Urban Food Chains

the links between diet and power

Brexit's legacy
Ports in practice
peter 0

The most important difference between a port and any other sector of the economy is that ports all operate 24/7 and mesh their activities to match local tides. There is no question of working to any other priority. Port owners charge for their services on the basis of weight/mass/size and will charge penalty payments for disruption to their schedules caused by a client’s time slippage. Basic services include loading/unloading cargo; storing goods; transferring goods from one vessel to another; dockside crane lifting. 

Penalties are imposed for late arrival; early arrival; storage without prior booking; demeurage, which was a medieval tax on saleable goods or assets deliberately kept out of the market in the hope of getting a stronger price at a later date. Readers may also encounter an anglicised spelling, demurrage.

Shipping lines pay port operators to get haulage and passenger traffic through the port and on to a ship. The roadways are all a part of the service and an opportunistic tax just to keep traffic moving is equivalent to being slapped round the face with a wet towel. The inland BCP at Sevington cost either £154 or £174 million to set up, depending on whose narrative is being presented. But it is not worth a brass farthing unless it works 24/7 and worth even less for not being part of a transport network node, not to mention twenty miles or so inland from the port of Dover.  DEFRA fails to specify that the site operates 24/7, but this can deducted from the website’s reference to unhappy local residents kept awake by the nightime floodlighting. Sounds like the worst of both worlds.

customs clearance haulage key concept
The elephant in the room
peter 0

A wall of silence still surrounds  the computer system at the heart of the BTOM, called the Single Trade Window (STW). This will be the one and only way of getting data into the system. The final version*⁠1 of the BTOM guide, published on February 11 states: “ …the Single Trade Window could be fully operational in 2027.” 

There are a number of reasons why this could be awkward, but one will do. The STW calculates the aggregate cost of wear and tear caused by lorry traffic to roadways at ports. This operational detail is  used to set a levy called the Common User Charge (CUC). This is payable when a lorry leaves a port: the CUC is added to a rolling monthly invoice. While the STW sets a figure for Government operated ports, private operators were invited to fix their own charges, as they would do for anything else.  Dover and Portsmouth,  the two busiest ports in the UK, both happen to be owned and operated privately.

Sorry, but this is not a clickable link yet. 1 Feb-11-24-Final_Border_Target_Operating_Model.pdf para 350 page 88

Brexit's legacy crunchy numbers
Brexit’s hostile environment
peter 0

The British establishment has a number of strengths, not all of them positive. Long standing cultural patterns such as racism or mysogyny are not always associated with the toxic knee jerk emotions they unleash. Sometimes stretching back for generations, past prejudices cast veiled shadows over current mindsets. 

A common marker of such underlying tendencies is the urge to promote a hostile environment for groups that the establishment does not feel comfortable around. Avoiding confrontation, but nevertheless antagonistic towards them, officialdom reserves a superficial welcome for people of colour, migrants or women, among others.

At an institutional level, something similar could be seen in the gung-ho pursuit of aggressive tactics throughout the Brexit negotiations, during which concessions were demanded with little thought of any form of quid pro quo. 

Left to its own devices, the civil service is capable of creating procedures and regulations that contribute to an underlying malaise. This administrative hostile environment casts a shadow on those who are bound by or who enforce such oppressive rules. The Border Transit Operating Model offers a number of examples of the genre, such as the Common User Charge (CUC). 

DEFRA consulted with business leaders last summer, promising to share its findings in the autumn. For months there was talk of a “world class” system, but no operational detail that anyone could use for the day to day running of their business.

On January 19, Walthamstow MP Stella Creasy challenged the government’s wall of silence surrounding the Common User Charge. Here is how Hansard recorded the occasion.

[She told the House that]: “The charge is intended to apply to each consignment, whether it is one leg of lamb or a van full of reindeer and frogs’ legs. As 65% of lorries coming into this country carry multiple consignments, known as groupage, it is clear how expensive this way of applying the charge will be. 

“The Government have therefore chosen to fund the new border by imposing fees directly on businesses that import. The pledge that Brexit would be a bonfire of regulation turned into a smouldering pile of paperwork that will kill imports for small businesses. Can I just put it on the record  on behalf of British business — this is mad.”

Parliamentary Undersecretary of State of Environment Food and Rural Affairs, Rebecca Pow, replied: 

“We have provided further facilitation and guidance for importers using groupage models – the honourable Lady referred to groupage models, where a lorry delivers a whole lot of different models in one lorry – in terms of moving sanitary and phytosanitary goods into the UK, in order to make the system of certification more streamlined.” 

The word “consignment” is completely absent from the minister’s frankly incoherent reply, which is a thinly-disguised attempt to buy time.

Creasy then asked the government on February 8 whether a decision had been taken as to the rate at which the Common User Charge would be fixed and when such a decision might be published. Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, Mark Spencer, replied on February 27 that an announcement would be made “imminently.” He added that: “This will help commercial ports in setting charges for their own facilities and provide traders with time to make the necessary finance, accounting and operational arrangements.” More stalling, more flannel, more empty words. 

The simple fact is that by the time the final workings of the CUC were revealed to the public, there was less than a month to do anything about it. For those who are still catching up with reality, the British government is rolling out a punitive tax on imported goods, starting on April 30.

For those who are up to speed with this news, there is a very real prospect that European traders will resent the British government’s crude attempt to monetise inland inspection facilities. The result will probably be a sudden and brutal drop in food shipments to the UK. 

Brexit's legacy fruit haulage lorry vegetables
So strange, yet true
peter 0

The British government’s plans really are as mad as they sound. Try this example for size:

Fresh produce importer PML Seafrigo runs a private BCP at Lympne, near Dover. Company director Mike Parr picks up the story:

“PML Seafrigo has its own 24/7 border control post at Lympne, which is the closest point of entry to the Port of Dover (closer than Sevington), we have a dedicated transport and logistics hub for imported goods and yet our customers will still be charged the CUC even though they will not be using the Sevington facility. 

“The government is effectively asking businesses such as ours to collect taxes on their behalf. And the fact that this fee will be reviewed and updated annually by Defra is itself worrying, it could easily be increased in 12 months’ time. 

Parr is outraged by the casual way the government is abusing the trust of the country’s traders.

“The common user charge (CUC) is effectively another business tax that will be applied to each commodity line in a Common Health Entry Document (CHED). Although fees are capped – £145 for every consignment arriving via the Port of Dover or Eurotunnel –this is another expense for importers and retailers to bear, which will of course be reflected in further delays at the ports and another price hike for essential food items.

“What is particularly frustrating is that the fee is being levied for all fresh produce / plants goods passing through Dover or Folkestone – even if they don’t pass through the government controlled inspection post at Sevington.”

The question that most people would want an answer to is “WHY is the British government waging war on the very people that it claims to support? Any ideas, please add as a comment.

raw
Brexit’s final nail in the coffin (1)
peter 0

On April 30 the government will roll out the second phase of its Border Target Operating Model (BTOM). The result is likely to be total chaos on a number of counts. 

There is growing unease about the wall of silence surrounding  the computer system at the heart of the BTOM, called the Single Trade Window (STW). This will be the one and only way of getting data into the system. The final version*⁠1 of the BTOM guide, published on February 11 states: “ …the Single Trade Window could be fully operational in 2027.” 

There are a number of reasons why this could be awkward, but one will do. The STW calculates the aggregate cost of wear and tear caused by lorry traffic to roadways at ports. This operational detail is  used to set a levy called the Common User Charge (CUC). This is payable to HMRC within four weeks. While the STW sets a figure for Government operated ports, private operators were invited to fix their own charges, as they would do for anything else. There appear to be a number of sticking points.  Dover and Portsmouth,  the two busiest ports in the UK, both happen to be owned and operated privately.

The Common User Charge scheme comes from the European Directive 1999/62/EC, which was passed by the European Parliament and voted by the Council of 17 June 1999.  The EU framed it as a way of charging heavy goods vehicles for the use of infrastructure such as national road networks. It is no more than a rehashed EU pipe dream.

The scheme was never developed into a fully operational model in Europe. However, faced with the challenge of organising a system of robust controls on EU imports, the UK government saved a lot of  time and effort by reviving the Common User Charge. Stakeholders believed that new processes would cost a lot of money, so the UK government took them at their word and came up with a scheme to absorb their cash. Whitehall covered its back by saying that future costs would reflect how businesses are adapting their working practices and supply chains to the new rules.

The architects of the project assume that a budget of £330 million a year would cover roadway wear and tear arising from EU imports. On the basis of that figure, civil servants argue that the new system represents a  cost of 0.13% of all EU imports, then valued at £259 billion pounds. The value of such arguments cannot be guaranteed, but it is definitely an advantage to have two numbers, one of them large and impressive. However, these assumptions were never put to the test.

On Wednesday April 5, DEFRA unveiled a radical restructuring for the Common User Charge. Officials expect the CUC to be set between £20 and £43 per consignment: there are often multiple consignments in a load. The Government predicts that the new system will generate a 0.2% rise in the cost of food over three years.

1 Feb-11-24-Final_Border_Target_Operating_Model.pdf para 350 page 88