The Association of International Retail estimates that allowing British residents to shop tax-free in the EU after Brexit has created a totally new market that grew from €900m in 2021 to over €5bn in 2025 and is still growing.
This generated around €800m in additional VAT alone and over 120,000 new jobs.
Britain has the opportunity to become the only major European country able to offer tax-free shopping to over 450 million EU residents, 7 times the population of Britain.
That suggests a huge, new, multi-billion pound market for Britain and billions of pounds of additional tax-revenue got the Treasury.
The big winners are the regions. EU visitors already spend half their money outside London, because they travel here more often and they fly to and from regional airports.
All these additional overnight visitors add more to regional mayors funding.
This is a potentially huge, cost-free, tax-raising growth measure for Britain.
If we move fast, we can get a new system up and running in time for Euros 2028.
If we move fast, we can get a new system up and running in time for Euros 2028, giving regional hosts a huge additional economic boost.
Please join us in asking the new Chancellor simply to review the impact assessments on tax-free shopping in light of all this new data.
Data that was not available when the decision was made to make Britain the only major European country not to offer tax-free shopping to non-EU international visitors.
That decision alone is costing British businesses over £2 billion of lost earnings annually , as non-EU international visitors divert their spending from London to Paris, Milan and Madrid.
Surely , it is worth a cost-free review of the figures so that we can have real evidence-based policy making.