INDUSTRY
BIG ASK
Brexit one year on – what impact has it had? It is now more than a year since the UK formally left the European Union, bringing with it a raft of new rules and regulations. But what effect has Brexit had on dealers? Has it led to increased costs and more red tape, or were these teething troubles that have been largely ironed out? David Martin, sales director
use for any orders. This was indeed the case for a while, but I
at One Office
think some of the suppliers overreacted at the time, pushing
Northern Ireland has certainly had its
up carriage costs and insisting on things like those numbers,
own unique difficulties since ‘the big
even though we still don’t really know if we need them or not.
leave’; all of a sudden there was an
There were a lot of delays at the start, especially with
Irish sea border between Northern
furniture; the wholesalers had already sorted themselves
Ireland and the rest of the UK and a
out, thankfully, but we had stories of furniture being stuck in
business protocol that hadn’t been there before. The result
containers alongside other orders that hadn’t produced the
was that no-one really understood what paperwork needed to
right paperwork, and there were a lot of delays to anything
be filled in or what procedures to follow.
which wasn’t coming through the normal wholesale channel.
The different tax and paperwork implications meant that
It coincided with COVID, which didn’t help matters, but,
some suppliers showed a reluctance, at the start, to trade
in some ways, the fact that there were so few people in offices
with NI - certainly from the point of view of suppliers within
made things a little easier to deal with. Obviously, the last
the UK who had, up to then, found it fairly seamless. The
thing we wanted was for customers not to be ordering the
goods outside of the normal wholesale channel, which we had
same amount, but at least we could deal with the changes.
come to expect within a two- to-three day delivery time, were suddenly not arriving, or taking a lot longer to arrive. We had done some preparation beforehand by collecting our customers’ EORI numbers, which we apparently had to
[20] APRIL 2022
www.dealersupport.co.uk
It all seems to have settled a bit since then. We don’t enjoy quite the same level of service from some UK suppliers as we did before, but it’s something we and our customers have got used to.
