Theresa May keeps delaying the Brexit vote, but the clock is ticking for business to prepare for a no-deal outcome

On her way to an EU-Arab League summit over the weekend, Theresa May announced that she would not provide British parliamentarians with a meaningful vote on an altered Brexit deal until perhaps 12 March.

Politicians wanted that opportunity this week, but instead, the embattled leader has once again sought to delay proceedings as she struggles to guarantee a supportive majority in the House of Commons.

Officials in Brussels, and businesses on both sides of the English Channel, have been quick to express their dismay at her decision, as a no-deal deadline looms ever closer. And after a visit last week to a logistics firm that has recently opened a new fulfilment center in Southampton, thanks in part to the Brexit-related uncertainty about Britain’s future trading relationship, it is possible to understand the context for that apparent frustration. It seems particularly acute in the freight and transportation sector.

PFS UK is a subsidiary of a large US e-commerce company that employs more than 2,600 people worldwide, and provides shipping and operations support to a slew of brands. It first expanded to Europe almost 20 years ago, and its operations on this side of the Atlantic have for some time been headquartered in the Belgian city of Liege, just an hour or so from the political heart of the EU.

But late last year, after several clients requested that PFS offer them a separate, UK-specific fulfilment location, the company took control of a vast new warehouse space on the south coast.

General manager Lisa Cooley moved from Tennessee to take charge, and explained quite candidly how much work had been required in such a tight span of time.

“It’s a little chaotic in the beginning,” she acknowledged, before underlining that, thanks to next-day delivery expectations, time is rarely on the side of her consumer retail clients.

The costs associated with separate shipping capacities, extra warehousing space, and an expanded workforce to combat the potential challenge of cross-border trading tariffs will all eat into the margins of companies like PFS, forcing them to pass the higher expenditure on to their clients, and then in turn to the end consumer.

“Those costs have already been incurred as a contingency measure,” explains Alex Veitch from the Freight Transport Association, who previously worked inside a no-deal Brexit planning team at the UK’s tax authority when it consisted of fewer than a dozen people. But he says that it is only the larger businesses that can afford to devote time and money to this kind of no-deal planning.

The Federation of Small Businesses (FSB) says that its members have continued to hold off from this kind of spending, warning that many would need between six weeks and two months to get ready for a no-deal Brexit.

According to Craig Beaumont, an external affairs director at the FSB, many such firms have now “simply run out of time to prepare.”

Political allies and opponents of the Prime Minister have repeatedly requested that she remove the possibility of no-deal, and in recent days European leaders like Donald Tusk and Angela Merkel have discussed with her a postponement of the 29 March deadline.

But after the summit in Egypt ended, the British leader refused to bend – publicly, at least – to those demands. Tick tock, tick tock.