Alex Osborne

Brexit’s hidden impact on the public sector

Earlier this year, Britain’s departure from the EU finally happened. Amid all the debate about Brexit’s impact on UK businesses and citizens, what is not talked about as much is the effect the split from Europe will have on the civil service and government departments.

Potential trade tariffs and regulatory reforms loom large in post-Brexit planning, but the procedural restructuring involved in Brexit may disrupt the public sector before anything else.

It goes without saying that the day-to-day functioning of most government departments is heavily reliant on processes that have for years been defined and managed by the EU. HMRC, the Home Office and Defra, among others, will be affected by the UK’s exit.

In most cases, civil servants within these departments have been implementing EU procedures for the whole of their professional lives.

Government departments will need to increase productivity in previously unimagined ways

But now the EU is to be cut out of the loop. This puts huge demands on the public sector to create new working methods and back-office processes from scratch — at a time when budgets and resourcing are already strained.

Clearly, significant transitional work will be required to keep the machinery of state running smoothly under this increased workload. Government departments will need to increase productivity in previously unimagined ways if the UK is to rise to the challenge that Brexit poses.

A clear example of this is on Brexit’s ‘front line’: the Dover-Calais border. According to the Port of Dover’s annual report and accounts, almost 2.5 million commercial road haulage vehicles pass through the port each year. Every vehicle must log its inventory with Defra — a process that previously worked with an EU mandated platform.

Once the transition period is over, this responsibility will fall to the UK.

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