Six years ago this April PwC had a killer report.
It was headlined, dryly, Leaving the EU: Implications for the UK financial services sector.
This was before the Brexit vote remember, so this was proper soothsaying stuff, the sort of thing for which the wealthy clients pay mega bucks.
The key finding from 56 pages of guesswork dressed up as wisdom, was that 100,000 jobs would depart from the City of London. That’s nearly one-in-five high paying, high tax producing jobs sucked out from the heart of our economy.
Pretty serious stuff and props to the accountants for sticking their neck out.
This turned out to be as trustworthy as PwC’s auditing of the BHS group, which it signed off days before it was sold for £1, later being fined a record £10 million for its failures as the retailer went bust.
Or its audit of cloud computing firm Redcentric, for which PwC was later fined £6.5 million with the Financial Reporting Council noting a “serious lack of competence”.
PwC hasn’t paid a fine for its egregious Brexit predictions, but its work here was equally unimpressive, equally lacking in a context connected to the real world.
Today the EY Brexit Tracker has the number of jobs going overseas due to Brexit at 7000 and falling.
What the Brexit vote really did for the City was to remind anyone who cared that it is the place to be in Europe for financial services and that other locations can’t compete and, whatever they may say, don’t intend or expect to. They are nipping at the City’s heels.
This isn’t some ra-ra Britain point, it is just what was always obvious to observers not blinded by anti-Brexit sentiment. Leaving the EU may not have been great for the City. The idea that it would crumble was absurd and has shown to be so.
