Brexit ‘disaster’ cost City 40,000 jobs

The UK’s decision to leave the European Union was a “disaster” that has cost the Square Mile almost 40,000 jobs, according to the lord mayor of the City of London.
The estimate by Michael Mainelli, who represents the Square Mile in his role as the 695th lord mayor, will fuel the debate over the true extent to which Britain’s financial services sector has been harmed by Brexit.
Immediately after the EU referendum in 2016, there were fears that there would be an exodus of jobs from the City to rival centres such as Paris, Amsterdam and Madrid as financial firms that used London as the hub for the EU bolstered their European operations to maintain access to their customers within the bloc. Those worries of a mass flight of jobs appeared overdone, however, with EY, the professional services firm, estimating in March 2022 that there had been just over 7,000 Brexit-related staff relocations.
Even so, the UK has lost out on its unfettered access to the huge EU market for financial services because of Brexit, prompting banks, asset managers and insurers to move assets worth more than £1 trillion, on some estimates, from Britain into the bloc. New finance jobs have also been created on the Continent.
“Brexit was a disaster,” Mainelli told Reuters. “We had 525,000 workers in 2016. My estimate is that we lost just short of 40,000.”
There are now about 615,000 jobs in the City, buoyed by the expansion of the insurance and data industries, Mainelli said. He added that the Square Mile had generally been pro-EU in the Brexit debate eight years ago: “The City voted 70-30 to remain. We did not want it.”
As lord mayor, Mainelli heads the City of London Corporation, the governing body of the Square Mile. A new lord mayor is chosen from the City’s aldermen each year and acts as an ambassador for Britain’s financial services sector. Mainelli co-founded Z/Yen, a City think tank, 30 years ago and also previously worked in merchant banking and was a partner at BDO, the accountancy and advisory firm.