With products on sale at Buckingham Palace, Westminster Abbey and museums across the country – as well as in European capitals – Jeremy Shaw, the managing director of Derbyshire-based Heritage Playing Cards, has particular reason to hope the coronation will be good for the business he set up 30 years ago. The past few years have been anything but. First, the Covid pandemic shut all museums and their shops, meaning an almost total collapse in domestic and overseas sales. Then the country’s leading producer of heritage playing cards – whose popular kings and queens of England pack has been updated ahead of the coronation to include one of Charles III – saw its export business almost completely wiped out by Brexit. The effect of Britain leaving the European Union has destroyed 85% of his company’s trade with EU customers – which accounted for 35% of its total turnover. “Before Brexit, we got an order at nine in the morning and three days later it was sitting in a shop or museum in Paris or Brussels or Vienna,” said Shaw. “Now almost all of our EU customers have given up. The paperwork and the costs of getting packages over to the EU mean they think it is just not worth it. Brexit has been a complete and utter disaster.” As well as UK-themed packs – the kings and queens, the prime ministers, the stately homes and many more subjects – the company has supplied European markets with bespoke packs for different countries, such as German castles and a pack celebrating the Brothers Grimm fairytales. But not for much longer. “We are running down all our German and French stock and then we will finish. We will donate whatever we have left to schools as teaching materials for foreign language lessons,” said Shaw. “We are just battering our heads against a brick wall. We spent so much time, effort and investment building up that market, and we might as well not have bothered.” The initial problem for EU shops or museums that order cards from the UK is the form-filling. Then the customers find themselves stung by extra VAT charges when the goods arrive. All in all, it is proving too much for many small operators.
“We have to pay a fee to get the parcel out of this country … something like £3,” said Shaw. “Then, when it gets to their end, they have to pay a processing fee. Then customers are told there is a VAT charge on that parcel. They then refuse the parcel, which has to be returned to us – and, to cap it all, we have to pay import duty to get it back again. “It is an administrative nightmare for us and the customers. None of this happened before we left the European Union.” Shaw said he recently received an order from the National Trust in Northern Ireland. Even this transaction involved post-Brexit form-filling, despite Northern Ireland being part of the UK, and London and Brussels spending much of the past two years trying to make intra-UK trade across the Irish sea easier. “It is just unbelievable,” he said. Shaw’s company operates from the Derbyshire town of Ilkeston. Nearby is Cluny Lace, another small firm. It provided material for Royal wedding dresses, including that worn by Kate Middleton. It too has been in the headlines because of the disastrous effect Brexit has had on its business model. The firm’s managing director, Charles Mason, says the taxman imposed an 8% duty on the return of all the lace it sent to France for dyeing. In a letter to the Financial Times he wrote: “We have spent more than 200 years building our business, fought for 30 years against the global textile trend of moving to the far east and have now been killed off by our own side in a couple of years. We all lose.” The Office for Budget Responsibility has forecast that Brexit “will result in the UK’s trade intensity being 15% lower in the long run than if it had remained in the EU”. Shaw added: “I have written to HMRC several times about all this and they don’t reply. They just send out their pointless circulars. They never get back with any answers.” An HMRC spokesperson said: “We have extensive guidance on GOV.UK to help businesses with all queries relating to importing and exporting. This includes detailed step-by-step guides and videos. You can also find information through our online services and HMRC app. For more complex queries, businesses can use our web chat to talk to an adviser or call us.”