Exiting the EU: Sectoral Impact Assessments

Phil Wilson Excerpts

Wednesday 1st November 2017 Commons Chamber

[Phil Wilson (Sedgefield) (Lab)]

Let me start by following on from what the Chair of the Select Committee, my right hon. Friend the Member for Leeds Central (Hilary Benn), said about the customs union. I have received information from the North East England Chamber of Commerce about the state of companies in the north-east and about how they will deal with leaving the customs union. It believes that the majority of its companies do not have the necessary skills to deal with the new customs arrangements that we will have when we leave. It says that Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs shows no inclination of providing any support to businesses to ensure company compliance. In fact, the new intake of 1,000 HMRC staff will be there just to raise revenue, not to help ensure that companies get the documentation right. It also says that if we have a no-deal scenario where everything sent from and to the EU has to have a customs declaration for clearance purposes, the cost to business will be huge. A customs declaration currently costs between £20 and £40—in some cases it is £75. Sometimes companies are charged by the line.

There are 16,600 commodity codes and more than 300 custom procedure codes. Even taking the view that businesses will get to know the commodity codes and the custom procedure codes that they use regularly, it will not be an easy task to get used to the change. They will need training, which will not be available, and they think that they will need a major upgrade of software and IT equipment to deal with the changes.

Given that background, it is not surprising that many of our companies and businesses want to know what the impact will be of leaving the single market and the customs union in March 2019. More than 60% of the trade in the north-east of England is with the EU. My constituency has the biggest business park in the region, with more than 500 companies based there employing between 10,000 and 12,000 people. A few weeks ago, I was at a Brexit seminar on the industrial estate, and the one thing that I kept hearing about was the uncertainty. People kept saying, “What happens next?” Some said, “What are the questions that we need to ask?” I said that the one thing they needed was access to the impact assessments. We need to be able to work out how the sectors of our industry will be affected.

It might be easy for multinationals such as Hitachi, Nissan and Airbus to put capacity into the problem so that they can see how they will be affected by the various scenarios in the future. The vast majority of companies on the industrial estate—the business park in Newton Aycliffe—are small and medium-sized enterprises and they do not have such capacity. For them, it is all about tactics. It is not so much about strategy, but about getting through the next year, and they need help. They need to know how they will be affected in the future.

Let us look at some of the sectors that are represented in that business park in Newton Aycliffe. Some 814,000 people who work in the automotive sector generally are feeling insecure at the moment and need to know what is going to happen. The construction and engineering sector employs 2.9 million people; the electricity, marketing and renewables sector 112,000 people; the electronics sector 850,000 people; the IT, software and computers sector 1.4 million; the medical devices sector 50,000; and the professional services sector 1.1 million. The list goes on. All those sectors are represented on the Newton Aycliffe business park.

We do not want to reveal everything—that might not be in the national interest—but companies and the Brexit Committee need to be able to analyse what is happening. What are we frightened of? What do the Government not want us to see? I fear that much of the redacted information will be a bit negative. Some of it might not be in the national interest, and therefore should not be revealed, but some of it might prove that the line the Government are following is not in the national interest.

In supporting this motion, I am saying that we need openness. We need to take back control in this Chamber. Those who wanted to leave said that throughout the referendum; now we need to put it into practice.