Originally written by Timothy Adler on Small Business
Small and medium-sized firms are especially vulnerable in the even of a no-deal Brexit, the CBI has warned.
Four out of 10 SMEs that trade internationally have no contingency plans for Brexit, says the CBI. Fifty-six per cent of SMEs in Northern Ireland – the pinch point of Brexit negotiations – have yet to start planning. And 90pc of small architecture firms have found it impossible to start planning.
The CBI says that both the UK and the EU are unprepared for Britain crashing out of the EU on October 31, with Brussels surprisingly even less prepared than the UK.
Although businesses have already spent billions on contingency planning for no deal, they remain hampered by unclear advice, times, cost and complexity, says the industry body.
For hundreds of thousands of small companies, diverting precious resource – both human and financial – to Brexit preparedness measures is out of reach, says the CBI. They cannot hope to have access to anything like the in-house advice available to large companies, and government funds that can help them to do so have been poorly advertised and are now closed, says the business lobbyist. Eighty-seven per cent of CBI members

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