A manufacturer in the north-east has told MPs that Brexit does not have to be bad for British exporters, boasting that his firm has just struck a lucrative, long-term deal with a French company.
John Elliott, the founder and chairman of Ebac, which makes water coolers, washing machines and dehumidifiers from a factory in Newton Aycliffe, County Durham, said trade tariffs were “not the end of the world”.
He told MPs on the new exiting the EU select committee that a French firm last week placed an order for water coolers worth many millions of pounds. The comments came on the committee’s first trip from Westminster into “Brexit country”.
Sunderland, which hosted Thursday’s meeting, became the poster child for Brexit when it recorded the first strong leave vote on referendum night, partly thanks to its enduring determination to count quickly.
Some 61.3% of voters in the coastal city opted to exit the EU, despite 58% of exports in the north-east going to the 27 countries in the trading bloc.
Business leaders from north-east England were less optimistic than Elliott, warning that the region had an ageing population and would need immigrant workers to plug employment gaps. They also said small businesses in particular needed help navigating the more complicated customs arrangements that may come into play if the UK leaves the customs union.
Ross Smith, the policy director of the north-east chamber of commerce, which represents businesses, said his members – who before the referendum were 57% in favour of staying in the EU – were particularly concerned about “access to talent”, saying businesses wanted to “recruit from the widest possible pool of talent”.
At the last count, in 2014, just 1.6% of the north-east population was born overseas, he said – the smallest proportion of any English region.
Asked whether businesses in the north-east would support the idea of regional immigration quotas, Smith said no. “I think that has the potential to be quite negative for the north-east. We have brought in a lot of skilled foreign workers to this region from other regions in the UK. They come to elsewhere in the UK first and then are attracted to the north-east,” he told the committee.
He urged the government not to restrict the number of foreign students, who he said brought significant spending power to university cities in the north-east and acted as de facto ambassadors for the region when they returned home.
Businesses in the north-east want the easiest possible trading relationship with the EU, said Smith. “Our members make things that many people want to buy [abroad], which is why the north-east has got the best export record in the whole country,” he said, warning against a Brexit deal that would make exporting more bureaucratic or costly.
But Elliott said businesses would have to accept the consequences of leaving the trading union. “We can’t have our cake and eat it,” he said, suggesting it was easy to be a successful exporter to any region “if you make products people around the world want”.
He was not worried about the imposition of trade tariffs in the post-Brexit world, he insisted after the hearing: “It will be 2 or 3%. It’s not a dealbreaker. Currencies will change as well. That’s part of life.”
About 48,700 additional jobs were created in the north-east between April 2014 and March 2016, Richard Baker, the chair of the North East Local Enterprise Partnership, told MPs. Almost 60% of these were classed as “higher level” positions, he said.
Paul Watson, the leader of Sunderland city council and chair of the North East Combined Authority, urged the government to grant the region “fiscal devolution” so it could decide how best to spend public money.
Smith said the media needed to move on from the view that Brexit would either be a certain triumph or a disaster: “The reality is that it will probably be somewhere in between.”
