Message from myself

There is no doubt that for many businesses in Lymington, it is essential for the UK to remain within the European Union. That is why I am sharing this letter from Dr Jeremy Bennett, local businessperson, arguing for the United Kingdom to remain.

Thanks,

Jack Davies,

New Forest Lib Dems Chair

A Letter from Dr Jeremy Bennett

Dear voter,

I was one of the 1280 business leaders who signed a letter to The
Times this morning, urging voters to support remaining in Europe.

We are a specialist software services business, with almost all our
expertise sold internationally to large multi-national silicon chip
manufacturers. You are unlikely to have heard of us, but are almost certainly carrying the results of our work around in your pocket.

We are exactly the sort of very high value, very high technology, fast growing business that the UK needs. Our staff are very well paid and inject a great deal into the local economy. As a company we pay a significant amount of corporation tax into HM Treasury.

But…

Our customers all bill us through their European subsidiaries. It’s
tax efficient for them, with no tariffs and VAT exempt thanks to the business-to-business trading arrangements of the EU. We spend a lot of time working with our customers, usually on their European sites, and the ability to travel visa-free at a moment’s notice is essential. Leave Europe and suddenly we have VAT on our prices to be recovered in arrears, and potentially even tariffs and visas to delay our visits.

But the biggest value for us is employment and free movement of
people. There are perhaps 50 individual engineers in the world who are expert in our field, technology that underpins every modern silicon chip. I recruit from across Europe. It is just not realistic to run a company like mine, if we were to recruit from just the 60 million residents of the UK.

So what would we do if the UK voted for exit? We would have no option but to set up operations within another country within the EU. All our new recruitment would be for that new location. It would be their local economy boosted by those highly paid engineers and their national treasury receiving corporation tax. At the expense of our local economy and the UK Treasury.

It makes no sense to leave the largest trading block in the world. I
therefore urge you to vote Remain in tomorrow’s referendum.

Dr Jeremy Bennett,
Chief Executive, Embecosm