The damage that Brexit will wreak on British industry is becoming ever more apparent. I notice this morning Dr Richard North is on the topic of regulation and says that traders and shippers are "having to get used to handling new forms of paperwork, with which many are unfamiliar, and failure correctly to complete the necessary papers is giving rise to delays and additional costs." He says to a limited extent familiarity, practice, more staff and better IT systems will help and things will settle down to a new normal.
This may be true but for some companies it will not come soon enough and for others the additional costs will threaten their survival in the longer term. After fishing, the next sector beginning to realise the problems are the meat producers and I see someone on Twitter posted a link to an article in Food and Farming Futures about the pork sector. It makes sobering reading.
The National Pork Association's (NPA) members are reporting what they say is "excessive bureaucracy associated with new paperwork requirements" causing delays at Dover, Calais and other ports, delays which are making UK shipments "unattractive to buyers in the EU" and forcing processors to cancel future orders.
I quote the problems listed in full:
• Officials at ports in the UK, France, Ireland and the Netherlands are taking a far more stringent approach to assessing paperwork, which in itself appears to be excessive. One load was caught at Calais for 20 hours undergoing vet checks and then rejected upon finally reaching its destination in Germany because of the delay.
• Additional paperwork is causing major delays for processors – one processor said it took nine hours to prepare the paperwork for one shipment to the EU last week.
• Another processor reported that when sending product to the Netherlands, each Export Health Certificate (EHC) needed 12 stamps for the English, Dutch and French versions required in duplicate. Therefore, for a 15 tonne load, the vet had to stamp paperwork 72 times. There is no electronic option at present – all EHCs have to be in hard copy
• Another processor reported that as we are now a third country, new rules require inspectors to check labels on each box in a consignment of pork products meaning that the whole pallet has to be offloaded and broken apart to check the boxes in the middle, adding more time to the process.
• The Eurotunnel needs to process 500 lorries an hour but only has the veterinary capacity for 150 an hour which will slow things down even more.
• The administrative burden of EHCs means that vets are struggling to meet the demand and the costs for exporters have increased.
NPA CEO Zoe Davies said, “We are seeing a bureaucracy overload and it is already having a big impact on the pig sector. This is partly an inevitable consequence of Brexit – we always knew it would mean more red tape, checks and delays. But there is a political element, too. Why are 30% of all UK consignments to the EU are being checked? This is far more than many other Third Country exporters to the EU - for New Zealand, for example, the figure is 1%.”
Ms Davies accuses the EU of wanting to make Brexit "as painful and as messy as possible to prevent any other country from following suit" and she may well be right. She claims the government is ignoring the problems - Dominic Raab's appearance on the Marr show can't have helped. He didn't accept that Brexit was responsible for the collapse of the fishing industry.
She calls for concerted action to speed things up on both sides but one wonders where the incentive is coming from for that. The deal is the deal we have negotiated and while things may 'settled down' they will never be as they were in the SM and the CU.
Davies points to the delay in the UK government introducing SPS and customs checks for products coming IN to the UK, something which won't happen until July and says this is convenient for a "government that wants to ensure there are no empty shelves in supermarkets" but UK producers are being placed at a huge disadvantage and we have "absolutely no leverage" to convince the EU to change their position.
This is the problem isn't it? Absolutely no leverage is the opposite of taking back control. As a member of the EU, and a large and influential one, we had a lot of leverage. Now we can only sit helplessly by as entire industries go to the wall.
Ms Davies can rail at the government but it will make no difference. She complains the bureaucracy is excessive but she would do well to read the IfG Summary of the TCA agreed just before Christmas which has this to say on SPS checks and why they are more frequent than on New Zealand products:
"This UK–EU deal sets a general aim to keeping the frequency of checks to a minimum but does not remove the need for them. The UK has not achieved its ambition of agreeing an equivalence mechanism for SPS measures, or agreeing a reduced level of checks or fees similar to the EU–New Zealand veterinary agreement where only 1% of goods are subject to SPS checks. This would likely have required the UK to sign up to greater regulatory alignment with the EU in this area."
In other words the "excessive bureaucracy" is in fact official UK government policy. I bet the EU offered something akin to the NZ veterinary agreement but it was rejected. The fact is New Zealand didn't put sovereignty above the well being of its own citizens. Pork producers are among the first to realise just how expensive sovereignty can be.
