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Brexit: Now What? Part IV

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Aber said:
That estimate was bollocks - it was based on an extrapolation of a round sum estimate of the cost of doing a single customs declaration. £20bn is roughly equivalent to half a million people being employed full-time doing customs declarations.:)
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Yes, it drastically underestimates the impact as it doesn't include frictional costs.
At an Business Conference organised by the Financial Times, Juergen Maier
(UK chief executive of Siemens), said it was “complete nonsense” to suggest that new customs procedures were not going to add new frictions to UK trade with the EU.
Indeed, he said that a high-friction model, such as max fac, would have higher costs than the £20bn because “it does not include the cost of delays” and other impediments to business, which he used to deal with before the single market was created.

HMRC officials took the figures from external studies, where clients have to fill in forms describing the proof of origin of the product; whether there are any trade preferences that apply to the product; whether the company has the correct licences to send the product; the value of the product and an exact description of it.*Completing the declaration is a legal necessity.
 
The Don said:
Well that's how you rationalised it upthread, I'm not aware that the study was that specific.

£20bn may well be equivalent to half a million people being employed full time. It may also be lots of people spending a few hours a week dealing with this sort of stuff, a few hundreds, thousands or tens of thousands of pounds being added to the monthly IT, process and hardware costs of an organisation together with whatever secure warehousing will be required if physical goods are being moved around.
My business deals almost exclusively with the EU (our UK business is almost trivial) and we deal in professional services. I'm not yet sure what kind of customs arrangements there will be but if they're anything like the hoops we had to jump through to do business in the US then it'll be torturous. In the end there wasn't that much business and we could afford to walk away from it, the same isn't true for the EU.


edited to add....

Sorry I was wrong :o, it was based on individual declarations but AFAIK the Nottingham business school did factor in economies of scale.
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Amortised costs of additional IT infrastructure.
 
Craig B said:
Remain didn't "come" at all. Remain means no change. The measure voted on was leave. I agree that an "expiry date" is not relevant to such a decision.
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Wrong. We've not always been in the EU you know. At one time the EU didn't even exist.


We joined the "Common Market" as it then was - and had a referendum that decided we wanted to remain in it. The Common Market then gradually morphed into the EU.


What most remainers wanted was to return to the common market - free trading but without the accompanying political unity. The EU weren't prepared to offer that, so now we're leaving.
 
Strawberry said:
One of the amendments passed last night requires no hard border between Ireland and NI. Since there is no way to uphold that without staying in the SM and CU, Brexit is effectively dead in the water, or at least a hard Brexit is.
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Except of course the no deal brexit.
 
ponderingturtle said:
Except of course the no deal brexit.
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No deal Brexit would create a hard border so yes, that's dead in the water too. I can't really see how the UK government are going to square this circle - max fac has already been rejected by the EU, the backstop solution has been rejected by the British government, and the Norway + CU option would cause uproar from Brexit voters.

The government seem to have backed themselves into a corner.
 
Strawberry said:
No deal Brexit would create a hard border so yes, that's dead in the water too. I can't really see how the UK government are going to square this circle - max fac has already been rejected by the EU, the backstop solution has been rejected by the British government, and the Norway + CU option would cause uproar from Brexit voters.

The government seem to have backed themselves into a corner.
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Which is why a no deal exit seems unavoidable, because it is the only one that doesn't require them to come to some kind of agreement. They just have to not get enough support to prevent it.
 
No deal might well create a hard border, but the UK government could argue, "We've not created the hard border - it is the EU side that's done that."

If that situation does arise, it will be interesting to see who actually builds the EU's hard border infrastructure, and who pays for it. The Irish government has insisted that it doesn't want a hard border, but it might well be forced by the EU to build it and fund much of the cost in the event of a no deal Brexit.
 
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ceptimus said:
No deal might well create a hard border, but the UK government could argue, "We've not created the hard border - it is the EU side that's done that."


If that situation does arise, it will be interesting to see who actually builds the EU's hard border infrastructure, and who pays for it. The Irish government has insisted that it doesn't want a hard border, but it might well be forced by the EU to build it and fund much of the cost in the event of a no deal Brexit.
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Its long past time Brexiters stopped rolling out this piece of BS. If there's no deal the UK will be obliged to place customs posts at its side of the border under the rules of the WTO/WCO. The UK government knows that, if they walk away with no deal they will be creating a hard border and they will be obliged to police it.
 
ponderingturtle said:
Which is why a no deal exit seems unavoidable, because it is the only one that doesn't require them to come to some kind of agreement. They just have to not get enough support to prevent it.
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The consequences of a no deal Brexit would be fairly catastrophic though, not sure any government would be prepared for it.
 
Are you saying that the EU WON'T be obliged to place customs posts at its side of the border under the rules of the WTO/WCO?
 
ceptimus said:
Wrong. We've not always been in the EU you know. At one time the EU didn't even exist.


We joined the "Common Market" as it then was - and had a referendum that decided we wanted to remain in it. The Common Market then gradually morphed into the EU.


What most remainers wanted was to return to the common market - free trading but without the accompanying political unity. The EU weren't prepared to offer that, so now we're leaving.
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A long time ago I was a member of a golf club. I went back recently to have a look around and the course has changed a lot. There are four completely new holes, two of the old par threes have been combined to make a par four, the tiny saplings of my youth have grown into large trees and the course is longer, tighter and, as a consequence, tougher.

It's that way because the majority of the members apparently want it that way. If the highlighted is true*, what the Leavers were asking for was the equivalent of me asking to be able to play the 1970's version of the golf course - things have moved on, that ship has sailed so we're leaving the club.

What Brexiteers seem to be asking for is to be able to play the 1970's version of the course, for free - which is never going to happen.

* - of course it isn't really the case. The customs union and EEA provide an ease of doing business that far surpasses anything covered by the 1970s common market. A return to common market rules would, IMO, be a rude awakening to those, like myself who haven't experienced 1970's commerce. There are industries and working methods that didn't exist back then and the common market wouldn't even begin to address their needs.

Like so many Leave talking points, it's a gross distortion and/or oversimplification of the real world.
 
ceptimus said:
Are you saying that the EU WON'T be obliged to place customs posts at its side of the border under the rules of the WTO/WCO?
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BOTH sides would be required to have customs posts in the event of a no deal Brexit. And it would be Britain's fault.
 
Strawberry said:
The consequences of a no deal Brexit would be fairly catastrophic though, not sure any government would be prepared for it.
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As long as they don't catch the blame from their supporters so what? I am skeptical that Country over Party will win the day.
 
ceptimus said:
Either or both sides in a negotiation can be responsible for failing to reach a deal. Usually both sides think that the fault is with the other side.
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It is Britain which has elected to leave the EU and Britain which has chosen to surround itself with contradictory red lines making a deal nigh on impossible. Nobody is to blame here other than Britain.
 
catsmate said:
HMRC officials took the figures from external studies, where clients have to fill in forms describing the proof of origin of the product; whether there are any trade preferences that apply to the product; whether the company has the correct licences to send the product; the value of the product and an exact description of it.*Completing the declaration is a legal necessity.
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And that is what Stock item codes are for.

The likely costs are for setting up computer systems with the correct info (much of which is already needed for Intrastat) rather than a cost for completing each form individually.
 
ceptimus said:
Nonsense. There was no hard border between Ireland and NI before the SM and CU even existed.
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Anglo-Irish Trade WarWP
On taking over power and coming into office in 1932, the new Fianna Fáil government under Éamon de Valera embarked upon a protectionist policy in economic dealings, and tariffs were introduced for a wide range of imported goods, mainly from Britain, the Free State's largest trading partner by far. This was thought necessary to develop native industry, move away from over-dependence on Britain, as well as its failure to develop industrially under free market conditions.​
 
ceptimus said:
What most remainers wanted was to return to the common market - free trading but without the accompanying political unity.
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The only people I've met who say they wanted that voted Leave. Sadly, though, since the referendum required a binary answer, we can never know what the majority of either side actually wanted; we can only look at what constructions the various factions have projected on to the vote in order to manufacture spurious evidence for their own personal aims being those of some hypothetical majority.

Dave
 
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