Press

Failures at HM Revenue and Customs mean £42 billion in taxes have not been collected and people are being let down by poor customer service. What that could pay for? The annual tax shortfall caused by Brexit (Centre for European Reform).

However, for Zach Meyers, a senior research fellow at the Centre for European Reform, privacy might be a big stumbling block for the initiative. “Users probably understand tracking from online players like Google because they aren’t paying for those services directly. That is quite different to being tracked for a service users are already paying for,” Meyers said.

De Britse denktank Centre for European Reform berekende dat de Britse economie sinds de uitstap 5,5 procent trager gegroeid is dan als het land in de EU gebleven was. Bovendien wordt het VK ook nog eens door een zware stakingsgolf ­geteisterd.

The Centre for European Reform says Brexit may have reduced UK goods trade by around 7% in the second quarter of 2022.

John Springford of the CER, tries to isolate the effect of Brexit by constructing a phantom country that tracked Britain’s performance before 2016’s referendum result. By using an algorithm to pick from a set of 22 countries rather than just selecting, say, a few economies of a similar size, he builds a plausible description of Britain’s path had it not voted to leave the eu (see chart 1). He estimates that by the second quarter of 2022, Brexit had hit gdp by as much as 6% relative to this counterfactual. Using the same method, he reckons that Brexit dragged down investment by 11%.

C- Customs: Although the picture was initially confused by coronavirus, the effect on trade of leaving the single market two years ago was immediate and negative. It is now possible to quantify the damage. John Springford of the Centre for European Reform estimates that national income is 5.5 per cent lower than it would otherwise have been.

The Centre for Economic Performance reckons that including that "dynamic" effect of Brexit could increase its impact on potential output to a hit of between between 6.3% and 9.5%, and the Centre for European Reform suggests the impact may have been a shortfall by up to 11% of the output that might have been expected.

In December, the Centre for European Reform (CER) found that Brexit cost the UK a staggering £33bn in lost trade, investment and growth. The CER also estimated the tax loss from Brexit at around £40bn. The research – first shared with The Independent – showed that by June of this year Britain’s economy was 5.5 per cent smaller than it would have been if the country had remained in the EU.