A £2M Brexit border post has performed just two checks

LONDON — Sporting a high-viz jacket and a radiant smile, former Maritime Minister Charlotte Vere declared a £2.3 million Brexit border inspection facility in the port of Poole officially open for business.
Spanning over 2,000 square meters and boasting two large unloading bays, inspection rooms and refrigeration facilities, the new border control post was well equipped to deal with the expected influx of imports from the European Union.
Eight months on from the ribbon-cutting ceremony, however, and the atmosphere at the port is decidedly less jubilant.
Since the former Conservative government introduced physical checks on imports of plant and animal products from the EU in April, the border control post has conducted a grand total of two checks. This is certainly not what the previous administration had in mind when it splashed out £1.8 million on the facility through its post-Brexit Port Infrastructure Fund.
The absurdity of the situation is not lost on Brian Murphy, chief executive of Poole Harbour Commissioners, which has spent more than £500,000 of its own cash on the facility.
“It would probably be very useful for a basketball competition,” he told POLITICO with a wry laugh. “It’s a very attractive, big facility with two or three people rattling around doing some paperwork.”
Murphy blames the predicament on the previous government, which was constantly “moving the goalposts” of its five-times-delayed post-Brexit border regime, ultimately reducing the number of checks that would be needed.
“Previous decisions had already been made for huge infrastructure and then they moved the goalposts,” Murphy said. “So you’ve got massive facilities that were built and designed for initial thinking and that thinking has now moved on and some facilities are just nowhere near what was expected. Two physical checks by the Port Health Authority since April 30 is just madness.”
In the month leading up to the introduction of the checks, Murphy and his team took the difficult decision not to charge importers for use of the facility. “The administration required completely outweighed what we would be receiving as a revenue stream, so we just haven’t bothered charging,” he said.
With no revenue coming in from checks, the estimated £50,000 in running costs for the first year will have to come out of the port’s own pockets.
Some 50-plus miles away, over in Portsmouth International Port, one of the largest border control posts in the country is also having issues. Spanning two acres, the site includes 14 unloading bays and 22 processing chambers able to accommodate 80 checks a day.
“We are averaging 80 checks a month and around two to three checks per day,” Mike Sellers, the director of Portsmouth International Port, told POLITICO. “So it’s being used, but only a small proportion of it is being used for those checks.”
The facility received one of the largest grants from government totaling £17.1 million, which was topped up by a £6 million grant from Portsmouth City Council at a time when, Sellers said, “local authority budgets were squeezed and they would rather be spending that money on schools and healthcare.” 
Despite being completed in 2022, the facility lay empty for almost two years as the government’s plans were continually postponed, leading to the facility being dubbed a “Brexit white elephant” by port staff and putting further financial strain on the council.
With an expected loss of “at least six figures” in its first year of operation, according to Sellers, the council will now have no choice but to pick up the cost.  
Increasing charges at the facility is not an option.
“We are hugely conscious of the fact that there is a government-run facility across at Sevington and we can’t be any more expensive,” he said, referring to Britain’s biggest border control post. “We have to be competitive with the inland facility in order for those food imports to continue through Portsmouth.”
“So we took the commercial decision to charge the same as the inland facility and we are going to review that after 12 months.”
Closure, Sellers explained, is also not an option because of the proportion of food imports that come through Portsmouth. But he warns that the situation is “not sustainable in the long term and we need to find a long-term solution.”
Richard Ballantyne, chief executive of the British Ports Association, the national membership body for ports in the U.K., blames the former Conservative government for setting unrealistic expectations.
“Ports built new Brexit [border control posts] at the direction of government, with an insistence on very high and costly specifications to be able to handle large volumes of checks on food and plant products,” he told POLITICO.
“Ports usually recover the costs for building government border infrastructure through charges when they are used. However, we are now seeing many of these barely used, making it difficult or impossible for the ports that were forced to build them to recover the costs.”
Ballantyne and his colleagues are now worried the situation could get worse under Labour.
One of Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s key election promises is to strike a veterinary — or sanitary and phytosanitary — agreement with the EU, which could lessen and even remove the need for checks on “agri-food” imports altogether.
On Friday, Ballantyne wrote to the government’s Europe Minister Nick Thomas-Symonds and Susan Hayman, a minister in the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA), calling for a conversation on how the sector might recover their costs.
A Defra spokesperson said: “Protecting U.K. biosecurity remains one of our key priorities.  We will continue working with border control posts to ensure they operate effectively and are resourced appropriately.”
“Many in the logistics sector will welcome the government’s ambition for a new settlement with the EU which could make these checks unnecessary, but that would come at a cost for our industry,” Ballantyne said.
“Ports should not have to repeatedly incur costs because of changing political winds and we are seeking a conversation on how the sector might be reasonably compensated.”
But for now, what ports want most is clarity.
“We can plan and ports are good at planning, providing we know what that future is,” Sellers said. “We need that long-term certainty around what’s going to happen to our borders.”