00Executive summary

As Britain prepares to leave the EU, attention will turn to what trade deals it can strike with other countries around the world. These deals will have different implications for different parts of the country.

Using new data released by the ONS, this report sets out how much cities export, what they export, and crucially given the current political situation, where they export to.

It finds that Britain’s cities are heavily reliant on the EU as an export market for goods and services, and that, despite the size of other markets such as the US, these remain much smaller than that of the EU. It also finds that cities in the Greater South East tend to perform much better than those in the North and Midlands and that this tends to be driven by their strength in service exports.