Debate contribution: Great Britain to Northern Ireland Trade

Debate contribution by Mr Timothy Gaston on 16 September 2024.

MLA: Mr Timothy Gaston
Party at the time: Traditional Unionist Voice
Date: 16 September 2024
Type: Debate contribution
Business: Private Members' Business
Heading: Great Britain to Northern Ireland Trade
Assembly identifier: Official Report component 4532639

Text

While I support the motion, I am concerned by the way in which it talks around the presenting issue without actually naming it. While hauliers remain concerned about the operation of the Irish Sea border in the round, the issue that they particularly highlight is their concern about the imminent arrival of the Irish Sea parcels border and Irish Sea green lane customs border on 1 October. In engaging with the arrival of those new aspects of the border, it is imperative to understand how they are new. First, we have been living in a grace period since the arrival of the protocol, but in 14 days' time, that grace period ends, and the border comes into effect for the first time for business-to-business parcel movements. Secondly, we are confronted by the imminent interaction of the complexity of the new green lane customs border with the existing red and green lane SPS border and red lane customs border arrangements. The lives of hauliers are being made impossible by the fact that, notwithstanding the imminent arrival of the Irish Sea parcels border and green lane customs border, on many points of process detail, they remain in the dark. Many months ago, they sat down with the relevant officials and pointed out that, the previous time they sought to introduce a customs border, on 1 January 2021, the hauliers were informed in detail about the new process only the day before. Yet, here we are, just two weeks away, and while they have some information, the hauliers remain in the dark on many key questions of process detail. In the context of the limited information that has been made available to them, hauliers are particularly disturbed on two levels. The first of those is the failure of the Government and the Trader Support Service to understand that the interaction between the red and green lanes is generating growing complexity, which is entrenching rather than qualifying or removing the sense in which the border is an obstacle. In the real world, lorryloads are mixed and potentially subject to multiple procedures, depending on whether they are red lane SPS, red lane customs, green lane SPS or green lane customs or parcels. As one haulier commented:
"We are creating the most complex set of customs arrangements anywhere in the world, with global customs processes imposed on a small-region economy relying on just-in-time services to keep business moving."
Secondly, the Government seem to think that they can rely on hauliers to extract detailed information from traders moving parcels and negotiating the customs green lane border, which is extraordinarily time-consuming and expensive. The hauliers' point is that if the Government wish to extract large amounts of information from traders, it is the responsibility of the Government to get that information. It is concerning that some traders have decided to stop trading with Northern Ireland because the data requirements are too burdensome. At the end of January, the DUP leadership told the people of Northern Ireland that it had secured a significant advance on the Windsor framework, which the party had rejected as unacceptable. Gavin Robinson told us, "The green lane is gone", and, on 8 April, he told William Crawley that its removal would begin in the autumn. However, what we see is not the removal of the green lane border but the next stage of its arrival in 14 days' time. As the final grace periods come to an end, when it comes to the border, nothing from the Windsor framework has changed in any shape or form. It is just the Windsor framework, which, through EU regulations 2023/1231 and 2023/1128, offers the movement of some goods within the UK, GB to NI, on the basis of simplified customs and international SPS border requirements, but does not remove them. That reserves to the EU the right to default to 100% red lane Official Controls Regulation (OCR) if it is not happy. Implicit in that upholding of the border is the upholding of the integrity of the new legal regime in Northern Ireland and across the island of Ireland as the result of our new colonial status arising from our subjection to legislation made by a foreign Parliament at which we have no representation. That relates to not just one law or 300 laws but 300 areas of law. October 1 is the day when reality will finally catch up with the current DUP leadership's 'Safeguarding the Union' fantasy. That is when we will discover, as the TUV warned all along, that the emperor had no clothes, and we will see more starkly than ever before that unionists now need to find a new credible, honest, competent, border-literate leadership to deal with the protocol and uphold the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Those in the Chamber who blame Brexit are Brexit deniers. To be clear —
— the problems are associated with the Northern Ireland protocol —
— and not with Brexit, which has been denied to the people of Northern Ireland.

838 words. Text as published by the Northern Ireland Assembly.

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