BBC political reporter, Essex
Reporting fromMersea Island
Five years on since the UK officially left the EU and, so far, Brexit has not been as bad as oysterman Tom Haward thought.
A year before January 31 2020, his business – Richard Haward’s Oysters – decided to stop sending 200,000 oysters a year to the likes of Belgium and France.
Instead, they have been served-up at more restaurants, fishmongers and markets across Britain.
“Brexit didn’t really impact us at all in the short term.
“We anticipated it would cause a lot of problems with exporting, so we stopped before Brexit happened and then filled that gap with domestic clients.”
Tom Haward’s family have grown and caught oysters around Mersea Island in Essex for nearly three hundred years. He hopes his daughter will one day become the ninth generation to make her living from the shellfish.
At the beginning of this decade, increased demand in the UK ate up the 10% of his oysters that were being exported to continental Europe.
“We were seeing a renaissance of love of oysters in the UK.
“We were seeing an increase in sales to restaurants, so we were like ‘Oh, Brexit hasn’t been as bad as we thought it was going to be’.
“But that was the beginning. Now we are starting to see, five years on, the implications of Brexit,” Mr Haward told the BBC.
The hospitality sector was “struggling” and the oysterman said his customers were not selling the same volumes of oysters in the past year.
“We’ve got a very small market that we are trying to keep hold of and there’s not really much growth in the UK.
“There are so many other oyster producers fighting for the same customers. I can already see a downward for sales in oysters.”
There were now “too many barriers, too many complications” to selling British oysters in mainland Europe, Mr Haward said.
To export live shellfish into the EU, export health certificates, origin of product paperwork and veterinary health checks needed to be completed.
Mr Haward said the paperwork and planning would take a week, whereas before Brexit an order from the EU could be made and the oysters would arrive the following day.
The bureaucracy, he said, had “pushed the price up by at least 20%” and he would “have to charge a lot more than our European competitors”.
There was also a risk live oysters would be delayed in transit and would “die at the border”.
‘Dubai easier than Dublin’
Tom Haward said he had found a new client in Dubai, which was easier to export to than Dublin.
“It’s really easy: I write out an invoice, box the oysters up, send them to Heathrow and it’s job done.
“It’s all done the way we used to do it with Europe.
“It’s easier to get them into the Middle East than across the English Channel, that’s the madness of it. It makes me sad.”
Before the Brexit vote, Richard Haward’s Oysters was looking to double its EU exports to 20% of sales. Now exports abroad make-up 0.5%.
The UK Chancellor Rachel Reeves has talked of a reset of relations with the EU and improving market access for food and farm goods.
But Tom Haward was pessimistic.
“There’s a lot of talk and little action regardless of which government is in place,” he said.
He was considering sending oysters to the Far East – demand is high in China.
But he was torn over whether it was sustainable to fly oysters “half-way around the world” and keep his family harvesting oysters.