Like the prudent and pragmatic people they are, the team behind Amsterdam’s bid to host the European Medicines Agency had no champagne on ice the night the EU was choosing the new post-Brexit home for its drugs safety watchdog.
“We’d massively lowered our expectations – it would have been tempting fate,” said one. “We thought European politics would kick in, the way they usually do,” said another. “And you know, we Dutch are really good at coming second.”
So when their capital’s name was pulled out of a hat on Monday evening – it was tied with Milan after the last of three tense rounds of voting – the joy was unbridled. But not, in truth, the surprise: Amsterdam had been building towards this for years.
“We had a solid, substantive proposition based on the city’s recognised assets,” said the city’s deputy mayor, Udo Kock. “We showed we’d go the extra mile for the EMA and its staff. It was a great overall package – basically, everything except the weather.”
Now consistently highly placed across a raft of global rankings, once-anarchic Amsterdam has, without great fanfare, spent the past several years steadily turning itself into one of the continent’s most favoured cities for international businesses.
If, besides the prized EMA – 80% of whose 900 staff listed it as their preferred location – that happens to bring it some of the firms seeking either to leave Britain or to secure or expand a foothold in the EU ahead of Brexit day, all well and good.
But officials here are at pains to stress Amsterdam has not altered or improved its offer because of Brexit, nor is it aggressively touting for Brexit spoils. “We haven’t done that so far, and we don’t plan to in the future,” promised Kock.
“We’re not playing games. We don’t shout from the rooftops. We have a good proposition and we’ll welcome whoever wants to come, for whatever reason. We don’t see Brexit as an ‘opportunity’. But it is ... a fact of life.”
The city has, nonetheless, seen a marked uptick in interest since the referendum both from British and foreign companies in the UK, and – noticeably – from non-European companies looking to set up a European bridgehead that have ruled out London.
Just under 100 firms, across a broad spectrum ranging from financial technology to legal services and asset management to biotech, are actively exploring a move to Amsterdam as a result of Britain’s decision to leave the EU. So far, nearly 20 have signed on the dotted line – expanding, relocating, or opening a subsidiary.
While the majority of major banks seem to have plumped for Frankfurt, among those to have made headlines in financial services are the big Japanese bank Mitsubishi UFG, which is making Amsterdam its new European base for investment banking, and RBS, set to shift about 150 jobs to the Dutch capital.
Less well known are a clutch of proprietary financial trading firms and platforms, including some of the high-frequency algorhithmic traders made famous by Michael Lewis’s 2014 book Flash Boys, all worried – like the banks – about losing EU passporting rights, and attracted by a comparatively friendly regulator.
Some big tech and TV companies are already here or mulling a move. Uber and Netflix have their European HQs in Amsterdam, while Discovery, Disney and Time Warner – all currently benefiting from UK licences to broadcast multiple channels into the EU – are hotly rumoured to be following.
Post-Brexit newcomers will join a flow of international arrivals that has swollen fast in the past decade. “In 2007, 80 foreign companies opened up here,” says Hilde van der Meer, the managing director of Amsterdam InBusiness, the metropolitan area’s foreign investment agency. “Last year, it was 157.”
Among Amsterdam’s prime attractions for international business are accessibility (seven minutes by train from Schiphol airport to Zuidas, its big new business district), digital connectivity, and a highly skilled workforce fluent in English – a major draw compared, say, with Paris.
The city’s 17th-century canal ring, museums and concert halls are of course big draws. Amsterdam is seen as cool and clubby enough for young workers, but with a quality of family life that expat surveys routinely rank higher than New York, London, Paris and Berlin.
The tax system is kind to internationals, too, with an exemption allowing employers to pay the first 30% of salaries tax free. Corporation tax is falling from 25% to 21%. A bonus cap – which the new government has agreed to re-examine – may repel the more rapacious City types but for most, Amsterdam is an appealing place to live.
It has streamlined the installation process. A decade ago it launched an Expat Centre – now rebranded IN Amsterdam – as a one-stop shop where a raft of otherwise complex and time-consuming immigration, local authority and tax formalities can all be completed under the same roof.
IN Amsterdam also works with government to identify aspects of Dutch life foreign residents tend to find hard. Dutch healthcare, for example, is among Europe’s best, but GPs are famously averse to prescribing anything stronger than paracetamol until medically necessary – an approach many newcomers do not understand. So IN Amsterdam runs cultural awareness classes for doctors.
For EU nationals who do not need to go through an immigration procedure, the city – helped by volunteers with long experience of living here – can help with practical advice on housing and schools, likely to be Amsterdam’s biggest challenges in the post-Brexit scramble.
“We’re adding 850 places in international schools, building 5,000-plus new homes a year,” said Colleen Geske of IN Amsterdam. “But there are bottlenecks, of course there are. Some schools have waiting lists; housing is an issue for everyone. Partly, it’s about broadening the scope of what it means to live in Amsterdam.”
Not everyone, Geske said, “wants to – or can – live on a canal in old Amsterdam. Our focus now is regional, working with neighbouring municipalities, offering a choice: inner city, smaller towns like Haarlem, space and nature in Almere, the seaside. All with commutes way shorter than, for example, London.”
Amsterdam’s new business and residential district, Zuidas, is barely 15 minutes from the central station by metro. With about 7,000 new homes, office space for around 60,000 workers, plus shops and open space, the project – part finished and already humming – will be complete by 2030.
In January, work starts here on the shining white Vivaldi building – on a site currently, and rather incongruously, occupied largely by the car park of the accountancy giant Ernst & Young – that by April 2019 will house the EMA, its international staff and its 30,000 visitors a year.
That the agency is coming to Amsterdam is a source of particular pride to David van Traa, who launched the Expat Centre and now heads the Zuidas project where 700 companies – from Baker McKenzie to Deloitte, Manpower to Accenture, Savills to Google and Kraft Heinz to JP Morgan – will find their home.
“Build a good city, a high-quality environment for people to live, work and relax, that’s accessible and ambitious, and international employers will come,” he said. “Yes, we’ve seen a lot of interest since the Brexit referendum. But it’s because of a process that got under way here some time ago.”
