The overwhelming consensus among economists is that Brexit has damaged the UK, hitting goods exports and curtailing business investment.
Yet the upheaval also created some winners.
As the 10th anniversary of the Leave vote approaches, the FT identifies some of those who gained from the UK’s departure from the EU — despite, and often because of, the wider losses.
Not all of the beneficiaries are British, nor are they as promised by the Leave campaign.
Customs agents
When the UK left the single market in 2021, the mountain of paperwork required to move goods between the UK and the bloc threatened to overwhelm the system. Trade professionals duly stepped in.
The Chartered Institute of Export & International Trade has trained 10,000 new customs agents since 2020.
“There’s been a huge growth in the number of customs agents, both within businesses and independent professionals setting up their own consultancies,” said Marco Forgione, the institute’s director-general.
There has also been heavy consolidation, with large players rolling up small operations, he added.
The UK is expected to strike a deal with the EU later this summer to remove border checks on plant and animal products, which will remove one major source of red tape.
But customs agents will be kept busy with plenty of other forms — unless the UK rejoins the customs union.
Meanwhile, the UK civil service added nearly 95,000 extra jobs in the six years after Brexit, according to the Institute for Government, as the UK government staffed new departments to handle international trade talks and Brexit negotiations.
The novel foods industry
Pro-Brexit ministers in successive Conservative governments lionised how a “nimbler Britain” could regulate faster and more freely than the 27-member EU.
In some sectors — like AI and novel foods — the UK has begun to leverage its post-Brexit freedoms.
Linus Pardoe, UK policy manager at the Good Food Institute Europe, said that a regulatory “sandbox” created by the Food Standards Agency had helped to bring investment into the UK.
The UK was the single biggest destination in Europe for public investment in alternative protein research between 2020 and 2024 with €127mn, ahead of the next two largest, Denmark and the Netherlands, according to the non-profit think-tank. The European Commission remained the largest source with €308mn.
Max Jamilly, co-founder of Hoxton Farms, which makes lab-grown pig fat, said the UK regulatory approvals process had improved beyond recognition since Brexit. “It’s the envy of other EU countries who come to visit us to learn how to ‘sandbox’,” he added.
Although the UK has retained the rules it inherited from the EU on novel foods, Brexit freedoms have allowed them to be applied more flexibly, according to Tom Phillips, the chief commercial officer of Edinburgh-based biotech firm Roslin Technologies.
Company bosses warned, however, that such flexibility risked being lost if the UK agreed to follow EU rules and processes as part of a deal to remove border checks on food and drink exports.
AI adoption has also received some benefit from the UK leaving the EU’s strict regulatory regime. Both Meta and Apple have introduced new AI features sooner in the UK than in Europe. However, early-stage investors and entrepreneurs in AI see the increased difficulty of bringing in talent from Europe as outweighing any regulatory upside.
Migrant workers from outside the EU
Campaigners for Brexit argued it would enable the UK to control migration. In fact, while leaving the EU did end Europeans’ free movement, it was followed by a sharp increase in non-EU migration.
After the Covid-19 pandemic, the NHS embarked on a major recruitment drive. With EU medical professionals reluctant to come to Britain, doctors and nurses from India, Nigeria, Egypt, Pakistan and the Philippines were big beneficiaries.
Mark Dayan, policy analyst at the Nuffield Trust think-tank, said non-EU workers responded to both the rapid expansion of NHS staff and changes to UK immigration rules after Brexit immigration that gave them equal treatment to EU workers.
“Before Brexit the EU supplied the NHS with about 10,000 nurses a year,” he said. There are now more doctors, nurses and health visitors in England from India than from the EU.
Alongside the NHS boom, the UK also saw a major increase in non-EU workers in the adult social care sector, according to data from Skills for Care which tracks the industry. Foreign recruits rose from 15,000 in 2020/21 — the year the UK left the EU — to 75,000 the following year and then 105,000 in 2023/24.
However, numbers of foreign workers entering the UK fell sharply from 2025 when new visa restrictions were implemented, making it much harder for firms to recruit foreign workers in low-paid jobs.
Northern Ireland
Brexit caused political upheaval in Northern Ireland, including a two-year shutdown of the Stormont power-sharing executive.
Even so, the eventual settlement, cemented via the Windsor framework agreement, left Northern Ireland with access to both the EU and UK goods markets — a “best of both worlds” arrangement that no other part of the UK or the EU enjoyed.
Some companies have made a virtue of that status to win business. The Almac Group, a medical diagnostics company in Craigavon, 25 miles south-west of Belfast, trumpets the advantage of “unique seamless, uninterrupted and flexible [market] access” to prospective customers.
Northern Ireland’s economy has fared better, relatively speaking, than any other part of the UK since Brexit.
An economic analysis in 2024 found that all other parts of the UK had experienced a “substantial decrease” in real GDP post-Brexit, relative to a counterfactual scenario, which the authors said was “not surprising” given that Northern Ireland had in effect remained part of the EU customs union.
“We estimate that nominal growth of household incomes is 3 per cent higher than what it would have been, so Northern Ireland is at least not a loser after Brexit, when all the other British regions clearly are,” said Thiemo Fetzer, a professor of economics at Warwick University, who co-authored the paper.
The situation remains complex. Stephen Kelly, chief executive of Manufacturing NI, said the region faced ongoing challenges, the latest being the imposition of new EU steel tariffs. “It’s going to have to be a never-ending, constant work-in-progress by both sides and traders,” he said.
Dutch and EU logistics providers
The southern Netherlands between Rotterdam and the German border has become a popular place for British businesses to hold stock to distribute in the EU.
Between 2017 and 2024, the NFIA/Invest in Holland network has supported 66 companies that chose to set up or expand their logistics in the Netherlands because of Brexit. They have created more than 2,100 jobs in the three years following the investment decision, it said.
Jochem Sprenger, secretary-general of Fenex, which represents the logistics industry, said the sector had grown 10-15 per cent cumulatively since Brexit thanks to corporate refugees from the UK.
“It’s not just British companies. The biggest shift has been from Japanese companies who used the UK as a distribution centre for the EU,” he added.
However, the success has downsides. Snag Tights, a clothing company that was an early mover, said it closed its warehouse in 2024 because of the intense competition for staff.
Brie Read, founder and chief executive, said new customs charges on small packets from outside the EU have now obliged it to contract an EU company to host stock there again. “All we can say is that the UK can’t return to the customs union quickly enough.”
Data visualisation by Amy Borrett and Alan Smith. Additional reporting by Tim Bradshaw
