Whatever Your Thoughts on Brexit, the Real Issues Lay Elsewhere

JJ Heath-Caldwell is Managing Director of Local Surveyors Direct, a price comparison website that helps users source local property professionals for most of their requirements. Here JJ shares his thoughts on how Brexit could affect the UK construction business.

Brexit will be all but forgotten in five years’ time– certainly as far as the building trade is concerned. What we won’t know is where we might have been by then if we had voted to remain. At least by then, we will be working with facts and cold realities. Whatever your outlook, that has to be preferable to the current ambiguity.

When I am asked if there is an upside to Brexit, I tend to point out that, for Britain at least, it represents the most fundamental change for a generation. And change is a force for good. It obliges us to rethink what we are doing, cast off the old ways and innovate. At the same time, we will continue to feel the benefits of our four decades inside the European Community and EU.

European standards, with which we already comply, are based on international norms, and even far-flung states like New Zealand use them as a basis for their own standards where appropriate. Once the transition period is over, the UK will find itself in a similar position. Very little will change right away and, even in the medium- to longer-term, I would expect the building industry to remain closely aligned to European standards.

I am also confident that the industry will fare a lot better than other sectors, on several counts. For starters, we are not reliant on the health of an export market. What we build in Britain stays in Britain, so worries over 7,000-plus queues of lorries waiting at Dover are moot.

Many of our raw materials are sourced domestically, and even those that we import won’t disappear. In 1973, when we joined the European Community, or the European Economic Community as it was formerly known, globalisation was a pipe dream, international trade was more difficult than it is today, and even the WTO wouldn’t be founded for another 22 years.

So, when we leave the EU in 2021, it won’t be like winding back the clock. Trade will continue, perhaps with a few bumps to start, but we won’t run out of bricks and joists, and even those items we have to import won’t disappear; they will simply attract a small levy. If necessary, we will adapt to the resources at hand. It’s not like what we are building needs to work across borders, like components in a mobile network, or parts of trains and cars. If we need to vary the constitution of our bricks, so be it. The same goes for the wood we use in trusses and the steel we roll into scaffolding. That’s why I’m less interested in hardware than I am in labour.

It may be a cliché to point out that a large proportion of our tradespeople are European – but that doesn’t mean it’s not true. Immigrant workers, particularly from eastern member states, have traditionally been attracted by the higher wages paid in Britain than they could earn at home. Should the economic climate change, and that no longer be true, they will leave, at which point, we will have to take a more proactive approach to recruiting UK-born teams.

This might be the most significant pinch point – and freeing it up will require a fundamental change in our nation’s schools. The British education system is geared to producing a stream of undergraduates for our universities. It is my belief, and my hope, that Brexit will be the catalyst for a significant reorientation, and a revival of traditional skills, like woodworking and bricklaying, among the domestic workforce.

Brexit may well turn out to be less disruptive than many expect and, depending on how you look at it, could be the opportunity we need to rejuvenate the country, the workforce and the economy.

Which brings me full circle. No doubt I will have raised a few hackles by suggesting that Brexit will be all-but forgotten in five years’ time, and the opportunities I have outlined above might not have smoothed them over. Yet, I see a far more fundamental problem that needs to be addressed, which is the structural fragility at the heart of our economy.

The UK national debt is now approximately £2,000 billion. This is a similar amount to our GDP (Gross Domestic Product), which is how much the country earns in a year. The interest on the national debt is currently running at approximately £50 billion per year. This is a colossal amount of money. To put it into perspective, the cost to run the NHS is currently running at around £150 billion per year. However, it should be noted that spending £150 billion on the NHS each year buys us a lot whereas spending £50 billion a year on servicing the government debt buys us nothing.

Unless we get this spending under control, we are facing a more diverse set of problems than most of us realise. When it becomes evident, some people will blame it on Brexit – and they might be right, to a degree, but we will never know for sure.

Brexit is a political issue, but not the political issue we should be focused on. Our system needs rebuilding to reign in the political class. They are not spending our money any more: that is all gone. They are not even playing with our children’s money, which was squandered several parliaments ago. What they are using to make themselves popular now is the money of our grandchildren, which will have to be repaid long after our generation is gone and forgotten.

That is a much bigger issue – and it will have a far bigger impact – than even the most pessimistic forecasts of a no-deal Brexit.

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