Guest column: Scott Fletcher – why I’m voting out

Scott Fletcher, the chairman and founder of ANS group, which employs 300 staff in Manchester, says Britain is significantly weaker because of the EU.

AS a member of my local enterprise partnership in Manchester, I’ve lost count of the number of times that the European Union gets in the way of business.

Because of the EU, Britain is significantly weaker. Not only do we spend £350m a week just to be a member, only half of which is actually spent in Britain, but our small businesses are crippled by the constantly increasing costs of regulation.

How can it be right that just a handful of unelected people can make decisions that will affect almost 500 million people?

This goes on all the time and its small businesses who suffer the most. Take the Official Journal of the European Union, which requires all public sector contracts to be advertised for tendering. By increasing the cost of running a tender process, this greatly favours bigger businesses who are able to pay.

Food, labelling, paperwork – the list goes on. Regardless of whether these EU regulations are good for business, for as long as we remain a member of the EU we will remain unable to control our own affairs. Surely that’s the biggest crime of all.

But perhaps what is just as damaging to the British economy is the way in which the EU encourages unskilled immigration. As someone who runs an IT company I want to attract the best people to come and work for me, regardless of where they are from. But because we have an open door to almost 500 million people inside the EU, Britain is forced to restrict immigration from outside the EU in an attempt to control the number of people coming to our country.

But that makes no sense – because we are unable to control the number of people coming to Britain, our economy loses skilled people from outside the EU, many of whom share a language, culture and history with our country.

I believe that the best decisions are made by the people who live and work in our country. Next month, we have a once in a lifetime opportunity to determine our own future by voting to leave the EU.

We can choose to live in a country where the laws that affect our small businesses are passed by the people we elect here in Britain. We can have an immigration system based on the skills that people bring, rather than the passport that they own. And we can have an economy that backs our small businesses and gives them the confidence to grow and trade with the rest of the world.

That’s the Britain I want to see and that’s why I’ll be voting to leave the EU on Thursday 23rd June.

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