British wine wholesaler ‘leave Brexitland forever’ over paperwork | brexit

A British wine wholesaler who last year criticized brexit as the biggest threat to his business in 30 years, he has decided to leave the UK after post-Brexit red tape left a £150,000 hole in revenue.

Daniel Lambert, who supplies Marks & Spencer, Waitrose and 300 independent retailers, will move to Montpellier in France later this week with his wife and two teenage children.

There he will establish a French company to export to his own company in Wales.

He said the only way he could get around the “incredibly complicated” paperwork to import alcohol was to set up a French company to export to the UK and do the administration in the EU himself.

“I am doing what the government was proposing, which is to have a company here and in Europe to mitigate the impact of Brexit,” he said. “What I’m doing will allow me to import and export into and out of the EU within the company itself, so that we mitigate all the cost of importing into the UK.”

Daniel Lambert Wines imports more than 2 million bottles of wine a year. The business boomed during the pandemic, with revenues rising to around £500,000 as consumers in lockdown substituted pub visits for household items.

But the end of the Brexit transition agreement in January it ate up the profits, with the bureaucracy costing the company “between £100,000 and £150,000”, Lambert said.

His Twitter posts about the Brexit regulations have a large following among other businesses, as he was one of the first to reach an agreement with the 200 pages of paperwork per shipment.

“In just one week I will finally leave Brexitland for good. Let me know if anyone ever finds those sunlit highlands. I don’t expect an answer anytime soon,” she posted last week.

Before Brexit, transporting wine across the Channel was relatively easy. Post-Brexit, it has become a nightmare with carriers fleeing the industry due to the complexity of additional paperwork. All imported goods must be accompanied by documentation detailing a commodity code and other information such as the origin and destination of the cargo.

Wine imports require specialized expertise. To begin with, each type of wine has an individual commodity code depending on the grape variety, the type of wine, the alcoholic strength, the size of the container in which it is imported and whether it comes from a protected designation of origin.

According to the government website. there are 361 different products in the wine category alone. A pallet is made up of different cases of wine, each of which incurs additional charges.

Lambert said that this had proven to be a great deterrent for logistics companies with the number of carriers now set to transport alcohol from “hundreds” to just “four or five”, allowing middlemen to charge up to £400 for each shipment.

“The premiums now being paid to transport alcohol, particularly across the border, are pretty incredible. Brokers have found themselves pretty much doing what they love in terms of getting paid, because so few are willing to do it,” he said.

By establishing a company in France, Lambert will be able to obtain a French Economic Operators Registration (EORI) number required for exporting to Great Britain, in addition to the UK EORI you hold in your UK company for importing.

For Lambert, it’s complicated, but it’s the only post-Brexit way to continue trading in Britain, as it will allow him to export and import legally and cut out the middleman who charges up to £150,000 a year for paperwork.

“It is absolutely unbelievable that in the 21st century people are actually prohibited from importing from Europe unless they pay the middlemen a lot of money,” he said.

He described the UK government’s claims that Brexit went through as “fatuated” as many small and medium-sized businesses were unable to cope with the trade barriers that now exist for anyone trading with Europe.