International delivery company ParcelHero has said plans to jettison EU regulations, far from reducing costs for small retailers and SMEs, may increase red tape and cost more. The comment follows the Queens Speech, delivered by Prince Charles, with the UK Government revealing new measures it said will “seize the opportunities of the United Kingdom’s departure from the European Union.”
ParcelHero said the opportunity to change UK business rules is very much a double-edged sword. While this could reduce costs for companies, it is also likely to introduce a situation where many products and services have to meet separate EU and UK regulations.
ParcelHero’s Head of Consumer Research, David Jinks M.I.L.T., said: “It is fine in principle that the new Brexit Freedoms Bill ‘will enable law inherited from the European Union to be more easily amended’. However, where that means significant divergence from EU law for products, packaging or online services, businesses will not want to have to meet two different sets of regulations.
“Nor do UK companies want to face a raft of new domestic sales and infrastructure requirements simply because this is now possible. This could end up in increasing costs. For example, the speech mentioned new data protection measures. Many businesses have spent considerable sums meeting strict new EU data regulations. To have these replaced by yet more new, UK specific, regulations will again increase costs and present significant problems for UK digital services and online marketplaces that also operate in Europe.
“Almost a year and a half on from Brexit, the upsides are still hard to find.”