Red tape tangle

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.

(https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/health-certificates-for-animal-and-animal-product-imports-to-great-britain#full-publication-update-history)

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.