A Letter From The Founder – Brexit A Decade On. What Has It Cost Households?

Ten years ago, I sat and watched the referendum results come in and felt, quite honestly, confused about what would happen next. I suspect most of us did, whichever way we had voted.

I am not going to tell you which box I ticked. That is not what this letter is for. What I will do is tell you what the last decade has actually cost ordinary households, savers, and investors in this country, because the numbers are now clear enough to look at plainly.

The most visible economic consequence of Brexit has been the value of the pound. Before the referendum, one pound bought around €1.27. Since the vote, it has averaged €1.16, and has spent 98% of the time trading below €1.20.

That might sound like something that only matters to people going on holiday or trading currencies for a living. It is not. The UK imports roughly 40% of its food, so when the pound loses value, the cost of bringing that food into the country goes up, and that cost eventually lands on your shopping bill.

Between 2021 and 2024, UK food prices rose by 30%. It had taken thirteen years to achieve the same increase in the period before. By November 2025, food prices had risen 38.6% in total since the Brexit vote, adding more than £1,300 a year to the average household grocery bill. Brexit is not the only cause of that. Energy prices, the war in Ukraine, the pandemic, and rising wage costs are all part of the picture. But the weaker pound and the extra paperwork and border checks involved in importing food from Europe are problems that countries still inside the EU simply do not face to the same degree.

That is why UK food price rises have sometimes been worse than those of our European neighbours, even when the rest of the world was dealing with exactly the same pressures.

Britain has seen more inflation than any other Western European country apart from Austria since the Brexit vote, with consumer prices up 41.4% as of May 2026. That is not a pandemic blip.

It is a decade of accumulated price rises, and it has quietly eroded the value of savings in a way that most people have not sat down to fully calculate. Money sitting in a cash ISA earning 1% or 2% while prices rose by 41% has lost significant purchasing power. You have more pounds in the account than you started with, but those pounds buy less.

On investment, the picture is complicated.The FTSE 100, the index that tracks the UK’s 100 biggest companies, has risen 62% since the Brexit vote, which works out at just under 5% a year.

Over the same period, the US stock market has returned 253%, roughly 13% a year. For anyone holding a global tracker fund, that gap represents a significant missed return. For anyone holding mostly UK-focused investments, the comparison is sharper still.

An investor focused on medium-sized UK companies would have lost money in real terms over the decade, while investors in France and Germany made gains of 13% and 19% respectively, after accounting for inflation.

UK investment funds have seen roughly $160 billion withdrawn since 2016, six consecutive years of investors pulling money out, which has become a sustained loss of confidence rather than a temporary reaction. British savers and investors have been moving their money away from UK stocks and towards US and global funds.

Here is the part that is worth pausing on, and I say this as my opinion rather than a recommendation.
Because so many investors have moved away from UK stocks, the prices of those stocks have fallen relative to companies in other countries.

That has made UK shares look cheap, and overseas buyers have noticed: there has been a wave of foreign companies buying up UK businesses at prices above what they were trading for on the stock market. Whether that is an opportunity for UK investors or simply a sign that confidence in Britain has shifted is a question that experienced investors are genuinely divided on right now. I think both arguments are worth hearing.

Brexit was always a trade-off. The country voted to step back from close economic ties with Europe in exchange for more control over its own laws, borders, and trade policy.

The question was never whether that would come with costs. It was how high those costs would be, and whether the benefits would be worth it. That is a fair way to frame it, and I find it more useful than the argument that still tends to dominate whenever this subject comes up.

A YouGov poll taken this month found that 57% of Britons now think leaving the EU was the wrong decision, while 30% think it was right. Opinion has shifted considerably. Though I notice that changed opinions do not, by themselves, change the financial reality that households are living with today.

What I would genuinely like to know is this: has the last decade changed how you think about your own money? Your savings, your investments, the way you plan ahead? Not how you voted, but how you have adapted, if at all.

Head to the comments and tell me. I read every response.

Antonia