Billions squandered on post-Brexit food checks as red tape finally faces axe

On Tuesday, the Prime Minister insisted a move to align with the bloc’s food standards and regulations could help add up to 0.4 per cent to GDP, adding the British public would expect him to take the opportunity for closer ties to Brussels “with both hands”.

However, with the new deal set to cut the red tape on checks on food and agricultural goods crossing the Channel and the Irish Sea, the several billions of pounds spent on projects to prepare Britain for post-Brexit control measures will have been wasted.

The waste also includes the £750million spent over three years implementing the Windsor framework which processes goods travelling between Britain and Northern Ireland.

The Government also splashed hundreds of millions of pounds establishing eight port inspection units, which were expected to carry out testing to ensure plant products moving between the EU and UK were free from disease or pests.

Despite the costly price tag, the measures were never put in place.

The taxpayer is estimated to have forked out around £4.7billion in total for 13 border-related projects over the past seven years, according to the National Audit Office.

The eye-watering sum does include the costs involved in updated Britain’s custom systems – but also many of the expensive programmes related to checks on food and the post-Brexit Irish Sea trade border.

The infrastructure required to implement sanitary and phytosanitary controls on the movement of goods has cost the taxpayer around £800million, while hundreds of millions of pounds was handed to exporters to help them keep up with the new rules – which will now be axed.

After Britain left the EU, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) was forced to hire an additional 3,000 new staff members to help manage the increased red tape.

One of the heaviest burdens to the taxpayer has been the construction of new facilities designed to ensure EU food imports are in line with British phytosanitary guidelines.

However, despite pledges for the controls to be implemented shortly after leaving the EU, the costly facilities have been mostly left empty.

Portsmouth International Port director Mike Sellers said it had built one of the largest border control facilities to carry out the food checks arriving into the coastal city from the continent.

The city council-owned port was forced to pay £6million – alongside the Government’s £17million in funding – to build the facility.

Mr Sellers said the council’s money would otherwise have been spent maintaining “essential services” for Portsmouth residents.

He told the BBC: “We’ve gone through stages from 2022 to 2024 when the government at the time changed their policies, changed the way they were going to carry out those checks.

“We built something that took two acres of our land that had to carry out, on average, 80 trailer checks a day.

“By the time of the operating model the Government settled on in 2024 that went down to on average two checks a day. It’s never ever been used for the scale that it was built for.

“Now we find ourselves in spring 2028 when the SPS [sanitary and phytosanitary] agreement is in place with the EU that this border control post is not needed.”

Mr Sellers called for the Government to pay the port “compensation for the amount of money that’s been put into this”.

A Government source told The Times: “The Tory Brexit deal was bad for business and bad for the country, leaving piles of red tape and extra costs.

“That’s why we’re securing a better deal that will tear down barriers to trade and back British business and jobs.”