Mersea Island oysterman says Brexit’s impact is now surfacing

Five years on since the UK officially left the EU and, so far, Brexit has not been as bad as oysterman Tom Haward thought.

A year before January 31 2020, his business – Richard Haward’s Oysters – decided to stop sending 200,000 oysters a year to the likes of Belgium and France.

Instead, they have been served-up at more restaurants, fishmongers and markets across Britain.

“Brexit didn’t really impact us at all in the short term.

“We anticipated it would cause a lot of problems with exporting, so we stopped before Brexit happened and then filled that gap with domestic clients.”

Tom Haward’s family have grown and caught oysters around Mersea Island in Essex for nearly three hundred years. He hopes his daughter will one day become the ninth generation to make her living from the shellfish.

At the beginning of this decade, increased demand in the UK ate up the 10% of his oysters that were being exported to continental Europe.

“We were seeing a renaissance of love of oysters in the UK.

“We were seeing an increase in sales to restaurants, so we were like ‘Oh, Brexit hasn’t been as bad as we thought it was going to be’.

“But that was the beginning. Now we are starting to see, five years on, the implications of Brexit,” Mr Haward told the BBC.