Brexit Promises: A Decade On, Which Were Met?

Ten long years have passed since that queasy morning of 24 June 2016, when Boris Johnson and Michael Gove addressed the cameras to hail the victory of the Vote Leave campaign, and a leap into the unknown for the UK.

In the no-holds-barred battle of Brexit that spring, many alluring promises were made to tempt voters to turn their backs on the European Union. A decade on, we take a look at which of them ended up being met.

1. £350m a week for the NHS – enough for a new hospital to be built every week

“At the end of the war, Britain created the NHS. It protects us throughout our lives, but it’s in danger. You can help it.” That was the plea at the start of one of Vote Leave’s more memorable broadcast adverts during the referendum campaign. “Every week we send £350m to Brussels. Money that’s wasted. That’s enough to build a new hospital every week.”

That figure was contested from the start. Experts quickly pointed out that it failed to take account of the benefits the UK received in return, such as funding for scientific research and regeneration projects in deprived areas.

But Johnson revelled in the row, repeating the figure at various points after the referendum result, and £350m for the NHS was famously plastered all over the side of Vote Leave’s battlebus.

So did the NHS get that much-needed injection of resources?

Max Warner, an expert on health and social care spending at the Institute for Fiscal Studies, says it’s true that health spending has risen in real terms – adjusted for inflation.

“Consistently over time, going back almost as far as the start of the NHS, we as a country spend more on health, more or less every year, than we did in the previous year. That is true in real terms, that’s true as a share of GDP,” he says. “Broadly, health spending rises.”

Part of the reason the “£350m a week for the NHS” argument may have resonated with voters was that the growth rate of spending had dropped since 2010, as the Conservative-Lib Dem coalition squeezed budgets.

“It was like a lot of areas of public spending, where you had significant increases in the Labour period, and then you had a period of retrenchment from 2010 onwards,” Warner says. “And I think you can broadly see that particularly from the mid-2010s, NHS performance does start getting worse.”

Two years after the referendum, in 2018, prime minister Theresa May gave a speech at the Royal Free hospital in north London, announcing a five-year funding settlement for the NHS that would see spending increase by 3.4% a year in real terms. By the end of the period covered, in 2023-24, she said, that meant spending would have risen by £394m a week.

“Some of the extra funding I am promising today will come from using the money we will no longer spend on our annual membership subscription to the EU after we have left,” she claimed at the time.

In the event, NHS spending ended up being much, much higher than May could possibly have envisaged, because of the struggle to contain the Covid pandemic, and treat its many victims, in 2020.

“Health spending, in real terms, is much higher than it was pre-pandemic, and that’s substantially higher than it was at the Brexit referendum,” Warner says. However, he says it is impossible to disentangle whether leaving the EU had any direct bearing on the path of NHS spending since.

That said, most economists believe the economy is smaller as a result of Brexit – by at least 4%, or up to 8% in one estimate recently cited by Rachel Reeves. “To the extent to which that is going to lower tax revenues, then all else being equal, that is going to make it harder to spend more on the NHS,” says Warner. He adds that this has more than outweighed any benefit of halting those budget contributions to Brussels: “A 4% hit to GDP we estimate would have a bigger effect on tax revenues than £350m a week.”

2. Bigger bottles of olive oil

In Johnson’s Vote Leave launch speech, he complained about the EU “telling us we can’t sell olive oil in containers bigger than five litres”. He repeatedly used the same example throughout the campaign – and it was also referred to by Gove as an example of bonkers Brussels bureaucracy.

Charles Carey is the founder of The Oil Merchant, a specialist importer of fine estate olive oils – and hasn’t noticed Brussels bureaucracy receding in the decade since.

“Little has changed,” he says. “The rules are all exactly as they were – for instance, the font size and typeface of the words Extra Virgin Olive Oil on the front label have to be the same as in the EU. The nutritional facts are all the same as in the EU, and the import codes for bottles and tins have not changed; there is still a different code for containers of five litres or less than there is for bulk oil.”

He does report one minor Brexit bonus, however: labels now have to carry the importer’s address, and this has been helpful in sending new buyers his way when they see his products on sale elsewhere.

3. ‘The easiest free trade agreement in human history’

It was actually a year on from the Brexit vote that Liam Fox, who had become international trade secretary, made this claim. But it encapsulated leavers’ casual confidence about the speed and ease with which the UK could draw up a new agreement with the EU – on the basis that the two sides had become so closely entwined through 40 years of EU membership.

As Jill Rutter, senior fellow at the Institute for Government thinktank recalls, however: “That didn’t prove to be the case.”

The EU refused to start discussing the post-Brexit trading relationship with the UK until the terms of its exit had been settled. May and her chief negotiator, Olly Robbins, agreed to that “sequencing”, as it was known, despite her pugilistic Brexit secretary, David Davis, hoping to make it the “row of the summer” after Article 50, kicking off the exit process, was invoked in March 2017.

This “withdrawal agreement” included around £30bn paid by the UK to the EU for its exit; settling the fate of EU citizens living in the UK; and deciding how a hard border in Ireland could be avoided. The border issue became the subject of furious debate, with the EU determined not to just wave through imports across the border into the single market to placate the British.

Rutter says part of the problem was that the leavers “just didn’t get the extent to which the EU really believed in the integrity of the single market, as a whole”.

May and then Johnson eventually had to request extensions to the two-year article 50 deadline, while the Tories conducted a fierce internecine battle. Once the withdrawal agreement was finally ratified – in January 2020, after Johnson’s landslide general election victory – it took another 10 months, until Christmas Eve that year, to complete what became known as the “trade and cooperation agreement”. This did include tariff-free trade in goods, but did not exclude UK exporters from facing additional customs checks and paperwork.

Rutter says an agreement might have taken longer had Johnson’s chief negotiator, Lord David Frost, not been prepared to make significant concessions, including on regulatory checks between Northern Ireland and Great Britain – the so-called “border down the Irish Sea”, which May had once said no UK prime minister could agree to. “If you just roll over and stick your paws in the air, then you can do a deal,” Rutter says.

4. Super-powered vacuum cleaners

In a speech early on in the campaign, Johnson complained that it was “absolutely crazy that the EU is telling us how powerful our vacuum cleaners have got to be”.

This in fact referred to an EU rule from 2014 that set a maximum energy input for electrical appliances, to incentivise manufacturers to make them more efficient – and therefore more environmentally friendly. It did not dictate their suction power.

For vacuum cleaners, the limit was set at 1,600W, falling to 900W in 2017. Ten years later, that limit remains in place in the UK, despite Jacob Rees-Mogg touting its potential for the chop in 2022, when he was Brexit opportunities minister. There has been no clamour from industry to go back to producing more energy-hungry appliances.

5. A free trade zone stretching from Iceland to Turkey

Gove used a speech at Vote Leave headquarters on the south bank of the Thames to promise that the UK could leave the EU, but remain in “a free trade zone stretching from Iceland to Turkey”.

I asked John Springford, associate fellow at the Centre for European Reform, if that has proved to be true. “I remember that statement,” he says. “I saw that as veiled language. Because the whole strategy in the campaign was to avoid giving any kind of specificity about what sort of relationship they really wanted … a free trade area can mean all sorts of things.”

“If we think of all the other agreements that European countries have with each other, then, yes, this is a ‘free trade zone’. But it didn’t really tell us much because obviously there’s a wealth of difference between a free trade zone and the single market, in terms of how much it covers, what sort of checks it involves and how easy it makes it for importers and exporters.”

Springford argues that most of these deals, including with the EU itself, but also the European Economic Area for example, embracing Iceland, are “significantly deeper” than the trade and cooperation agreement that Johnson ended up signing.

“The closest would be the association agreement with Ukraine – but even that has got a lot more regulatory cooperation,” Springford says. The EU–UK trade and cooperation agreement, signed on 30 December 2020, did secure tariff-free trade; but without the UK agreeing to follow EU rules and regulations – always a red line for Johnson – it has meant border checks and more bureaucracy for exporters. In 2024, Springford estimated that goods exports to the EU were about 15% lower than they might have been without Brexit.

6. Taking control of UK waters and supporting fishing

In a Facebook post illustrated with a picture of him grinning at a lobster, Johnson said on 16 June 2016 that a vote for Brexit would mean the UK could “take back control over UK waters, set our own fishing policies, and support our fishermen”.

Bertie Armstrong was chief executive of the Scottish Fisherman’s Federation at the time of the campaign and for three years afterwards, as the industry tried to influence negotiations. He says the fisheries sector was deeply unhappy with the EU’s common fisheries policy, and Brexit “appeared to be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity” for a reset. “In the simplest of terms, it was grossly unfair to the UK fishing industry, particularly the Scottish fishing industry,” he says.

Harnessing that dissatisfaction, Nigel Farage, then Ukip leader, led a flotilla of fishing boats up the Thames to Westminster at the height of the campaign, only to be confronted by a rival pro-remain armada, captained by Bob Geldof.

Ten years on, Armstrong laments the fact that, after the vote, the Brexit talks didn’t bring the fresh start the sector had hoped for. Before Brexit, EU countries landed about half the fish caught in UK waters. In the deal struck as part of the negotiations, they agreed to give up about a quarter of that share, phased in over five and a half years. There are still annual consultations between the UK and the EU about the “total allowable catch” of each fish, from which quotas are then derived.

Today, Armstrong says: “Things have not changed overmuch – we’re still engaged in an annual round of arm-wrestling with Europe. It’s not the picture we had in mind, of control of the seas.”

7. Freedom to eat whatever shape bananas we like

As he launched the Vote Leave battlebus in Cornwall in May 2016, Johnson said he’d had enough of the EU determining “what shape our bananas have got to be”.

Brussels bureaucrats banning bendy bananas had been a tabloid favourite since the Eurosceptic Sun first covered the idea in 1994. In truth, while EU regulations did set guidelines for what could be sold as an “extra class” or a “class 1” example of the fruit, there was no ban.

And since Brexit? “It certainly wasn’t anything the government tried to address,” says Joël Reland, an expert on regulation at the thinktank UK in a Changing Europe. In fact, he points out, very little has happened to change the rules when it comes to what we eat. “The fundamental reality is that voters didn’t want lower food standards.”

8. An ‘unchanged’ border in Northern Ireland

John Major and Tony Blair, who had both been involved in the Northern Ireland peace process, made a rare joint appearance in Derry during the referendum campaign to warn that Brexit could lead to border controls and customs checks in Ireland.

Johnson insisted throughout the campaign that the situation would be “absolutely unchanged” at the land border between Northern Ireland, which as part of the UK would be leaving the EU, and the Republic of Ireland, which would remain a proud EU member.

Matthew O’Toole was a senior press officer in No 10 during the campaign – an experience he found so dispiriting that he quit the civil service to enter politics and is now the leader of the opposition SDLP in the Northern Ireland assembly. For the politicians he worked for in No 10, the border “was only ever going to be a marginal part of the story, because, brutally, they didn’t really think about Northern Ireland that much. It wasn’t a worry in their minds.”

“As a mid-ranking comms guy in No 10, I was shouting and roaring about it. I can’t say it was particularly popular,” he recalls. “Even after the referendum, Theresa May’s people were just not accepting that this was going to be a big deal – but it ended up being possibly the single biggest issue in the negotiations.”

After the vote, it became clear that the Irish government had carefully prepared for the eventuality that it would now be at the external border of the EU – and was understandably determined not to lose out as a result. “The problem was that No 10 didn’t really understand that this was going to be existentially, hugely important for the Irish government, both because of concern for the peace process, but also because of their membership of the single market.”

Avoiding a “hard border,” as goods travelled from Northern Ireland into the Republic of Ireland and into the EU single market, in a way that would satisfy Brexiters’ demands for freedom from Brussels, became the knottiest challenge for negotiators.

“The centrality of the border by that point had become quite clear,” O’Toole says, but nobody could find a solution and the negotiations “just went on and on”.

It was Theresa May’s solution to this conundrum, the “backstop” – a fallback option meant to protect the Good Friday agreement/Belfast agreement and keep the border free of customs checks – that ultimately led to her being removed as prime minister.

It would have come into effect if another solution couldn’t be fo