Chris in London
Well-Known Member
- Joined
- 21 Sep 2009
- Messages
- 13,342
Service provision post Brexit is particularly nuanced. Brexit itself and the “oven ready deal” did vast damage to our services providers because providing services to the EU was a major part (and therefore a major loss) of our economy . That market is lost, and the beneficiaries have been Frankfurt Paris and Dublin particularly.
That said - and this is absolutely not a by-product of Brexit - exports of services outside the EU market have increased considerably. So there has been a loss to the sector from the loss of the EU market which has been compensated for and even over compensated for by the increase in services provided to the rest of the world. In part it seems probable that some of the increase relates to capacity- our services providers are better able to provide non-EU services precisely because they aren’t flat out servicing their EU customers. In part, I stress - there has been I think on any view an overall increase.
One of the problems of course is that it is comparatively easy to measure volume of goods provided- count them - but less easy to measure volume of services. If you ask the Americans how much they buy in from the UK you get a different answer than if you ask the UK. So the overall trend is probably that there is a reasonably impressive increase in out of EU services, (a) it would be unwise not to approach the figures with a degree of caution, and more importantly (b) it is absolutely wrong to see that as any kind of Brexit benefit.