Government hectoring won’t get businesses ready for the oncoming Brexit car crash

With another Brexit cliff edge looming, this time perhaps the final one, the government is embarking on another of its publicity campaigns in the hopes of persuading Britain and its businesses to “get ready” for the mess it’s creating for them.

There have been a number of these undertaken at great cost to little apparent effect. The one that ran this time last year cost the taxpayer £46m and it did succeed in reaching a lot of people. Trouble is they didn’t do a lot of getting ready, at least not according to a National Audit Office assessment of the exercise.

This time businesses are going to be told that “time is running out”, and it is, but it’s hard to see it having more of an impact. To the contrary.

What ought to be of concern to ministers is that the no-deal outcome they’re currently pursuing isn’t generating the fear among firms that it really ought to.

One reason for that, as I discovered when talking to business groups, is that another F word best characterises their members response to all this: fatigue. With a sprinkling of “fed up”.

Having endured years of crippling uncertainty, some of the more bluntly spoken business leaders will very likely use a rather more Anglo-Saxon F word, or rather a phrase that starts with that letter and ends in “off”, in response to more government hectoring.

You could hardly blame them. In the midst of a poorly handled pandemic that has scorched the economy and left them fighting for their lives, they need a no-deal Brexit like an outbreak of a particularly virulent flu strain.

With the final outcome still wrapped in a thick, impenetrable fog of uncertainty, a large number of them have simply decided they’ll just have to cope with the coming storm as and when it hits. 

Many simply don’t have the capacity to get ready. They have too many immediate concerns to contend with.

The results of a member survey published by the Institute of Directors (IoD) after Boris Johnson’s predictably bellicose Friday statement makes it clear that things could get very sticky in the new year, even in the increasingly unlikely event that a deal is secured.

The poll, of 958 respondents, was conducted between 11-20 September. It found that just 12 per cent had in place a customs agent or intermediary to help them deal with the bureaucratic swamp the government has created at Britain’s ports. Just 7 per cent were planning on hiring one, which leaves 81 per cent in danger of drowning.

As for obtaining the necessary licences/authorisations from EU/European authorities to allow them to operate on the continent? Barely 14 per cent have them. The same number again are planning to obtain them. The remaining 73 per cent? Oh dear.

How about stockpiling? Only just over a quarter have either done this or plan to. The remainder will be crossing their fingers and hoping Kent’s newly created lorry parks clear a lot quicker than people expect.

There’s a long list of similar questions to which the answers are no less worrying.

Just one in five of the IoD’s respondents (21 per cent) felt they were prepared, while the same number again thought they would get there by the end of the year.

When set against the answers they gave to those other questions, that fairly grim number actually looks to be on the optimistic side.

Another patronising government campaign isn’t likely to change that much. 

It might give ministers the option of saying “look, we told you to get moving” when things start to get sticky. But that would be a perilous road for the government to take. The fatigue the business community is currently feeling could easily turn into another F word – fury – from a group that is usually quite supportive of the Conservatives but is becoming increasingly frustrated by the way the current government is conducting itself.