Better Britain Bureau
Independent, Manchester-rooted, evidence-led reporting and explainers.
Brexit: a Trillion pounds and counting…
Brexit isn’t a one-off bill. It’s a persistent drag: the economy is smaller than the no‑Brexit baseline, every year, and the gap compounds.
This isn’t money we might lose. This is money we already lost - and we’re not even trying to scrape it back.
Illustrative Brexit cost paths
Different channels that leave the UK economy smaller than a no‑Brexit baseline — and how the gap builds up over time.
Where the big “£1tn and counting” number comes from...
When the economy grows more slowly than it otherwise would, you don’t just "lose" money; You end up with fewer pay packets, fewer sales, fewer profitable businesses, and less tax coming in.
Our headline counter takes an estimated yearly “missing growth” gap (sources below), then adds it up from 2016 to today. It's naive and vague, and if we were economists, we could find cleverer ways to lie about it, but the real question is whether it's really half that or double that, how much is too much?
Here’s what we could have won
Take the Treasury shortfall, and translate it into estimated budgets through likely tax receipts.
So what number goes on the bus now?
The big important Brexit number was never what “we pay the EU”, it's what that growth did for us. Using a Treasury receipts shortfall of ~£75Bn/yr (±£12.5Bn; sensible range: £65–£90Bn), here’s what that looks like per week - and what share that implies for the NHS if spending stayed roughly proportional.
Other big yearly lines (for scale)
Advanced assumptions
Tax-to-GDP ratio
Used to turn Treasury receipts shortfall into an implied GDP shortfall series for the chart and the total counter.
Assumption: 35%.
NHS share of spending
Default is 19%, the share of total spending that goes to the NHS.
Assumption: 19%.
“Money cycles” factor
Optional storytelling knob for the prize board (1.00 = direct receipts only).
Assumption: 1.40×.
Where the cost shows up
The “tab” isn’t a pile of banknotes in Brussels. It shows up as deadweight loss, lower investment, and friction that turns normal economic activity into overhead. Some of the leak is obvious; some of it is political opportunity.
- Real-income hit: sterling drop → higher import prices → squeezed living standards.
- Investment hole: less kit, less productivity, weaker future wages.
- Trade/admin friction: paperwork and border processes as a permanent tax on SMEs and exporters.
- Leakage: procurement/contracting and “intermediaries” ecosystems that grow around new friction.
Key sources
- UK in a Changing Europe - Brexit’s impact on the UK economy (6–8% GDP per capita shortfall estimate by 2025)
- ONS - annual nominal GDP series (baseline GDP path)
- House of Commons Library - GDP figures (context for “£bn/year” scale)
- OBR - Brexit trade assumption performance (trade volumes + productivity drag framing)
- IFS - sterling fall and inflation + CEPR/VoxEU - Brexit depreciation & prices (import-price pass-through)
- GOV.UK - customs administrative burden (friction and compliance costs)
- Public Accounts Committee - PPE procurement + NAO - PPE contracts (procurement risk + waste dynamics)
Thanks for reading
Britain’s skint - and Brexit is a big chunk of why.
It’s easy to feel like it’s too late, or that the argument is stuck forever. It doesn’t have to be.
Almost nobody in politics is shouting “rejoin” (except Steve), but we can still have a serious, practical conversation about healing those economic links, rebuilding trust, and moving toward closer ways of working that other EU‑friendly countries already use.
