Brexit: red tape follies

By Richard North - February 11, 2021

Scottish Television is waxing lyrical (or spluttering with indignation, if you prefer) about shipments from the UK to Europe have been held up for hours because of the type of ink used in a stamp.

This is what MSPs have been told, with Ian McWatt of Food Standards Scotland (FSS) complaining about the “inconsistency” with which EU rules were being applied, with huge differences in how consignments were treated at border control posts in the Netherlands and France.

Said McWatt, some loads “sailed through on day one and they were held up for six hours the following day because the ink that was used on the stamp didn’t meet the importing officer’s requirement”.

The frustration – little short of anguish – that this sort of experience is causing comes through clearly in the evidence given by Andrew Charles to Holyrood’s Rural Economy Committee.

Owner of the Aberdeen company J Charles Sustainable Seafood, Charles complained that the paperwork needed for firms to sell goods to customers in Europe was “incredibly complicated and open to interpretation”.

He added: “The whole thing, whoever sat down and considered this to be a reasonable, free export system has really got to question what is going on here. What has been created is a system to destroy exporting. There is absolutely nothing easy about what industry is being asked to do”.

One can have enormous sympathy for individual business owners who have been caught up in this maelstrom of “red tape” but, as always, there is more to this than meets the eye.

When it comes to the complaint about loads being delayed or rejected because of the wrong colour ink used in the stamps, this refers to the export health certificates (EHCs) which, in the main, have to be signed (and stamped) by government designated “official veterinarians”.

For these individuals – often practice vets signed up by the government in an attempt to make up for the massive shortage of such officials – Brexit is proving to be a financial bonanza.

For rapacious veterinary contract firms such as Eville & Jones – known for hiring cheap, newly qualified foreign vets and hiring them out at top rates – providing a “complete service” for EHCs is a license to print money.

Typically, hard-pressed companies desperately needing have incomprehensible EHCs for their consignments, are having to pay anything from £150-250 a time for each certificate.

Unsurprisingly, the vets themselves are being very coy about their charges, but we do know that the government is footing the bill for certifying food products destined for Northern Ireland, to the tune of £150 a pop, each time a certificate is needed.

Thus, when it comes to the spluttering about “red tape” and the different coloured ink used for the stamps, there is an interesting twist to this. The people responsible for signing and stamping the EHCs are these highly-paid official veterinarians, who are, in effect, signing declarations that they have read the forms they are signing.

And there, immediately above the signature block, where these gifted individuals must append their marks, is a line of text – simple enough even for a vet to understand – which instructs: “The colour of the stamp and signature must be different to that of the other particulars in the certificate” (pictured).

Why this should be isn’t explained – it may be a basic security precaution, working on the premise that the plebs who actually fill in the details on the forms can’t afford coloured pens. This hardly explains the colour requirement for the stamp though – but then we are dealing with the European Union.

The point though is that, if loads are being delayed or rejected for “the wrong kind of colour”, this is down to the official veterinarians, who apparently can’t even get that bit of the job right – like picking the right colour pen and having a coloured ink pad for their official stamps.

As for the rest of the form, the declaration is a farce. In the example I’ve chosen, the vet has to attest to being “aware” of the relevant provisions of a formidable list of legislation, listed in a densely-printed paragraph that runs to 17 lines.

The certificate relates to LBM (there’s a surprise), and this paragraph is just the entrée. The vet must also attest that the goods were produced in accordance with a further ten, specific points.

First on that list is something that attests to the fatuity of the whole exercise. This vet is asked to confirm that the goods come from an establishment “implementing a programme based on the HACCP principles in accordance with Article 5 of Regulation (EC) No 852/2004.

Now, this is very much my territory – it’s my specialist field. I’ve carried out verification exercises, and seen them done by officials. For a moderate-sized operation, a skilled auditor usually needs about eight hours, as long as there are no complications. I’ve seen officials take 2-3 days.

Of course, your hapless vets – many of them more used to sticking thermometers up cats’ bums (for about £80 a time) – are most unlikely to have the skills to do an audit. They wouldn’t begin to know what they were looking for. But they nevertheless are signing, not that the operation has a HACCP programme, but is actually implementing it.

Here, there is an interesting issue – one that has never been satisfactorily resolved. The process of auditing a programme requires going through reams of paperwork (it is a paper-based system) and then checking that all the components are there.

But all that tells you is that the operation has a programme in place. It doesn’t tell you whether it is being implemented. Mostly, when the auditor leaves, the papers go back into the filing cabinet. Implementation checks, therefore, are far more complex and can be extremely time-consuming.

Just as an aside, I once inspected a big-brand frozen cream gateaux manufacturer and, as one point I was standing in the cream room, having a bevy of managers explain to me their rigorous glass exclusion policy, and how no glass, ever, was allowed in or near the room.

I said nothing, but looked down and shuffled my feet. In the embarrassed silence, the managers followed my gaze down to my feet, where they saw that I was shuffling several large fragments of broken glass. That’s what implementation checks are about. What the EU wants is a useless tick-box exercise which serves no purpose other than to fill the wallets of useless vets.

This is further reinforced by the next item on this fabled list, which demands that the vet attests that the products have been “harvested, where necessary relayed and transported in accordance with Section VII, Chapters I and II of Annex II to Regulation (EC) No 853/2004.

The “ask” is, of course, impossible. Unless the vet has followed the process through – assuming even that they know what they are looking for – it might take several inspections over days or weeks before an honest declaration could be made.

Talking of cream on the cake, the penultimate attestation that vets must now make is beyond surreal. They must confirm that the products:

have satisfactorily undergone the official controls laid down in Articles 51 to 66 of Commission Implementing Regulation (EU) 2019/627 of 15 March 2019 laying down uniform practical arrangements for the performance of official controls on products of animal origin intended for human consumption in accordance with Regulation (EU) 2017/625 of the European Parliament and of the Council and amending Commission Regulation (EC) No 2074/2005 as regards official controls (OJ L 131, 17.5.2019, p. 51) and Article 11 of Commission Delegated Regulation (EU) 2019/624 of 8 February 2019 concerning specific rules for the performance of official controls on the production of meat and for production and relaying areas of live bivalve molluscs in accordance with Regulation (EU) 2017/625 of the European Parliament and of the Council.

But then, this is nothing compared with the hapless producers who must actually carry out all these processes, in order that the attestation can be made in the first place.

No one will disagree that realistic controls are necessary. But this is bullshit. The Commission has completely lost sight of what they are trying to achieve. All it takes is a bent vet to sign off the form and take the money, to make a mockery of the system. It is then up to the brave vets at the BCPs to carry out the hazardous process of checking the colour of the ink used for the stamps. That is just about within the capability of an official veterinarian, and will have us all sleeping easier in our beds.

Interestingly, people now ask for Brexit “benefits”. Well, what Brexit has done is expose us to the full force of a shitty system that we’ve been instrumental in supporting for the past 50 years (since before we joined). Inside the “walls” of the Single Market, we have been shielded from the realisation of quite how bad it really is.

Not least of the effects is that it makes it very difficult for developing countries to sell produce to us, yet does nothing to stop the torrent of counterfeit goods coming out of China, or horsemeat from Eastern Europe.

But now we’re exposed to the full horror of it, it might motivate us to do something about it. Inside the system, we were merely complicit in making it worse. Outside, we have a chance of making changes. And that most definitely could be a Brexit benefit.