Customs system looks likely to be overloaded

According to a national newspaper the UK’s new customs system was intended to handle 60 million declarations a year, but thanks to the Northern Ireland Protocol it may be overloaded with 400 million declarations a year (Sunday Telegraph, July 5 2020, ‘Unseen and untested Brexit IT system risks customs chaos’).

Perhaps the impending chaos will averted in good time, before January 1; but it is particularly annoying that as early as February 2018 it was pointed out to the previous Prime Minister, our local MP Theresa May, that the legitimate concerns of the Irish Republic, and the EU as whole, do not extend beyond the goods which are actually entering their territory (Viewpoint, February 22 2018, ‘Easy solution to EU border conundrum’, copied directly to Mrs May as my MP).

There was no reason why protection of the separate EU and UK single markets should ever have involved any changes to the internal UK trade between Great Britain and Northern Ireland; that was a totally unnecessary concession, which is now creating the problem that huge numbers of shipments will be wrongly treated as being potentially ‘at risk’ of being sold on into the Republic.

Dr D R COOPER Belmont Park Avenue

Maidenhead