Defining provenance post-Brexit: Paul Henty charts the often-painful experience of tackling rules of origin
- Following Brexit, a wider section of the business community is now wrestling with the complexities of rules of origin—the criteria for determining the national source of a product and its components—and their application to particular types of goods.
Back in 2016 when the two sides of the Brexit debate were slugging it out, much was made by the proponents of ‘Remain’ of the impact that tariffs would have in the event of a no-deal Brexit. It was pointed out that EU-UK trade falling back on World Trade Organization (WTO) terms would mean that tariffs would need to be paid on imports into the UK and exports to the EU27. This factor was advanced as one of the key reasons not to leave the European Union.
Perhaps in hindsight, those who opposed Brexit should have spent more time highlighting the complexities of ‘rules of origin’, as these may have served as a more convincing deterrent to the electoral choice which was eventually
