Additional admin and paperwork for EU trading is continuing to affect independent retailers, Mr Goodacre said, with the new requirements providing “pretty horrible” for small businesses to navigate.
“Previously, they hadn’t needed to worry about importing from Europe at all. VAT, sorting out reports, delivery costs, the paperwork required: it was pretty horrible if you’re running a small business. You don’t have a lot of resources to begin with, so all that was difficult. There was support available, it wasn’t as if they were left alone completely, from us and the Government. People did what they could to ease the problem but it was difficult,” he said.
“Now, people have normalised it. But whether they’re happy with it, I don’t know. Do they have more work to do now, more costs? The answer has to be yes, because I can’t think of any situation where they wouldn’t have had that., they’re likely to say they don’t regret it, it was just badly implemented. But if they didn’t vote for Brexit, they just think it was a bad idea. But they’ve all, irrespective of what their vote was, experienced problems they didn’t anticipate.
The organisation found that “relatively few businesses have pivoted to new markets since the end of the transition period”, with just 6 per cent of EU exporters and 5 per cent of EU importers turning to other markets. Nearly one in ten had stopped importing or exporting overall over the past five years due to the volume of paperwork , overall costs and supply chain or logistical issues .