DEFRA has a problem, but is saying nothing that will help the situation. The release is a classic of its genre and a PDF of it can be downloaded here. The first paragraph is fatuous and the second is nonsense. They haven’t got a clue and but won’t say so.
Empires tend to look backwards, in a bid to see far enough into the past to identify the reasons for their success. Unfortunately, for reasons that I won’t unpack here, history involves believing that society’s direction of travel is backwards looking. Were this to be the case, we would still be convinced that the Earth was flat. Faced with new problems of a scale, violence and force not seen previously, this is no time to take refuge in the past. We need to reach out to other societies, learn from them and resolve the crises that threaten our shared futures. This is no time to hide from reality.
No procedural detail is too small for food and farming ministry DEFRA miss an opportunity to dismantle any vestiges of EU compliance it can get its hands on.
For example, on January 1, 2025, the EU Deforestation-free Regulation (EUDR) will come into effect and require the European food industry to ensure that basic ingredients such as soya and palm oil have not been harvested from forest that has been recently cleared, or has been a source of forest degradation.
There is nothing unexpected in this: there have been a number of consumer-driven campaigns to harry the food industry into improving its environmental track record. Typically, companies have responded by setting up lookalike groups such as the Rainforest Alliance, which allow multinationals to feel good about their corporate foot dragging and buys them time. The EU Deforestation-free Regulation (EUDR) has the task of ending years of lip service to good intentions and tackling increasingly obvious vulnerabilities in the modern economy.
Soya and palm oil are two cornerstones of today’s food industry. From livestock to highly processed foods, the whole sector depends on reliable ingredient supplies. The burden of proof is on suppliers, who will have to provide evidence of their product’s provenance and full traceability. European food companies have been preparing this shift in manufacturing practice for months, if not years.
Dairy products are not covered by EUDR, but livestock farmers and meat processors who want to ship cow beef to Europe after January 1, 2025 will need to be ready for the far-reaching changes. Small to Medium Enterprises (SMEs) have an extra six months to comply.
The UK has a parallel scheme that will respond to a number of subtly different issues, the UK Forest Risk Commodity Regulation (UKFRC) There is not a lot of detail on UKFRC, but DEFRA has confirmed that dairy cattle and their products will be within the regulation’s scope if the livestock’s diet includes soya or palm oil by-products.
The impact of having two similar but incompatible standards at the heart of the food sector should not be underestimated. The cost of managing more than one standard in a business is potentially exponential. It is not something that businesses would consider, let alone adopt willingly.
Undaunted by the potential costs or consequences of its systematic detuning of international standards, DEFRA is continuing to look for things to tweak. During the last week of August, the ministry released a series of changes to the management of food imports to the UK with immediate effect. The long term aim is to grow the user base for the Goods Vehicle Movement Service, which will eventually manage all lorry movements across Britain. This UK government IT system will control and co-ordinate the post-Brexit movement of vehicles. A Wikipedia contributor has estimated that it will need to be capable of handling 400 million movements a year. Whatever the real figure turns out to be, the system will have to work flawlessly.
Being a third country has not boosted the British economy in any of the ways the electorate was told it would. The last week of August saw a tidal wave of amendments to Britain’s food export regulations. Over 30 official guidelines setting out modified requirements for cross border food trading were re-issued on Wednesday and Thursday alone. Some of the products involved are high value occasional transactions, such as retired race horses for breeders in the Middle East, but the meat products covered by certificate 3858 are in daily use by the UK food industry. (https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/66d18b210e4387ef0d1aeab1/8385_EN_rs_-_SPECIMEN_V4.pdf) The link to the real document gives readers an indication of the detailed work that goes into an eight-page A4 document. A qualified vet would charge a few hundred pounds for each certificate issued.
This is the level of detailed work that has been going into on high volume processed foods for years. Becoming a third country supplier has placed another layer of cost on UK exporters. Some of the pain is self-inflicted: the Common User Charge (CUC), for instance, is tax on a collection of lines extracted from a consignment note. There is no way it can be linked in any significant way to the operating costs of port inspection facilities. For good measure, Dover is a private port, over which the government supposedly has no say in the charging of anything, let alone CUC.
As for the setting of schedules for the inspection of loads,, the standard procedure is for port authorities to inspect 100% of shipments from unproven facilities, lowering the inspection rates as the newcomers prove their reliability.
Meanwhile, food importers to the UK are being badgered to include all the data fields on their health declaration, without using any of the template material from the official model statements made available online. Inadvertently copying and pasting fragments of watermarked documents, for instance, is a no-no. Here is DEFRA, verbatim:
You must not directly copy the model health certificates provided on GOV.UK. Competent authorities should create their own official documents for use by exporters. These should include all the information from the model certificates.
Any consignments into Great Britain will be considered non-compliant and will be rejected if they have a model certificate that has been directly downloaded from GOV.UK, shows the ‘model certificate only’ watermark and is dated 1 April 2023 or later.
Double standards are just one item on a growing list of abusive post-Brexit practices that are emerging from the parliamentary woodwork. Most can be traced back to the previous administration, which set the tone for a spectacularly vindictive modus operandi that soured relations with many lifelong anglophiles across Europe.
Time is running out for importers of food to the UK. On September 4 HMRC will demand its pound of flesh and the UK food industry will find itself between a rock and a hard place. This is not the first time that the deliberate destruction of the British economy by the departing government has been discussed on this site: it is still a live topic. Called the Common User Charge by civil servants, the UK’s stealth tax on food imports is also known as the Brexit border tax and doubtless has cruder titles.
Since August 4, many importers have been receiving their first invoices for Common User Charge (CUC. Importers of animal and plant products that would usually be considered for food safety checks can expect to pay over the odds for driving a lorry off a ferry at Dover to join the UK road network. Hauliers booking a DFDS one-way ticket online to Dover pay three pounds for this indispensable service, while lorries carrying grouped consignments of SPS foods face open-ended bills in the hundreds or low thousands for the same access. The simple explanation is that Britain is playing catch-up: the European Union had everything in place to trade with the UK as a third country the minute it ceased to be a member state. Britain was so totally convinced that it would somehow negotiate a favoured nation package Brexit that there was not even a sketchy idea of what a post-Brexit customs system might look like. The years passed, conveniently putting off the awkward moment when Brexit would be complete. As recently as November 2023, DEFRA describes the organisational basis for European food imports to the UK thus:
“Currently, imports from the EU and certain imports from Greenland, Faroe Islands and EFTA countries do not need to enter Great Britain via a BCP and are not subject to veterinary checks at the border.”
(Source: http://apha.defra.gov.uk/documents/bip/iin/vcap.pdf)
Just two months later, Britain was rolling out its three-phase Border Target Operating Model (BTOM). (The label ‘world-beating’ is optional.) Lorry drivers arriving in Britain have not been impressed by the service standards they have encountered on the ground (https://urbanfoodchains.uk/sevington-gives-cause-for-concern/), which is more of a hostile environment than a workplace.
DEFRA has gone from absentee administrator to nitpicking zealot overnight and is chafing over the accuracy of form-filling, notably for consignment detail on Export Health Certificates (EHC). Hang on to your hats, here is a sample:
“Continuous and/or deliberate non-compliance
It has come to our attention, that some traders and logistics companies are making continuous and/or deliberate errors including:
mis-declaring goods as low risk when they are medium;
or as medium when they are high;
not including a relevant Export Health Certificate (EHC) or Phytosanitary certificate.”
Or the consequences… :
“Continued non-compliance within either the EHC or the CHED is not acceptable and will not be tolerated by Port Health Authorities (PHAs). Deliberate misdeclaration is a criminal offence. PHAs will be actively looking to identify such behaviour.
“Where there is repeated non-compliance or evidence of misdeclarations, the appropriate authority will take statutory action. This will result in goods being held at a Border Control Post (BCP) for a physical inspection, which may lead to the consignment being ultimately returned or destroyed at cost to the person responsible for the load.”
Entering a conversation with a tone like that is doomed to become a monologue. Enough said. Now it just remains for the law enforcers to round up a bunch of suspects.
Since the end of April, Dover has been receiving a steady trickle of complaints about the way the Brexit border tax has been implemented. Here is what Dover had to say on the subject, again verbatim:
“As you are aware, the Border Target Operating Model (BTOM) checks have been operational for a month. Aside from initial teething problems, we are receiving a growing number of queries and concerns about how the checks are being carried out versus the costs that are being charged, delays to consignments, poor responses to calls and/or appropriate live assistance with your imports, the impact on biosecurity and the possibility of using Dover BCP to complete checks.
“It is important to understand your experiences so far to enable us to help establish simple solutions moving forwards, so we would like to set up a short call to discuss this with yourselves.
“Please drop us a line outlining your concerns and suggested solutions so we can escalate these for you. In addition, a member of our team may also call you.”
The simple fact is that the CUC started off on the wrong foot and is compounding ongoing problems on the way. It was cobbled together out of retained EU law. Its stated aim is to recover the operating costs of Border Control Posts in the UK, but this does not stand upto close inspection. Officially, CUC rates for privately-owned ports are set by their owners. At regular intervals, DEFRA kicks the distinction into touch by stating that the tax is being charged at Dover and the Eurotunnel terminal.
The port of Dover has belonged to the town since it was incorporated in 1608 by James 1. Some members of the port harbour authority board are appointed by the department of transport, but this is a working arrangement rather than a power grab.
At the beginning of June, Dover issued the following statement, which I cite verbatim:
“We are writing to you with reference to the ‘Operational Border Target Operating Model Information’ Defra circulated on the 03/06/2024 which contained a significant inaccuracy regarding the BCP for high risk food not of animal origin arriving via Dover within the section ‘Moving high-risk food and feed not of animal origin at the Short Straits’.
“To clarify, if you are importing high risk food not of animal origin (HRFNAO) through the Port of Dover, either via RORO ferry terminal and / or deep sea cargo, you must continue to pre-notify Dover Port Health Authority on IPAFFS using the Dover Terminal BCP code GBDOV2P and not, as outlined in the Defra information update, Sevington BCP.
“Official border controls on high risk food not of animal origin arriving via RORO freight have been undertaken at the BCPs in the Western Docks for over a decade and since 2019 at the Cargo Terminal GBDOV2P (in the Western Docks).
“Dover Port Health Authority will continue to provide this statutory function and ensure that your goods are handled efficiently and without undue delay. Please note, the Common User Charge does not apply to the Dover Cargo Terminal BCP. The Common User Charge will be applied if your goods are notified to Sevington BCP by selecting their different BCP code on IPAFFS.”
Hundreds of small to medium businesses are bracing themselves for a financial maelstrom in the wake of DEFRA’s implementation of the Common User Charge. Officially the ministry sent out thousands of invoices during the first week of August, many of which have yet to turn up. CUC has been charged on imported plant and animal-based products since the end of April. As well as billing three months’ worth of tax in one fell swoop, there is a widespread concern that a significant proportion of the bills will end up with people who are part of the supply chain but not actually liable for settling the account. Preliminary estimates of impending invoices run to thousands of pounds a month.
Often referred to as the “Brexit border tax”, the Common User Charge was devised by the previous Conservative government. It was presented as a mechanism to recover the costs of border checks for inbound goods, but this notion should be taken with a pinch of salt. The most potent multiplier in a CUC bill is in fact the number of consignments in a load, making it a damping influence on grouped shipments. These account for around two thirds of UK food imports.
After four years of test marketing, ASDA is taking down the refill stations that were installed at four UK stores. The proposition was simple: invite customers to bring in their own packaging (glass jars and the like) or use a new container from the refill station. They could then fill these from bulk containers, weigh the goods and take a till slip, to settle at the checkout. The fact that this project survived for four years suggests that ASDA did not lose any money with it: the retailer cites low consumer uptake as one of the main reasons for dropping the scheme. The story opens a whole raft of issues, far too broad to do it justice here, although there are some topics that we shall be revisiting in the coming weeks.
The workload of maintaining post-Brexit trade with the UK is such that every day six people are diverted to troubleshooting red tape and overcoming administrative inertia for a major meat importer. This resource is additional to the routine business of managing a presence on the UK market in previous years. All around Europe, food companies are reconsidering the cost of shipping product to the UK. A number of Spanish pigmeat traders are already starting to throw in the towel on the British market and sell to Germany instead. The reasoning is clear: they know that their lorries will no longer face unpredictable treatment on arrival in customs sheds.
The Scandinavians have been selling food to the UK since the 1870s and the Danish meat sector is as firmly embedded in the UK economy as it has ever been. It operates on a scale that allows it to ship a high proportion of full loads, making it something of a rarity among the UK’s food suppliers, many of whom are seriously questioning the increased costs of a “world class” operating model.
This is not new, but for a few brief moments the British political climate might just let a few sparks of fresh thinking to take hold. It all depends on the extent to which the underlying structures of the UK’s food imports have been broken. Starting where we left off with the Brexit border tax, there is a short window during which some damage limitation might be implemented.
Top of the list of policy changes to make would be to improve the treatment of lorry drivers coming to the UK. Another objective that should be high on the list is a greater level of care and attentionrrdrþ when handling fragile goods. Fragile shipments of young plants have been refused by retailers, who operate in a very time sensitive market. The horticultural sector has been disproportionately hit by hamfisted inspection teams.
Defensive to the last, DEFRA has come out fighting and is accusing importers of deliberately making mistakes in the data entered into consignment details. For instance, there are six primary classifications for rice, a common component in ready meals. How complicated can DEFRA make it to identify the rice used in a ready meal, then? Well, the guidance for six customs codes topped 680 words and the text fills a sheet of A3 when reduced to 7.5 point. It details the rice varieties to be found. While quite interesting, it assumes knowledge and experience that is quite rarified. Oh, and you’ll need to bring your own standardised system to measure rice grains. In fact, it would be a useful addition.
This is not the first time that the deliberate destruction of the British economy by the departing government has been discussed on this site, but we are in the final hours during which a national fiscal fiasco stands any chance of being resolved with any form of access to the original planning documents. It may well be that the origins of the UK’s stealth tax on food imports have already been shared with a shredder and the perpetrators will never be identifiable. Nor is there any guarantee that this would go any way towards clearing up one of the messiest episodes in British history. In the years since Britain left the European Union, it did not get round to establishing an integrated system for imports for years. Here is what DEFRA said in 2023: “Currently, imports from the EU and certain imports from Greenland, Faroe Islands and EFTA countries do not need to enter Great Britain via a BCP and are not subject to veterinary checks at the border.” (Source: http://apha.defra.gov.uk/documents/bip/iin/vcap.pdf)
Just two months later, and Britain is rolling out its three-phase Border Target Operating Model (BTOM). (The label ‘world-beating’ is optional.) Lorry drivers arriving in Britain have not been impressed by the service standards they have encountered on the ground (https://urbanfoodchains.uk/sevington-gives-cause-for-concern/), which is more of a hostile environment than a workplace.
It is time for the British government to get its borders in order, implementing the Border Transfer (BTMO) and charging a border tax called the Common User Charge. This month, importers will receive their first invoices for Common User Charge (CUC), a sneaky way of removing nasty swellings from collective wallets. Importers of animal and plant products that would usually be considered for food safety checks can expect to pay over the odds for driving a lorry off a ferry at Dover to join the UK road network. Hauliers booking a DFDS one-way ticket online to Dover pay three pounds for this indispensable service, while lorries carrying grouped consignments of SPS foods face open-ended bills in the hundreds or low thousands for the same access. The simple explanation is that Britain is playing catch-up: the European Union had everything in place to trade with the UK as a third country the minute it ceased to be a member state. Britain was convinced that it would somehow avoid third-country status by negotiating a favoured nation package. There was not even a sketchy idea of what a post-Brexit customs system might look like. The years passed, conveniently putting off the awkward moment when Brexit would be complete.
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DEFRA has gone from absentee administrator to nitpicking zealot overnight and is chafing over the accuracy of form-filling, notably for consignment detail on Export Health Certificates (EHC). Hang on to your hats, here is a sample:
“Continuous and/or deliberate non-compliance
It has come to our attention, that some traders and logistics companies are making continuous and/or deliberate errors including:
mis-declaring goods as low risk when they are medium;
or as medium when they are high;
not including a relevant Export Health Certificate (EHC) or Phytosanitary certificate.”
Or the consequences… :
Continued non-compliance within either the EHC or the CHED is not acceptable and will not be tolerated by Port Health Authorities (PHAs). Deliberate misdeclaration is a criminal offence. PHAs will be actively looking to identify such behaviour.
Where there is repeated non-compliance or evidence of misdeclarations, the appropriate authority will take statutory action. This will result in goods being held at a Border Control Post (BCP) for a physical inspection, which may lead to the consignment being ultimately returned or destroyed at cost to the person responsible for the load.”
Entering a conversation with a tone like that is doomed to become a monologue. Enough said.
There are no redeeming features of the purpose-built customs inspection facility close to the Eurotunnel terminal. Sevington will be remembered for its brutally sparse amenities, more an abandoned building site rather than a conduit of international trade. Even though the British taxpayer poured at least 120 million pounds into the place, there is no way that any of it went into amenities for lorry drivers, such as a food outlet for those kept on site for a day or more. An Italian driver was given directions for a MacDonalds takeaway more than a mile away, when he asked about catering arrangements during a 55-hour wait. Water is available for lorry drivers, but neither tea nor the continental working beverage of choice, coffee, is anywhere to be seen.
The purpose of the visit is food inspection, but Sevingdon has a growing catalogue of problems. There are no guarantees that having waited four hours or more to have goods inspected the goods will still be saleable at the end of the process. There is no way that HMRC will take any form of liability for breakages and rough handling of fragile goods, particularly plants. Retailers are refusing damaged consignments, in one case estimated at EUR 40,000 (GBP 37,700).
Over the past six weeks since the second phase of BTOM, 2,500 Dutch lorries have travelled to the UK, with 125 being “turned out” in HMRC slang. The Dutch haulage industry body Transport en Logistiek Nederland (TLN), remains supportive of Britain’s BTOM plan, with a polite but firm report outlining the Dutch hauliers’ reservations with the status quo, making tactful suggestions for improvements. At this point it should be made clear that while most people would assume that the Border Transfer Operating Model is an administrative framework to manage the flow of goods efficiently. There is a more sinister, or cynical view that runs through the British establishment from its very origin. Had the government spent £120 million or more on a state of the art logistical platform, eyebrows might have been raised. But spending on that scale to create an environment that brutalises all those who come into contact with it and pitilessly crushes any possible interest in wanting to move to Britain was fine. Publishing under his pen name George Orwell, journalist Eric Blair captured this elusive maverick mindset writing under the setting sun of a crumbling empire. Orwell’s accounts of such incidents as the shooting of a working elephant juxtaposes the credentials of the imperialist administrators and the lives of those they exploited. Only we wouldn’t say exploited if we could get out of it: Orwell saw to it that we can’t.
What today’s generation of administrators is doing would make sense to a commentator like Orwell. He would understand the previous government’s obsession with small boats: the symbolism of inbound asylum seekers; the fear and loathing of exotic languages; the lingering smell of spices that grow in crowded corners which are ill-suited to mechanised agriculture. These are the roots of racism and prejudice, tinged with guilt for the massacres that were carried out in the name of civilisation. We must first slay the ghosts of oppression that our ancestors pretended to ignore, hardening their hearts and blocking their ears the while.
It is against this backdrop that we need to look at the operational shortcomings of BTOM. Start with the inspection processes and the sketchy way they operate. EU sampling rates, for instance, would normally start at 100% for new third country businesses (Brexit assumes tabla rasa.) easing off over a period of time to, say, 35% after a year so of solid compliance. Sevington is sampling 5% at most, and struggling with it. There is no way a long term target of 100% could be achieved, nor would it serve any useful purpose once compliance levels have been established. TNL is concerned by wide variations in prices for testing at privately-owned facilities, citing fees ranging from £300 to £750, with additional surcharges for weekends and bank holidays. This leads to uncertainty for costings, resulting in financial losses and operational constraints. What is more, any non-food consignments that are travelling on the same trailer as food products selected for testing face an average surcharge of £13. Go figure.There are also issues with the flow and quality of information coming back from BCP. The Dutch hauliers urged the British authorities to communicate in real time, since saving messages sent as an overnight email is not a lot of help in the real world. Likewise, linking the Common Health Entry Document for Plants and Plant Products (CHED-PP) with the Goods Movement Reference number (GMR) would make it easier to identify consignments that will undergo testing later on. As for handling standards, TNL was scathing. Not least because HMRC does not take any liability for damage caused during product checks. The Dutch hauliers would like to see staff trained to a higher standard and suggest that drivers would be well-qualified to advise on reloading fragile plants after inspection. While on the subject of drivers, none of them took on the job to spend hours in a sensory deprivation decor, often for hours on end. They are routinely barred from leaving the site or are required to surrender the keys to their vehicles as a condition of going outside for a breath of fresh air. TNL is receiving calls from members who have lost money due to rough handling of fragile goods. There have also been cases of inspectors not turning up or being taken off one inspection to attend another. The lack of any form of product liability on the HMRC inspectors is a recurring theme, but the tone of the TNL assessment is constructive and polite, as the industry body offers to help to resolve some of the issues the HMRC faces. It has published a four-page report on the subject. Expect the temperature to rise in July, when the first batch of invoices go out for Common User Charge payments from April 30 onwards. There are suggestions that it will be tricky to match up consignments, locations and testing in a coherent narrative adding up to some serious money. Watch this space.
