On 1^st January 2021 the EU introduced a series of controls on imports of animal products from Great Britain. It is no exaggeration to say that this created chaos, and seven months on, UK food exporters are still struggling to recover. The UK, meanwhile, delayed the introduction of similar controls for most animal products arriving from the EU, but this will soon change. On 1^st October 2021 all products of animal origin entering Great Britain from the EU will require certification and registration. On 1^st January 2022 a further requirement for inspection of arrivals will be introduced. Both of these requirements are likely to dent, or even reverse, the anaemic recovery in food imports from the EU to the UK. What should or can be done to prepare for these critical changes?

On 25^th June companies which have opted to defer their UK import declarations will need to start dealing with the consequences. 25^th June marks the first of a series of dates when the UK will tighten its border controls. Will there be chaos or barely a ripple? What happens at the end of June could give us a window to the future.

The most recent figures from the UK Office for National Statistics[1] made grim reading. Imports from the EU to the UK, having fallen by almost 30% in January, showed only an anaemic recovery of 7% in February. At first glance, it appears that exports from the UK to the EU had fared better, with a good proportion of January’s loss returning in February. Looking under the surface, however, shows that most of this recovery was due to two sectors – machinery and transport equipment (incl. cars) and chemicals (incl. vaccine ingredients). This indicates that the impact of Brexit on trade volumes is likely to be persistent.

Welcome to our Innovation event 30th Nov, hosted together with SAAB Group and British-Swedish Chamber of Commerce (BSCC).

Warm welcome to our webinar the 19th November: Managing the Cost of IT Spend in Manufacturing.

Since the 23^rd March 2020, when the UK transitioned overnight into a self-enforced national lockdown in an attempt to curtail the transmission of COVID-19, executives have been almost entirely focused on damage limitation to their people, business infrastructure and trading position. As we now emerge from lockdown, in the absence of a viable vaccine and attempt to manage the further spread of the virus by local, less economically damaging measures, we must focus on other important events looming large on the immediate time horizon. If not handled correctly and with knowledge, insight and experience these events will be as equally damaging to many of our UK businesses as the virus itself.

The level of entrepreneurship in an economy is cyclical, and historically precedes the economic cycle. The post-pandemic recovery of the global economy, nations and value chains will rely on the level of entrepreneurship to increase and lift new and existing organisations and ultimately whole economies. Never before in most people’s working lives has the entrepreneurial spirit been more important for organisations to survive, innovate, explore opportunities and thrive through the down-turn triggered by the pandemic and beyond.

As we return to the workplace and attempt to emerge from beneath the shadow of COVID-19 we will see that, for most organisations around the world, the pandemic has laid waste to the P&L and Balance Sheet to the extent that they now both exhibit significantly more red than black. Undoubtedly, planning for and executing a successful recovery will cost money. So, every function in the organisation will now be under scrutiny. Not least those functions previously classified as “indirects” or “back office” such as finance, legal, human resources and information technology, etc. Because money is tight, and the capital markets are hesitant to lend on reasonable terms in the present uncertain times, all internal costs will become a focus of attention.

Every executive running a busy organisation has, at one time or another, stared through the office window and thought “… if only I were King (or Queen) for a day and could just stop the business merry-go-round for long enough to re-shape and re-position my business it could all be so very different...” Well, probably none of us will ever be a King or a Queen. And, in any case, there is a wise old idiom we should remember which asserts that you should always “be careful what you wish for, lest it come true”. Never has this been truer than in respect of the COVID-19 pandemic. That certainly stopped the business merry-go-round for us all, in no uncertain terms. Having been on forced lock-down for several months now we have all had plenty of time to watch and reflect on the damage it has done to our industries, businesses, suppliers, customers and markets.

While there would seem to be little to thank COVID-19 for it has forced us all, as business executives, to confront an unspoken truth. Since at least the dawn of the digital era, however you want to recognise that - be it the widespread use of the internet and the development of broadband; or the creation and proliferation of connected mobile devices in our commercial and domestic lives – we have never really needed to continue working the same old way we always have. We have all succumbed to one of the most basic failings of the human condition - the unconscious bias toward the maintenance of the comfortable norm in the sense of trudging each day to the office or factory and back while comprehensively failing to rapidly grasp the competitive advantage available to us from the advances in, and convergence of, all the technologies we have invented. So, just like the Luddites[1] of the 19^th century, we must now re-consider our options lest we continue sleepwalking towards our own demise accelerated by the onset of the pandemic.