Out of pocket, no business, retired early. These are the stories of the “sunlit uplands” that small and medium-sized businesses across Britain experienced after Brexit.
Between 16,000 and 20,000 companies stopped exporting to the EU completely, but others continued to complain that Boris Johnson’s government catered to “blue chips”, not ordinary small businesses, when they designed a hard Brexit for Britain.
Cheshire cheesemaker Simon Spurrell says Brexit not only left him with a A £250,000 hole in their small but fast-growing, but eventually lost his business.
In 2021, he described Brexit as the “biggest disaster” any government has ever negotiated. Looking back, nothing has changed his vision.
“Brexit is the greatest self-harm any government has inflicted on itself in recent history,” he says.
In the first weeks of 2021, Ben Fletcher, director of Logistics UK and then Make UK, described Brexit as “Dante’s Fifth Circle of Hell”.
Five years later? “We get even lower, to Dante’s seventh or eighth circle of hell, at its worst,” he says.
Spurrell was a good example. He discovered he could no longer export his award-winning cheese to the EU because every sale, even those worth just £30, would have to be accompanied by a £180 health certificate confirming they met EU standards. It was sold to a larger company that could handle the paperwork.
“All the small businesses that produce animal foods — meat, cheese, dairy, eggs, even pet food — suffered enormously because they didn’t have the luxury of a large organization that could juggle the paperwork and have someone dedicated to doing it,” Spurrell says.
In November, he joined a small artisanal stilton cheese business in Derby, part of Hartington Creamery, where his daughter’s family looks after a herd of 300 cows.
He says the market is tougher because of Brexit for those who are not big enough to cope with the bureaucracy.
“Small producers are just stuck on this island and we’re all fighting each other for the same market share,” Spurrell says.
Analysis of HMRC data by the National Farmers Union earlier this year showed that exports to the EU of agricultural products, from beef to cheese, had fallen 37.4% in the five years since 2019.
Alastair Brooks, owner of a berry farm in Kent, also stopped trading, with Brexit precipitating an earlier-than-planned retirement.
“We stopped business probably because of the politicians who gave us Brexit and not Brexit itself,” he says, citing “a lack of preparation on the part of the civil service and the government” and their inability to “design a 10-year strategy or vision” for farmers after leaving the EU.
For farms, one of the big problems of Brexit was seasonal workers, who for years had been hired in the EU, largely from Romania and Bulgaria. After Brexit ended free movement, farms had to go further.
“They were replaced by people from the ‘stans: Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan,” Brooks says. Before Brexit, he had built a team of loyal European workers who would come for the season and return home.
“We had a system designed with countries we knew people would return to, but suddenly we had a scheme for seasonal workers where some came in and, as soon as they got a national insurance number, they left. They wrongly thought that an NI number allowed them to work anywhere,” he says.
Although the staffing shortage never materialized, Brooks says, running a business that depended on government pronouncements each March about how many people it could get to work on its farm that year “was simply too big a risk.”
Along with other non-Brexit changes that small businesses have faced, including increases to the minimum wage and national insurance, Brooks also decided to sell up and retire early.
Another businessman considering retirement due to Brexit is the seasoned Daniel Lambert who, like Spurrell, did much to draw attention to the plight of small businesses in the run-up to Brexit.
British-French dual nationality permanently left the United Kingdom after Brexit, but has continued with its business of importing and exporting wine from France.
It says the cost of doing business in the UK since Brexit has “shot up five-fold”, from £30,000 to £166,000 a year.
“Everything I predicted in terms of difficulties – paperwork, administration, generally people don’t know what’s going on, the government has no idea – everything came true and it’s basically become a complete and utter nightmare,” he says.
“In terms of Brexit, there has been nothing positive at any point.”
Before Brexit there were three key steps to selling in the United Kingdom: the name of the winery, an export document and the excise duty process, known as EMCS.
This has now multiplied into around 20 steps involving exact product codes for wine, which differ depending on alcohol level, and export duties and excise taxes for both sides of the channel and a host of other formalities.
Additionally, HMRC requires wine importers to take out insurance in case their trucks are stolen, ensuring the tax authority continues to receive its excise duty. Since Brexit, Lambert has only been able to find one company, based in Gibraltar, that offers it.
“One of the clients said something and he said it very well: governments always make legislation for the frontline companies first. They start with them, they consult them and they never think about the little guys who can’t adapt to the things that are being introduced,” he says.
“Britain will only move forward when it begins to realize that it is a small cog among a lot of cogs that make up the EU, that make up global geopolitics, and that the UK alone, not being a cog anywhere, is really reckless,” he says.
Mark Ormiston, a supplier of sixth generation cables to a wide range of customers from the military to the film industry, has said previously Brexit had “flushed” small businesses down the toilet.
At first, it saw its EU business halve. It is now down 33% compared to pre-Brexit days, he says. He adds that “I can’t name a single advantage of Brexit”, which he describes as “terrible – the stupidest decision the British public has ever made”.
Earlier this year, a parliamentary select committee heard about the “hell” of Brexit controls, A haulage company told how they had a frozen meat lorry stuck in Calais for a month, costing the cargo owner £16,000 to keep the driver of the refrigerated trailer parked while they waited for documentation to be checked.
Total exports of goods to the EU have fallen by 15.9% between 2016 and 2025, according to HMRC data, with hopes that the food and drink deal will return to the continent.
Beyond urgently restoring the market for lost trade, Fletcher is concerned about Britain’s ability to grow markets for new products.
“What we are doing well is moving proven products. EU companies are worried about accepting new products because they don’t know if they will be able to cross the border,” he says.
“If all we do is sell products that we have sold for years, at some point those products will be replaced, they will be replaced. Someone in Europe will find an alternative.”
As legislation in the EU moves forward with legislative proposals on technological sovereignty, cybersecurity and an industrial acceleration law, all designed to reduce dependence on foreign products, Fletcher fears that the UK could find it increasingly difficult to export unless the UK keeps up the pace in drafting laws.