£7B extra cost

These changes were entirely driven by products with high non-tariff barriers. Food products which fall into this category, such as meat and cheese imported from the EU, have seen price increases in the region of 10 percentage points higher relative to similar products which were not exposed to Brexit since January 2021, when the trade and co-operation (TCA) agreement began.
Here they seem to be missing the point – food export prices have increased to most EU export markets, not just the UK. For example, Ireland is the UK’s largest supplier of fresh or chilled beef. The UK buys almost half of Irish beef exports and between 2020 and 2022 the unit price, in Euros per tonne, of Irish beef exports to the UK increased by 40% but so did Ireland’s exports to its second largest EU customer, France. In total, Ireland’s unit export prices were 36% higher between 2020 and 2022 to all markets and this increase ranged from 69% higher for beef exports to Spain, to only 4% higher for beef exports to Luxemburg – not that Luxembourg buys much Irish beef. So, could we really blame the increase in the export prices of Irish beef to the UK on Brexit? Probably not.

Well, what about other meats? The UK imports more pork than any other meat, we imported 329,112 tonnes of fresh, chilled or frozen pork in 2022. (By the way, this figure doesn’t include cured or dried pork.) Our biggest supplier was Denmark, then Germany, then Spain. Danish pork’s unit export prices to all markets, in Krone per tonne, were slightly lower between 2020 and 2022, down 2.4%, but they fell by 11.7% to the UK. Denmark’s biggest market in 2022 was China, their average unit price was down 5.1% from 2020. It was Danish exports to EU countries such as Italy and Greece that saw large unit price increases of 9.7% and 9.1% respectively. Is anyone claiming the large drop in the per tonne export prices of Danish pork to the UK as a Brexit benefit? I thought not.


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Now companies that import or export goods to the EU must pay for their own compliance costs, just as they do when they trade with non-EU countries. These costs are probably passed on to UK consumers unless there is a competitive reason not to do so. Many trade compliance costs fall on exporters not importers, so in a competitive market some exporters may absorb these costs.



But regardless, these costs should never have been paid by the government and only for trade with one region. So, it is possible that costs that were once part of the EU membership fee and so covered by UK government expenditure, are now being charged directly to UK consumers, but this is not an increased cost, in fact it is much less than our present membership fee would be if we were still EU members, we have simply changed how we pay it – at the supermarket till, rather than as tax.