Brexit: ‘the biggest disaster any government has
ever negotiated’
Exclusive: British cheesemaker says Brexit and
subsequent trade deals have cost his firm £270,000
Lisa
O'Carroll Brexit Correspondent
@lisaocarroll
Mon 27 Dec
2021 09.00 EST
ABritish
cheesemaker who predicted Brexit would cost him hundreds of thousands of pounds
in exports has called the UK’s departure from the EU single market a disaster,
after losing his entire wholesale and retail business in the bloc over the past
year. Simon Spurrell, the co-founder of the Cheshire Cheese Company, said
personal advice from a government minister to pursue non-EU markets to
compensate for his losses had proved to be “an expensive joke”.
“It turns
out our greatest competitor on the planet is the UK government because every
time they do a fantastic deal, they kick us out of that market – starting with
the Brexit deal,” he said.
Spurrell
predicted in January that Brexit would cost him £250,000 in sales. “We lost
£270,000, so I got one thing right,” he said, describing the post-Brexit EU
trade deal as the “biggest disaster that any government has ever negotiated in
the history of trade negotiations”.
His online
retail business was hit immediately after the Brexit negotiator David Frost
failed to secure a frictionless trade deal addressing sales to individual
customers in the EU.
Spurrell
said he had lost 20% of sales overnight after discovering he needed to provide
a £180 health certificate on each order, including gift packs costing £25 or
£30. He said the viability of his online retail had come to a “dead stop”.
After he
embarked on a personal crusade to draw attention to the plight of UK exporters
involving almost 200 media interviews around the world, he was invited to an
online meeting with Victoria Prentis, a minister at the Department for
Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. She suggested that emerging markets could
compensate for the Brexit-related hole in the Cheshire Cheese Company’s
finances.
Spurrell
said he had pursued new business in Norway and Canada but post-Brexit trade
deals sealed by the government had put barriers in place.
“We no
longer have any ability to deal with the EU as our three distributors in
Germany, France and Italy have said we have become too expensive because of the
new checks and paperwork.
“And now
we’ve also lost Norway since the trade deal, as duty for wholesale is 273%.
Then we tried Canada but what the government didn’t tell us is that duty of
244% is applied on any consignment over $20 [£15].”
That meant
Canadian customers who ordered a gift pack worth £50, including transport fees,
were asked to pay £178 extra in duty when the courier arrived at their door,
Spurrell said. “As you can imagine, customers were saying: ‘You can take that
back, we don’t want it anymore’.”
Norwegian
duty on a £30 cheese pack amounted to £190 extra, he said.
Spurrell is
now pursuing the domestic market with greater vigour but says the cost of
marketing has gone “through the roof” because all his competitors are having to
do the same.
“Before we
could sell across the EU, now we are all fishing in the same pond. We used to
be the biggest online sellers but now we are absolutely bombarded with attacks
by all our cheese rivals because they are buying all the ads on Google to try
to beat us. These are competitors who would never have bothered us before,” he
said.
The “sad”
thing, Spurrell said, is that it is the small to medium-sized companies such as
his, important employers up and down the country, have been hammered by Brexit
and other trade deals struck by the government, rather than giant rivals.
He noted
that the Canadian company Saputo, with a market capital of more than C$14bn
(£8.3bn), had done well out of the Norwegian deal as producers of three of the
four “premier” cheeses singled out for “significantly reduced tariffs”.
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