Loss of border checkpoint ‘will put food imports at risk’
Demolishing a £24m post-Brexit border checkpoint in Portsmouth would risk food imports being turned back towards Europe, local authorities have warned.
The control post at Portsmouth International Port is due to begin physical checks on food and plant imports from the EU from 30 April. But the site may no longer be economically viable after government changes to border rules mean only a fraction of the lorries it was built to check now need to be processed. The council had to pay £7m for the facility and has to cover an £800,000 annual shortfall left by fees that will now not be charged to importers for checks to be carried out. If Portsmouth were to close it would put more pressure on imports into Dover in Kent.
“Everything then would be going through Dover and the whole country is at risk,” Portsmouth City Council’s transport lead Gerald Vernon-Jackson told i.
“If Dover is closed because of industrial action, or something else, there’s a single point of failure for the whole country’s economy and our food imports. It means there would be no import of stuff that we rely on every day.”
The implementation of post-Brexit sanitary and phytosanitary checks on medium-risk food and plant products, such as meat and dairy, entering the UK from the EU and the rest of the world has been delayed five times, but these are now weeks away from starting.
To handle the new checks, the Government has built a site 22 miles from Dover at Sevington in Kent. The facility will be used to inspect goods carried in lorries to intercept illegal and dangerous food.
Dover port authorities estimate that Sevington would check at least 3,500 consignments of produce a month.
The building at Portsmouth was originally designed to check about 80 lorries a day. However, only around five or six will now be processed. Mike Sellers, director at Portsmouth International Port, said it might be necessary to build another smaller border control post or to knock down the facility.
“We have to plan for the future and we have to think about what will happen with this facility,” he told Portsmouth newspaper The News.
A Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs spokesperson said: “Our border control posts have sufficient capacity and capability... to handle the volume and type of expected checks.”