Brexit is often framed as an opportunity to streamline government and reduce regulation, yet the reality has been quite the opposite. Since the referendum in 2016, the number of full-time equivalent civil servants in the UK central government has risen from approximately 380,000 to over 510,000, an increase of more than 130,000. Multiple research institutions have pointed out that, after accounting for the pandemic, around 100,000 of these positions are directly or indirectly related to the new systems, border controls, regulations, and negotiations that emerged post-Brexit. This is not a result of improved administrative efficiency, but rather a structural cost incurred from exiting a common system that necessitates compensatory staffing.
The issue is not merely one of having more personnel; it is that this influx represents a permanent increase in ongoing expenditure. When calculating the total cost of civil servants, one must consider not only salaries but also employer national insurance contributions, pension liabilities, office rentals, IT systems, cybersecurity, training, and management costs. Even under conservative assumptions, the annual cost per civil servant is estimated to be between £50,000 and £60,000. If we consider the 100,000 staff related to Brexit, the additional ongoing expenditure reaches £5 billion to £6 billion per year, and this is not a one-off cost but rather a recurring burden embedded in government spending.
One of the most expensive and difficult-to-reverse areas is border control and immigration. Prior to Brexit, the UK did not require complete third-country checks on goods and people from the EU; post-Brexit, customs declarations, rules of origin, plant and animal health inspections, border IT systems, port infrastructure, and additional border and immigration officials have all become the norm. The Home Office and HM Revenue and Customs have maintained high staffing levels to manage the new visa system, residency approvals, customs clearance, and compliance enforcement. These costs are reflected not only in salaries but also in the expensive construction and maintenance of border systems, making this one of the heaviest burdens on public finances post-Brexit.
Another underestimated source of expenditure is the regulation of food, pharmaceuticals, and agriculture. Previously centralized by the EU, food safety assessments, drug approvals, agricultural subsidies, and environmental compliance have all returned to domestic management post-Brexit. In the pharmaceutical sector, the UK must establish parallel approval and regulatory capabilities to the EU, which, even if the outcomes often align, still requires a complete set of independent personnel and procedures. The same applies to food and agriculture, where health inspections, subsidy management, standard-setting, and enforcement demand additional long-term human resources. These tasks are not an expansion of policy choices but rather an unavoidable duplication resulting from institutional fragmentation.
In addition, there are layers of Brexit-related expenditures that are less frequently mentioned but equally resource-intensive. Legally, a significant number of regulations that were previously EU-based need to be transposed, amended, and maintained over the long term, requiring specialized legal and policy personnel. In trade, the UK must independently maintain rules of origin verification, trade remedies, subsidy regulation, and dispute resolution mechanisms, even if actual cases are few; the system itself must still exist in its entirety. Furthermore, the government must continue to provide businesses with guidance on Brexit compliance, support hotlines, and transitional arrangements. These seemingly scattered tasks cumulatively represent a long-term burden on both human resources and finances.
When these expenditures are distributed at the household level, the picture becomes clearer. With approximately 27 million households in the UK, the annual Brexit-related personnel expenditure of £5.5 billion translates to about £200 per household each year. This amount will not appear on tax bills as a ‘Brexit cost’; instead, it will be absorbed indirectly through tax pressure, dilution of public service resources, or the squeezing of other budget items.
It is noteworthy that the government often attributes the rise in civil servant numbers to the pandemic while downplaying the long-term impact of Brexit. The pandemic has led to a temporary spike, which theoretically can recede; however, the effects of Brexit are permanent and recurring. As long as the UK chooses to operate independently in institutional terms, it will require more personnel and financial resources in the long term to accomplish tasks that could have been shared within a common system.
Whether Brexit was worth it remains a matter of political division; however, from an administrative and financial perspective, the accounts are quite clear. Approximately 100,000 new civil servants and billions of pounds in annual ongoing expenditure ultimately fall on every household. This may not be the most prominent page in the Brexit narrative, but it is likely the most enduring and hardest to ignore.
