10 February 2020

Financial Times: Prepare for Brexit trade costs and red tape, says Michael Gove

Cabinet Office minister Michael Gove has admitted that a new “smart” border to cut post-Brexit trade friction with the EU will not be ready until 2025, sparking warnings that exporters and importers will face big costs at the end of the year.

Mr Gove on Monday told the freight industry to prepare for new bureaucracy and costs from January 1 2021 when the post-Brexit transition period ends and the UK leaves the EU customs union and single market.

“Frictionless trade has been kicked to the touchline,” said Elizabeth de Jong, UK policy director of the Freight Transport Association, after meeting Mr Gove. “This was a big dose of realism. It’s going to be really costly for business.”

Speaking at a “border delivery group stakeholder event”, Mr Gove confirmed that Britain would introduce import controls on EU goods from the start of 2021 — effectively treating them in the same way as imports from any third country.

Authorities on both sides of the border will collect customs, value added tax and excise duties and check the safety of goods crossing a frontier that has — under Britain’s EU membership — been largely friction-free.

UK government officials said that by 2025 Britain would have the “best, smartest and most efficient border in the world” — with new simplified systems in place — but in the meantime industry has been told to prepare for significant friction to trade.

“The UK will be outside the single market and outside the customs union, so we will have to be ready for the customs procedures and regulatory checks that will inevitably follow,” said Mr Gove.

He told hauliers that from 2021 there would be “symmetry” and that the UK would impose the same checks and customs procedures on EU goods entering Britain as the bloc conducted on exports from the UK.

That would mean that customs declarations and regulatory checks would take place on trade in both directions. [...]

Full article on Financial Times (subscription required)

Related article on BBC: UK trade will thrive despite border checks, says chancellor

© Financial Times