Every Form, Permit and Fee Brexit Added to Ordinary Life

Nobody voted for the paperwork. I have been through the leaflets, and it is not in there. There was a bus with a number on it, there were some claims about fish and there was a great deal of talk about sovereignty, which turned out to mean the right to fill in forms that a Belgian used to fill in for you.

What has Brexit actually cost Britain? This drawn explainer adds up the bill line by line.

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There was no page that said, in bold, that taking the dog to France would in future require a vet, an appointment and a fresh certificate every single trip.

And yet here we are. Ten years on from the referendum, the thing Brexit has actually delivered into most people's hands is not blue passports or a bonfire of red tape. It is admin. Quiet, expensive, cumulative admin, arriving one form at a time so that nobody ever quite has the moment where they add it all up and say, out loud, hang on.

I have a particular vantage point on this. I live in Finland and come back three or four times a year, which means I do the crossing in both directions more often than most, and I have watched the queue at the other end grow a new arm every eighteen months like something in a horror film.

The last time I flew into Stansted a man behind me asked the border officer, quite sincerely, when they were going to finish the building work. It is not building work. It is the border.

So let us add it up. Not the big constitutional stuff, which has been added up by cleverer people, but the ordinary stuff. The forms. The fees. The things you now do on a kitchen table on a Sunday night that in 2015 you did not do at all.

Getting yourself there

Start with the border, because everybody meets the border. The Entry Exit System, or EES, went fully live across the Schengen area in April 2026. It replaces the passport stamp with biometric registration. Fingerprints, a facial scan, a record kept for three years.

The stamp took a second and a bored official with an inkpad. The scan takes considerably longer, and it takes it in a queue that is now split into two, one of which moves.

Behind that comes ETIAS, the European Travel Information and Authorisation System, which is a form and a fee that British citizens will need before entering most of Europe. Twenty euros, roughly seventeen pounds, valid for three years and free if you are under eighteen or over seventy.

It has been postponed more than once and at the time of writing the EU has withdrawn its target date entirely, which is the only genuinely good news in this article and I want to enjoy it for a moment.

Neither of these is punishment. They are the standard machinery the EU applies to non members, and Britain asked, in writing, to be a non member. But it is worth being precise about the trade.

We gave up a border that took a second in exchange for one that takes fingerprints, and we did it in order to get a passport that is a slightly different colour, which nobody at the biometric gate looks at.

Getting the dog there

The pet passport was one of the quiet triumphs of European bureaucracy, which is not a sentence anybody expected to write. One document, issued once, valid for years, stamped by a vet when the jabs were done. You showed it at the ferry and the dog got on the ferry. It was, by some distance, the most efficient thing any of us owned.

It is gone for British pets. In its place is the animal health certificate, which a vet must issue, which costs money, which is valid for a single trip. Just the one.

You come home, and the next time you go, you do it again, with a new appointment, a new fee and a new form that the vet fills in by hand while the dog looks at you as if you have personally arranged this.

Owners now describe it as the most expensive part of the holiday, and they are not exaggerating for effect. A fortnight in the Dordogne with a spaniel is now a veterinary procedure with a holiday attached.

A fortnight in the Dordogne with a spaniel is now a veterinary procedure with a holiday attached.

Getting a parcel there

Sending a birthday present to a cousin in Rotterdam used to require an address and a stamp. It now requires a customs declaration, a description of the contents, a declared value, a tariff code if you want to be thorough, and, at the far end, a decent chance that the recipient is asked to pay a handling fee before they are allowed to have their own present.

This is the category of Brexit cost that never makes the news, because each instance is too small to be a story and too annoying to forget. Nobody writes a headline about a jumper stuck in Belgium. Everybody who has had a jumper stuck in Belgium remembers it, and remembers the email from the courier asking for eleven euros and a copy of the invoice for a jumper their mum knitted.

Small businesses got the industrial version of this. A woman who used to post pottery to Germany from a shed in Devon now needs an EORI number, VAT registration in another country or an intermediary who charges for the privilege, and a working knowledge of a tariff schedule. Or she stops selling to Germany, which is what a lot of them did, quietly, without a press release.

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Getting the phone to work there

Free roaming was an EU rule. Not a British invention, not a gift from the networks, a rule, made in Brussels, that said you could use your phone in Lisbon for the same price as in Leeds. When Britain left, the rule left with it and one by one the networks reintroduced the charge, each of them insisting they had no plans to do so right up until the morning they did.

So now there is a daily fee, or a bolt on or a cap you have to remember to set before you land or the old dance of turning data off at the gate and hunting for cafe wifi like it is 2009.

Two pounds a day does not sound like much. Two pounds a day for a family of four for a fortnight is a hundred and twelve pounds for something that used to be free, and it was free because somebody in Brussels made it free.

Getting the car there, and the cheese

The green card for the car came back, then went away again, then the rules changed about what you needed to display and at some point a UK sticker replaced the GB sticker for reasons that were explained at the time and that I have genuinely forgotten. Somewhere in a drawer I have both.

And the cheese. Or the ham, or the sausages or the sandwich you made for the ferry.

Meat and dairy from Britain cannot be taken into the EU for personal use, which means the ham sandwich gets confiscated at Calais by a customs officer who has confiscated four hundred of them that week and has stopped finding it funny. There are signs. Nobody reads the signs. The bins at the port are, by all accounts, full.

That is not a reduction. That is a delegation, and you are the one it was delegated to.

The bit that is genuinely funny

Every one of these is a form invented to replace an arrangement that already worked and cost nothing. The pet passport worked. The stamp worked. The parcel worked. The phone worked. The sandwich, God help us, worked. None of them were anybody's grievance in 2016, and none of them appeared on a leaflet, because the leaflet would have been very boring and quite long and would have lost.

The promise was that leaving would remove bureaucracy. What it actually did was move the bureaucracy from an office in Brussels, where a civil servant dealt with it once for five hundred million people, onto your kitchen table, where you deal with it every time.

Keep a folder. Everyone I know who travels with a pet now keeps a folder, a physical one, like it is 1994. Put the certificates in it. Take a photo of everything. Set the roaming cap before you land. And when somebody tells you Brexit cut red tape, ask them the last time they posted a jumper to Rotterdam and watch the face.

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