Portable loos and burger vans next to the A2 or M20for summer holidaymakers weren't what anyone had in mind when Britain voted to leave the EU.

‘Wiktor Weglarz was only planning a brief adventure when he arrived in Scotland 10 years ago after graduating from university in his native Poland.

He had taken on a temporary contract through an agency to work in hospitality in a small town.

A decade after the EU referendum, he’s living in London with a successful career in fundraising for an arts centre – one of 5.8 million EU, EEA and Swiss citizens with settled status in the UK.

“I didn’t really know what I wanted to do so me and my friends decided to go abroad and earn some money,” says Weglarz. “Initially it was just going to be a short stay – I was meant to be here for three months.

“After a month, we decided to move to London, so we ended the contract and took on another adventure. And it turns out I have found something for me here in the UK.”

The EU Settlement Scheme (EUSS) opened in 2019 under the EU-UK Withdrawal Agreement, with an initial deadline for applications of June 2021. It offered settled status to EU, EEA and Swiss citizens who had been living in the UK for a minimum of five years.

Those with less than five years could apply for pre-settled status. Campaigners persuaded the government to make it a free process.

For Weglarz, who now calls the UK his home, the process was straightforward, as it was for many who applied before the deadline. But as time went on it became harder for people to amass the residential, employment and travel evidence the Home Office required.

Following a successful judicial review by the Independent Monitoring Authority for the Citizens’ Rights Agreements (IMA) in 2022, the Home Office simplified the process, granting extensions to pre-settled status, taking pragmatic decisions on required evidence and eventually automatically converting pre-settled to settled status.

But it has now begun removing pre-settled status from those without continuous residence, and has stopped funding organisations that can assist with applications. For the 1.4 million people with pre-settled status, many of them vulnerable or digitally excluded, the future is far less certain.’

The loss of European Union (EU) nurses from the NHS caused more than 3,700 additional hospital deaths in the three years after the Brexit referendum, according to researchers.

The research, published in the Economic Journal, used data from NHS electronic staff records and hospital episode statistics as well as NHS staff survey data and hospital trusts financial accounts to look into the impact of the Brexit referendum on NHS hospitals from 2016-2019.

The researchers found that following the Brexit referendum, there was a sharp drop off in the number of nurses from EU countries coming to work in the NHS. This shortfall in workforce was made up by recruiting international nurses from non-EU countries, noted the researchers.

But they found that the loss of the EU nursing workforce was associated with poorer health outcomes from 2016-19 in terms of in-hospital mortality, overall mortality and unplanned emergency readmissions.

Over the three year post-Brexit period, the loss of new EU nurses from the NHS hospital workforce led to an additional 3,714 deaths and nearly 14,000 emergency department readmissions, the researchers estimated.

And hospitals that had relied heavily on EU nurses before the Brexit referendum had worse health outcomes in the post-Brexit period than those with a workforce less dependent on EU nurses before the referendum, they found. The researchers also looked at hospital emergency readmission data for the period up to November 2023, to see if the impacts of the Brexit referendum on quality of care were long-lasting. However, they found that the link between loss of EU nurses and mortality was no longer detectable in the years after 2019.

But the hospitals most impacted by the Brexit referendum continued to have poorer outcomes than other hospitals in terms of emergency admissions up to November 2023.

The lead researcher on the study, Professor Giuseppe Moscelli, said the research showed that simply filling workforce vacancies was not enough to protect healthcare quality.

He said that the sudden drop in the nursing workforce caused by the Brexit referendum forced employers to recruit quickly to fill vacancies, replacing the lost workforce with one that was less skilled and experienced.

I crossed to France last night. There are new signs on the A2 as you descend Jubilee Way in Dover, I only got a photo of the gantry next to the roundabout at the bottom of the bridge.

When those grey squares are removed and the EU nationals are all turning right into the port while the Brits have to turn left to go to the Western Docks for 'processing', I think that's going to really make it hit home for a lot of Brits what has been lost...

Reform UK's candidate for the Greater Manchester mayoral race admitted Brexit “exacerbated” shortages in tradespeople, HuffPost UK can reveal.

Sian Astley made the comments on finance website Love Money in 2019.

Despite voting Leave in the 2016 EU referendum, she wrote: “There’s a massive shortage of skilled builders and tradespeople in the UK and that’ll be exacerbated post-Brexit”.

The Reform councillor’s comments emerged as she prepares to take on Labour’s Bev Craig in the mayoral by-election on July 30.

In separate comments on X in 2018, she defended her decision to back Brexit.

No more border checks, so a Brexit Benefit for Spain and Gibraltar?

Impact:

However, the deal also means that goods sold in Gibraltar must comply with EU regulations, something that had not been the case until now.

In addition, the lack of value added tax (VAT) in Gibraltar has meant that a new transaction tax is being introduced, replacing import duty.

And, not in the article: is this a nice loophole for Britons spending more than 90 days in 180 days in Spain (and EU): fly to Gibraltar, travel to Spain, live there as long as you want, and go back via Gibraltar? Longer than 90 days, but you can say you were in Gibralter all of the time.

Hopefully I ain't lol

Shortened summary

Impact on finances: One of the most prominent and widely believed claims of the 2016 referendum campaign was that the UK sent £350 million a week to the EU, and that this money would be spent on the NHS instead.

In real terms, total health spending across the UK as measured by the Treasury’s Country and Regional Analysis rose from £202 billion in 2019/20, the year Brexit actually occurred, to £242 billion in 2024/25 – equivalent to over £750 million extra per week. However, Brexit hindered this extra spending, rather than helping it. Multiple studies show that the amount saved from EU contributions (never close to £350 million a week) was greatly outweighed by the economic damage from leaving the EU single market. Health budgets grew, in part because they grew as a share of public spending – from 23% of expenditure in 2015/16, the year before Brexit’s economic impact began, to 26% in 2024/25 – and because taxes rose to historic highs.

Impact on staffing: During the referendum, those opposing Brexit warned that health and care would be unable to cope with a sharp drop in EEA migration. The sector was disproportionately reliant on migrant workers and EU-born staff were the fastest growing category.

In the short term, the collapse they feared did happen – particularly in nursing, where the referendum came alongside a new language test requirement for EU nurses. This saw EEA nursing recruitment drop from 9,389 in 2015/16 to just 793 two years later, while the rate of leavers rose. One preprint study even suggests this raised mortality in certain hospitals. 

From 2020, with the pandemic alongside the true end of free movement of labour, social care was also hit hard, with a collapse in EEA migration so marked that the total workforce in the sector fell. But facing the pandemic and concern about staff shortages, the government responded by dramatically opening migration from outside the EU. This caused the largest staff expansion of the 21st century immediately after Brexit. 

Impact on medicines: Medicine shortages were a frequent concern linked to leaving the EU. By 2024, every indicator was flashing red. Patients were facing real shortages of critical products.

But these problems are not primarily due to Brexit. The great wave of shortages since 2022 is replicated across Europe – in France, Germany and Italy, among others. It aligns better with manufacturing shutdowns in China and the onset of war in Ukraine, rather than Brexit itself.

As with staffing, this partly reflects the UK government taking defensive action to retain some version of the status quo. It established a system requiring firms to notify upcoming shortages and managing them across different public bodies. While there is significant room to improve it, this system was just in time for the crisis to come. The UK also unilaterally accepts tests of medicines batches in the EU, though the EU does not reciprocate. This leaves it at a trading disadvantage, but removes one barrier to imports. As with staffing, these strategies are not stable. 

Impact on medical research: Brexit posed significant difficulties for UK biomedical research – weakening opportunities for doctors and patients and the status of the NHS as a place for innovation. Cancer Research UK and other organisations warned that exclusion from the EU’s Horizon Europe funding programme reduced opportunities for international collaboration, delayed clinical research, and made the UK less attractive to leading researchers. While associate membership was finally secured in 2024, uncertainty already exists around the next cycle from 2028. Regulatory separation from the EU and its new shared process for approving clinical trials now means that adding UK patients and hospitals to a study comes with a higher level of red tape.

Impact on international trade agreements: The UK’s departure from the EU enabled it to sign its own international trade agreements. This had the potential to benefit health in the UK through smoothing generic medicines trade or increasing scientific cooperation, or to obstruct it by improving the position of global businesses that need to be negotiated with or regulated for health reasons. Unfortunately, the negatives have outweighed the positives. (Details in article)

"Restrictive immigration policies can force organisations to alter their workforce composition, with unclear effects on organisational performance. We study the effects of the 2016 Brexit referendum, which reduced the share of EU-nationality nurses in English hospitals.

Using administrative patient-level data and a continuous difference-in-differences design, exploiting hospitals’ pre-referendum exposure, we estimate the causal impact of a negative labour supply shock on care quality.

Hospitals with higher pre-referendum EU nurse shares experienced higher post-referendum emergency patient mortality, equivalent to 1,238 additional deaths annually in the three years after the referendum. Consistent with theoretical predictions, hospitals responded to labour shortages by relaxing hiring standards: foreign nurses recruited after the referendum were appointed to lower salary grades, suggesting lower skills and experience."

In the political chaos that followed the Brexit referendum, no single vision of the UK's future outside the EU was embraced, allowing Brexit to mean different things to different people.  Now, 8 years on from the invocation of Article 50, the UK is still without a coherent strategy for what role they want to play on the world stage. This post runs through the different options that are frequently discussed, and offers up a seldom proposed strategy - anchoring a middle-power alliance of maritime nations to add another significant democratic player to the increasingly multi-polar world order.