Helping clients have no regrets when it comes to Brexit

Setting the scene

Brexit is the biggest change to the UK’s economic/trading conditions since the Second World War. The UK is leaving the European Union on 29 March 2019, though what that looks like in practice is yet to be agreed. We are helping clients try to solve one of the most important and complex challenges they’ve faced in recent years. This year our focus has been about helping our clients to move from understanding the issues to action.

How we helped

Solving important problems is in our purpose and there are none bigger at the moment than those associated with Brexit. Under the Beyond Brexit: Time to Act banner, the starting point was that Brexit, despite the question marks around it, is about change - and that people turn to PwC in times of change.

From there we have:

• equipped our people with the knowledge and confidence to be able to have Brexit conversations.
• helped our clients understand the range of possible and likely scenarios and what that means for their business.
• supported clients to ensure they are ready on day one of Brexit on 30 March 2019 and to thrive beyond.

A team of experts from across the firm have come together to deliver a joined-up response to support our clients and our people meet the demands of Brexit-related change, with a focus on: trade and customs, people and immigration, strategy and business planning, regulatory requirements, and governance and implementation.

We created a free Time to Act digital toolkit to help clients think through the implications that Brexit will have on their business. This has included an impact and readiness checklist, a negotiation timeline, eight ‘no-regrets’ decisions, an expert podcast and webcast series. We have also held an extensive series of client events. Our expert team made up of Head of Political Relations Anna Wallace, Co-Head of Corporate Affairs Neil Sherlock, Senior Adviser Michael Moore and Senior Trade Adviser Phil Brown spoke at more than 300 engagements across the UK. Additionally, we welcomed 400 clients to our quarterly PwC Immigration Club Meetings.

The messages and content run through our external Beyond Brexit campaign have also underpinned how we have helped our people to understand what Brexit means to them and to clients. For our partners and staff we have provided regular bulletin updates from our experts, a Brexit roadshow, webcasts, a one-year-to-go trade briefing, a new Google site with regularly updated points of view and resources, and Brexit immersion sessions for industry teams and the teams focused on supporting our priority clients. Our content has been used and interpreted by our Spanish firm on its external website.

Part of our tech-enabled response to our clients’ issues around Brexit and beyond has been via our online portal The Suite, where Brexit has been among the most searched terms this year. Our subscribable podcast series began in February 2017 and we had 14,222 listens to the nine podcasts we produced in FY18. Our two webcasts were watched 2,054 times, while our Time to Act blog series has been read by over 2,200 people in just three months.

We have contributed to leading thought pieces on future immigration policy, surveyed businesses as to their Brexit readiness, sponsored an Institute for Government one-year-to-go event, and produced a series of external publications and workshops looking at the implications of Brexit on financial services and pharmaceuticals and life sciences. Our work has continued to form the basis of the life science industry’s discussions with the UK government. We identified a number of actions/proposals which the Government should prioritise in its negotiations which would ensure that British patients can continue to access medicines post-Brexit. We were pleased to see the Government adopt many of them in its White Paper in July.

We have continued to engage with government departments, regulators and industry bodies across a number of sectors. Our economics team also developed thought leadership on the potential impacts of a loss of mutual market access which has been a reference point for many across financial services and has informed the policy debate in Parliament and Whitehall.

As part of the external approach, Brexit forms part of an innovative social media-led programme looking to share our messaging and to protect our brand, people and work from reputational threats. We identified more than 300 Brexit influencers with whom we have been sharing our content, including our podcast series. It’s led to the number of people that could have seen the #beyondbrexit going beyond 22.75 million people in FY18.