‘Same nightmare week after week’: UK firms fed up with post-Brexit EU trade

theguardian.com:

Mark Brearley is still frustrated by Brexit. More than a year from Britain’s formal withdrawal from the EU, on terms agreed by Boris Johnson’s government, exporting the goods his company produces hasn’t got any easier for the London-based manufacturer.

Describing it as “the same nightmare week after week”, he says: “A lot more time is spent with things going wrong. The EU really feels like the hardest place in the world to ship things to sometimes.”

For the past seven decades the company Brearley runs, Kaymet, has made and sold tea trolleys, trays and hotplates from its factory just off the Old Kent Road to customers including the British royal family. It’s thought that Kaymet’s wares were used by the queen – celebrating her platinum jubilee this week – on her coronation world tour. The company sells goods in 40 countries across the world.

But leaving the EU has added to Brearley’s costs and makes selling items abroad more difficult. “There’s loads of things I could’ve been doing if it wasn’t for these problems. We could do things that take us forward, rather than back,” he says.

Official figures show that UK exports to the EU remain significantly below pre-Brexit levels, despite some recovery from an initial plunge in January 2021 at the end of the transition period. Exports had fallen 40% on the month as traders adapted tonew red tape and border delays, but came back to finish last year down 11% compared with 2018 – the year used by the Office for National Statistics as the most reliable comparison, before Brexit stockpiling and the Covid pandemic influenced trade flows.

However, concern is mounting that fresh Brexit roadblocks are looming as the government threatens to tear up the Northern Ireland Protocol, which covers