Thursday, March 20, 2025
Enough red tape to wrap around the world 15 times
The paper says that the Institute found that if all the bits of paper were laid end to end they would also reach to the moon and half way back again:
Lib Dem trade spokesperson Clive Jones said it showed the scale of red tape plaguing British businesses since the UK’s withdrawal from Europe.
He said: “The Conservatives’ botched Brexit deal is suffocating businesses, tying them up in a Gordian Knot of red tape, as they try to export our fantastic British products and produce across the world. These figures are mind blowing.”
The party is calling on the government to negotiate a bespoke UK-EU customs union to free businesses from the bureaucracy – which has pushed up prices on the high street.
Marks and Spencer recently revealed that it has had to rent a warehouse just to store its piles of Brexit paperwork, that the retailer’s chairman said “nobody looked at in the first place”.
Archie Norman said “it is quite extraordinary… you wouldn’t believe it” that the retailer has to store thousands of pages of documents in a warehouse in the Republic of Ireland for six years after taking food across the border.
The official Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) also estimates that the size of the economy over the long term will be four per cent smaller than it would have been without Brexit.
The Chartered Institute of Export and International Trade found an estimated 2 billion additional pieces of paper had been used by those exporting to the EU since the UK left the bloc.
The Liberal Democrat analysis also calculated that those extra pieces of paper would reach the height of Mount Everest 66,751 times over, have to be extracted from 248,603 trees and be worth £19.5 million in A4 paper alone.
But the party said the true cost could be higher as its analysis assumed that each piece of paper was printed just once.
This red tape is holding back the economy and it is impacting on the government's growth agenda. Surely, it is time to put an end to it through a proper trade deal with the EU that sees the UK becoming part of the single market once more.
