self-harm. We have watched a slow car crash unfold in real time. The results of this disastrous experiment are in, and it has made us all poorer, and our country less influential.

"The hit to GDP means that the chancellor has tens of billions less to spend on our public services every year. Less on defence. Less on schools. Less on the NHS. We are at a watershed moment now, ten years since the Brexit vote, where finally a national reckoning can happen. Let's remember the lies we were told in 2016. And let's realise that things could be so much better."

The Cabinet Office has been approached for comment.

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