Britain’s exit from the European Union cost London’s financial centre about 40,000 jobs, according to the Lord Mayor of the City of London, Michael Mainelli, making it a far deeper impact from Brexit than was previously estimated.
Michael Mainelli had remarked that Dublin gained the most from Brexit, attracting 10,000 positions. Cities like Milan, Paris and Amsterdam had also benefited from jobs migrating from London after Britain voted to quit the EU trading bloc in 2016.
Mainelli was quoted as saying: “Brexit was a disaster. We had 525,000 workers in 2016. My estimate is that we lost just short of 40,000.”
These figures by Mainelli, who spent years mapping out the fortunes of Britain’s financial centre before becoming Lord Mayor and has contact with hundreds of City firms, is far higher than the 7,000 jobs that experts at EY calculated had left London for the European Union by 2022.
But on the upside, Mainelli said the City of London was growing, including in fields beyond finance, with new jobs that compensated for the fallout of Brexit. “Worker numbers have also jumped to 615,000 as insurers and data analysis sectors grow,” he said.
Nonetheless, his evaluation underscores the scale of the fallout, as Britain makes plans to rebuild bridges to continental Europe.
His push to improve relations with the continent is coming amid a wider economic slowdown in Britain, driven by disagreement over its exit from the European Union.
Several people had hoped that Brexit would give London the freedom to reduce immigration, drop the large amounts of EU regulation and bolster the economy, immigration rose and regulating it proved hard to untangle especially as the economy slowed.
Meanwhile, Britain’s new prime minister, Keir Starmer, is looking to rebuild relations with continental Europe, damaged by years of fractious Brexit negotiations.
He plans to remove some barriers to doing business with EU countries, including a mutual recognition agreement of professional qualifications, but he ruled out a return to the bloc’s single market.
