Cheesed off: Brexit blues wipe out UK cheesemaker s European business euronews.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from euronews.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
An award-winning British cheesemaker has abandoned sales to the European Union because of the £180 cost of post-Brexit paperwork.
Hartington Creamery in Pikehall, Derbyshire is seeking to replace European sales with exports to the United Sates and Canada.
Before Brexit, the cheese manufacturer faced no red tape when exporting to the European Union.
It comes as exports of UK goods to the European Union dropped by more than forty per cent in January as Britain and Brussels began their post-Brexit trading relationship.
New data published this morning by the Office for National Statistics revealed that the overall export of goods fell by £5.3billion - some 19.3 per cent - in the first month of the year.
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A trade deal agreed just before Christmas also saw the dairy get its first Canadian shipment. (AFP via Getty Images)
One of the few dairies allowed to make Stilton said it has lost 20% of its online turnover ‘overnight’ due to Brexit.
Hartington Creamery at Pikehall, Derbyshire, has said that the paperwork needed to send orders to the European Union was too expensive to make business with the EU viable.
Simon Spurrell, the director of Hartington Creamery, said each parcel, pallet or container of Stilton required a veterinary surgeon certificate costing £180 per destination while each order costs only £30, which he said meant there was “absolutely no way” the dairy could continue with their online sales to the EU.
Feb 15, 2021
London – As the new year made Brexit a reality, Tony Hale encountered the pitfalls of Europe’s redrawn political geography. Specifically, he confronted the need to extricate 53 tons of rotting pork products from administrative purgatory at a port in the Netherlands.
For more than two decades, Hale’s company had shipped pork to the European Union without customs checks, as if the United Kingdom and the continent across the water were one vast country.
With the U.K. now legally outside the bloc, exporters have suddenly had to navigate inspections, safety regulations and a bewildering crush of paperwork.
For Hale, incorrectly prepared documents meant sending five containers full of pork to an unplanned final destination: the incinerator.