Customs and Borders

Jim Cunningham Excerpts

Thursday 26th April 2018 Commons Chamber

[Meg Hillier (Hackney South and Shoreditch) (Lab/Co-op)]

I fully associate myself with the remarks of my right hon. Friend the Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper) when she opened the debate and the right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe (Mr Clarke), so I will not repeat their arguments now. I will, however, pick up on what my hon. Friend the Member for Leeds West (Rachel Reeves) and the right hon. Member for Loughborough (Nicky Morgan) said: we should be having a reasonable and evidence-based debate. Four of us who have spoken so far have the privilege of chairing Select Committees and seeing and hearing from witnesses directly about what is happening out there on the ground, and it is right that we have this opportunity to pass this information on to the Government and make sure that we have a serious discussion.

The right hon. Member for East Devon (Sir Hugo Swire) spoke about what the public voted for. Had there been a very clear exposition of the either/or position, we could say that, but it was not clear at all, and now is the time for clarity. I want to focus on the practical issues facing this country if we leave the customs union. The Public Accounts Committee, which I have the privilege of chairing, is a cross-party Committee made up of Members from four parties in this House—Members who voted both Brexit and remain and whose constituents voted similarly differently. Yet as a Committee we have produced a series of reports, two of which I want to talk about today, that highlight the practical challenges facing this country.

The first report was on the customs declaration service. Testing of that system, which is to replace the outdated customs handling of import and export freight—CHIEF—system to ensure we have a customs declaration system fit for purpose, is only now just under way. Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs estimates that the volume of customs declarations per year could rise by 200 million, from 55 million in 2015 to 255 million, and that the number of traders making declarations could increase from 141,000 to 273,000. We will need border checks for people and goods—we heard a lot from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs on this; we will see increased costs for businesses and Governments, as others have touched on; and we will see enormous delays at the border.

[Mr Jim Cunningham (Coventry South) (Lab)]

Has my hon. Friend’s Committee looked at the cost and number of officials we will need at the border after Brexit?

[Meg Hillier]

My hon. Friend raises an important point. In another report, published last December, we looked at Brexit and the border—I say “looked at”, but the situation is not static; we are working closely with sister Committees, particularly the Treasury Committee, with which we are doing some joint work on the cost of Brexit. We need to look at the wider cost and what Departments are having to do to implement these new systems and employ new staff.

HMRC has told us very candidly that it does not expect, as the right hon. Member for Loughborough highlighted, to have any additional border infrastructure in place by next March, yet other countries are planning for this already. In the Netherlands and Ireland, they are buying up land and planning to build facilities to do those necessary checks. Pieter Omtzigt, the Dutch Parliament’s Brexit rapporteur, has said that his country is

“preparing for the stated policy of the UK government”

and that it needs

“hundreds of new customs and agricultural inspectors”.

He says: “if we need” that,

“the British are going to need thousands”.

Already this week, we have seen Border Force advertising to recruit 550 staff—in addition to staff it has already had to recruit and will have to recruit again in the future.

Extraordinarily, a response to our work from the border planning group, which comprises a number of Departments, told our Committee there was no evidence to suggest that the risk profile of goods would change on day one. It went on:

“The Government is reviewing the specific areas where the risk posed by these imports could change, both immediately following EU exit and over time, and the measures that should be put in place to address this”—

should be put in place! We are one year away from Brexit. Even with a transition period, it will be enormously challenging—in fact impossible—to deliver the infrastructure needed to make sure that our country is safe.

We need full clarity on the costs. The Treasury Committee and the Public Accounts Committee are pressing the Treasury and other bits of Government about what the total cost will be. Let us be clear: there will be additional costs to the financial settlement, which will be only a small portion of the overall costs. That is the cost we will have to pay for the political exit, but there are the on-costs—the lost opportunity costs. We need to see the full bill and to have it analysed by the National Audit Office. We need to have that before any meaningful vote in the autumn. We are still woefully short on such information, but the right hon. Member for Loughborough and I are on the march, so I warn the Government: they had better be prepared.

As with the emperor’s new clothes, we need to call it out. Wishful thinking is not enough. It is not about ideology or romance, though many of us hold ideological positions. We need clarity. We need a decision so that business, and indeed the Government, can prepare. We need a customs union—we need the customs union. The alternative is chaos, cost, confusion and huge damage to the UK economy.