U.K. Businesses Counting Cost of Brexit Before It's Happened

(Bloomberg) -- The costs of Brexit are already mounting before the U.K. has even left the European Union, the country’s biggest business lobby group said.

“There is the direct cost of what businesses are having to put into their businesses and their supply chains to protect themselves” from the impact of Brexit, Carolyn Fairbairn, director-general of the Confederation of British Industry, said in an interview at the Conservative Party Conference in Birmingham. “The other cost, which is less easy to see, is the investment that hasn’t happened as a result of Brexit uncertainty.”

While the CBI hasn’t put a figure on the costs so far, Fairbairn said it certainly runs to billions of pounds. Plenty of companies have already gone public, though; U.S. drugs giant Pfizer Inc. said last month its costs will reach $100 million, while GlaxoSmithKline Plc predicts a similar financial hit. Automaker BMW AG is bringing forward a scheduled shutdown of its Oxford plant to April, to counter uncertainty immediately after Britain’s scheduled departure.

On Tuesday, Toyota Motor Corp. warned that a hard Brexit would hurt revenue.

Fairbairn said Brexit-related uncertainty is already feeding through to U.K. growth because it has dimmed business investment.

“Business investment growth is running in the low single digits,” she said. “Given the scale of international growth, there’s a strong global market, we should be expecting to see double-digit business investment growth.”

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