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Business travelers will face fines of up to 20,000 euros (18,240 pounds sterling) 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, warned leaders of the industry.
“What you can’t do after Brexit as a third-country citizen is just think you can go up to Eurostar and improve like you did before when we were an EU member state, you can’t just do that,” said Tim Thomas, consultant of the specialized firm International Employment Mobility Consultancy.
Make UK, which represents some of the UK’s biggest manufacturers, said it is concerned that the problem of business travel for service engineers will not only arise in a no-deal scenario, but could arise if a trade deal hits. home without full services. section.
Service engineers are the army of workers who are called on short notice to factories, offices and industrial sites in the EU to repair everything from hospital scanners to elevators to aircraft parts.
“There is real nervousness amongst our members,” said Ben Fletcher, Make UK’s policy director. “The whole focus is on the assets and there is not enough detail on this for our members to feel comfortable.”
“One company has told us that in an average month they have around 10,000 movements of people … to go and do service-related jobs 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 machinery in factories and equipment inside aircraft that needed regular maintenance.
Any barriers to a company’s SLAs could affect its ability to sell its products to the EU, Fletcher said.
“A service level agreement would sometimes guarantee a service engineer, present in hours instead of days,” he said. “There is real nervousness about how that can work after Brexit.”
The threat stems from the UK’s decision to leave the single market as part of the tough Brexit the government is pursuing.
In a non-negotiated outcome, UK visitors will have to “navigate the rules of 30 different countries,” Thomas said, with different regulations on each and high prices to pay for non-compliance.
Displaced workers who do not currently have permits can face fines “typically between 10,000 and 20,000 euros per worker for non-compliance,” according to Thomas. But the application in some countries has been described as punitive with fines of up to 50,000 euros in Austria.
To add to the challenge of bureaucracy, the rules in each country will be different. “Some countries will allow you to attend a trade show, others will allow you to attend but not exhibit, while others will allow you to exhibit but not sign a contract,” Thomas said.
“I think most people are still in a state of partial or total disbelief when they find out about this.”
