Welcome, everyone to this first edition of the Brexit and Beyond podcast for 2022.

And I'm delighted today to be joined not by one, but by two colleagues and friends.

The person we're going to be talking to about her work is Sarah Hall, Professor of Economic

Geography at the University of Nottingham, who will be known to you all, I imagine, from our

events and from the excellent report she would produce just before Christmas on services after Brexit, but we're

also joined by the one and only Jill Rutter, so we can have a little conversation about services.

So hi to you both. So Sarah, your starter for 10 is what are services?

So yeah, this is a great question to start off with and I actually had to sit down and

think about it, which is surprising given it's what I work on. Strictly speaking, services are

kind of intangible aspects of the economy. So it's not about the buying and selling of physical

goods like a car. It's about intangible activities and they're really

characterised by their breadth. So it includes everything from hairdressing to insurance, IT,

architecture, the arts and financial services. But there's a couple of important points in there.

One is there are a key part and a real strength of the UK economy.

Economists estimate regularly that they make about 80% of the UK's economy or around 8% of

jobs. And there are also a real strength of the UK's economy. Typically, the UK runs a surplus

in services export as opposed to a deficit in goods. And given the topic of

this podcast, the EU, certainly prior to Brexit, was a really significant services export market for the

UK, made up about 40% of services. But if I may just return back to the distinction between

physical goods and services, that's

actually really murky. And that's quite an important part of the UK's economy. So if you think

about something like a car, which might be seen as a kind of quintessential manufacturing or good,

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