Business travellers will face fines of up to €20,000 (£18,240) if they do not apply for special permits for visits to conferences or exhibitions in the European Union if there is no Brexit deal for the service industry, industry leaders have warned.
“What you can’t do post-Brexit as a third-country national is simply think that you can get on Eurostar and rock up as you did before when we were a member state of the EU, you can’t just do that,” said Tim Thomas, a consultant with specialist firm International Employment Mobility Consultancy.
Make UK, which represents some of the biggest manufacturers in the UK, said it is concerned that the issue of business travel for service engineers will not only arise in a no-deal scenario but could arise if a trade deal comes home without a full services section.
Service engineers are the army of workers who are called out at short notice to EU factories, offices and industrial sites to fix everything from hospital scanners to lifts and aircraft parts.
“There is a real nervousness about it among our members,” said Ben Fletcher, director of Policy at Make UK. “All the focus is on goods and there is just not enough detail on this to make our members feel comfortable.”
“One firm has told us that in an average month they have about 10,000 people movements … to go and do service-related work across the EU,” he said.
He declined to identify the company but said they had a “very large manufacturing base in the UK” and had heavy duty machinery in factories and equipment inside aircraft that needed servicing regularly.
Any barriers to a company’s service-level agreements could impact their ability to sell their products to the EU, said Fletcher.
“A service-level agreement would sometimes guarantee a service engineer, present within hours rather than days,” he said. “There is a real nervousness about how that can work post-Brexit.”
The threat is a consequence of the UK’s decision to quit the single market as part of the hard Brexit the government is pursuing.
Time-limited travel trips and a deal for services were part of the negotiating objectives said out by the government earlier this year.
In a non-negotiated outcome, UK visitors will have to “navigate the rules of 30 different countries” said Thomas, with different regulations in each and heavy prices to pay for non-compliance.
Posted workers who do not have permits currently can face fines “typically of between €10,000 and €20,000 per worker for non compliance”, according to Thomas. But enforcement in some countries has been branded punitive with fines of up to €50,000 in Austria.
To add to the red tape challenge, the rules in each country will be different. “Some countries will allow you attend a trade show, others will allow you to attend but not exhibit while others will allow you to exhibit but not conclude a contract,” Thomas said.
“I think most people are still in a state of partial or total disbelief when they hear about this.”
