Brexit: perpetuating weakness

By Richard North - April 6, 2023

For all the hyperventilation during the Brexit negotiations about border controls on imported goods, the media seems remarkably relaxed about the UK government’s much-delayed implementation plans, announced yesterday in the form of a 99-page “Border target operating model”.

Actually, to call the government’s proposals “plans” – as has done the report by Reuters and the Financial Times – is somewhat premature. What we have been given is officially described as a “draft for feedback”, giving stakeholders a brief period to comment before publishing what is said to be a “final version” in May or early June.

The operating model, supposedly, will then be implemented in three stages between the end of October this year and 31 October 2024.

Much is made of the intention to use digital technology to simplify procedures and to save paperwork, leading the Telegraph to announce that business will save “£400 million a year” implementing the “new slimmed-down Brexit border checks”.

Also central to the model is the application of the so-called “trusted trader” system, where established importers, with a good track-record and proven systems, can by-pass many of the physical checks at the borders, substantially speeding up entry processes and reducing costs.

Based on an international system devised by the World Customs Organisation (WCO), participants in the “trusted trader” system were initially known by the description Authorized Economic Operator, with the system applying exclusively to supply chain security standards.

Since Brexit, though, wider application of the system has become an obsession of the Muppet Brexiteer tendency, with a determination to extend it to sanitary and phytosanitary (SPS) imports, initially in respect of Northern Ireland and then more generally to imports into the mainland.

The intention to do so is based on a flawed appreciation of the system of official controls applied to the SPS group of products, which stands aside from the customs system and apply a wholly different control strategy.

This obsession was prominent in the run-up to the idiot Johnson’s negotiation of the original Northern Ireland Protocol and now, it seems, it has been carried over into the new scheme which has been just announced.

However, given that the “trusted trader” obsession has been part of the Johnson-era lexicon for many years, one would have thought that there was by now an “oven ready” – so to speak – scheme, available for implementation with this new operating model.

Strangely though – for all that the government is selling its model as delivering on its ambition “to have the world’s most effective border”, this fabled “trusted trader” scheme for SPS goods simply does not exist.

Instead, we are told that the government is merely “exploring” the creation of not one but two animal product trusted trader schemes: the Accredited Trusted Trader Scheme (ATTS) and the Technology Assurance Scheme.

Neglecting the tautology, where the “trusted trader” necessarily implies accreditation, the ATTS seems to be the main option. Yet the government’s document commits only to carrying out pilot schemes, to be “co-designed with industry over 2023 before they go live from January 2024”.

With less than nine months to go, these pilots seem to be highly tentative ventures, designed only to “explore whether it is possible for businesses to demonstrate compliance and provide the necessary assurance to manage biosecurity, animal health and welfare, and food safety risks”.

The obvious inconsistency here is very real. This is a scheme which is a central part of the new model – vitally necessary to reduce the “red tape”, yet from the tone of the phrasing, the government has not even determined whether it is possible for the scheme to perform its stated functions.

Despite this, the government tells us that the ATTS being piloted “would allow frequent importers of products of animal origin and animal by-products to potentially reduce the need for routine physical checks at the Border Control Posts by taking responsibility for carrying out routine checks and sampling to ensure the protection of biosecurity, animal and public health whilst being closely regulated by government”.

Pilots, we are told, will be used to establish the final membership criteria but as a minimum trusted traders will be registered businesses in the UK for custom purposes; have a good compliance history (where available); and have a named responsible person/s for the identification, management and monitoring of risks.

These traders will have to implement government-produced standard operating procedures to ensure equivalent assurance of public health and biosecurity safeguards, they must have bio-secure premises and infrastructure and provide “end to end supply chain assurance”, all with “suitably trained staff who can act independently”.

Ironically, this word salad comes a week after the revelation of criminal practices by the Derbyshire-based Loscoe Chilled Foods, yet – until it was outed by Farmers Weekly would most probably have qualified as a “trusted trader” based on the published criteria.

Once again, we are seeing an emphasis on conformity with processes rather than physical oversight in an industry where there are multiple examples of fraud, rendering procedural checks and paper certification unreliable.

With the focus mainly on the importers, the document does suggest that the high-level framework for the pilots could cover: supply chain information (where the products come from, how they are produced, by who etc.), production assurance – rules/regulations for producers to uphold (auditing), sampling and testing of products etc. and pre-arrival checks (for example at a hub in mainland Europe).

But what is missing is any provision for any independent physical oversight of these parameters. Compared with the EU system, which has its own food safety inspectorate in DG Sanco’s Dublin-based Food and Veterinary Office (FVO), there is no provision in the UK system for the independent verification of the standards of exporting establishments or allied parameters.

Here, there is another anomaly in that the UK model claims to be taking an innovative stance in relating inspection rigour at Border Control Posts to the assessed level of risk (although this is now standard procedure under the EU regime).

Thus, it says, it will take into account the risks specific to the country of origin e.g. the prevalence of pests/diseases and the standard of official health controls. This means a commodity from one country could be in the low-risk category but the same commodity from a different country could be in the medium risk category.

But, without an independent inspectorate, how would the UK government be able to assess the standard of official health controls in any of the exporting countries from which goods are received?

In fact, the EU system of official controls is based on a three-tier assessment – the country standard, the general production standards and environment – as we saw with shellfish certification – and then the standards of the individual exporting establishments – all verified by periodic independent inspection by the FVO.

And far from this being a paean of praise for the EU, one should recall that this system evolved from British experience with the 1964 Aberdeen Typhoid Outbreak.

In the sixty years since that outbreak, it seems that any institutional knowledge has been lost, and the government is now locked into an untried (and ill-defined) system which owes more to ideology than it does to rationality, perpetuating the weaknesses which are already self-evident.

Without a more robust framework and real resources devoted to independent verification of standards, this proposed “model” cannot possibly be fit for purpose.