BRITISH businessman Simon Boyd recalls winning a big contract to build an aircraft hangar in France — only to lose it because he couldn’t secure the required French insurance in time.

    “We tried very, very hard to sort it but it was unsortable, because we are not a French company,” said Boyd, managing director of Reid Steel which employs 130 people and has exported to around 140 countries.

    At his office in the southern English town of Christchurch, Boyd has a file 10-cm (four inches) thick of correspondence he wrote to the British Government, EU officials and others to try to solve the problem. “It’s easier for us to export to Mongolia than to France,” he said.

    The kind of frustration he felt at losing the 1.5 million-pound deal in 2009 — it would have been worth US$1.85 million at today’s exchange rate — is shared across the European Union.

    In principle, the EU’s single market ensures people based in one member state are free to do business in others without any barriers. In practice, companies, professionals and traders complain of running into practical problems similar to Boyd’s. The single market rules, they say, are applied at best unevenly.

    As Britain prepares to negotiate its departure from the EU, the bloc’s most powerful leaders say the single market is an indivisible package. Britain must accept and enforce all its rules to retain tariff-free access to a market of close to 500 million people, or lose all the rights that members enjoy.

    Yet the experiences of people trying to work across EU borders suggests member states often enforce single market principles selectively to suit their own interests.

    If this is the case, why should the British Government not negotiate a Brexit deal to include the single market rules that it wants, such as on free trade, and exclude those that it does not, such as on immigration from the EU?

    The single market emerged from the 1992 Maastricht Treaty on European integration. This enshrines the EU’s “four freedoms” — of movement of goods, capital, people and services.

    Yet, 24 years later the bloc still has a patchwork of national regulations that result in an uneven playing field. The European Commission said in July that the market “is not always running as smoothly as it should.”

    For Britain, this means access to the single market should not be a “take it or leave it” proposition after Brexit. If the rules are applied flexibly within the EU, there is scope for flexibility in divorce negotiations too. (SD-Agencies)