Tag Archives: customs

Only eight weeks to go to Boris Johnson’s border chaos day

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Lorries leaving ferries at a British port. Pic credit: National Audit Office

A damning new report has come from Parliament’s financial watchdog, the National Audit Office, on what to expect at the ports on January 2 whether the country leaves the EU with a deal or no deal.

Despite spending a humungous £1.41 billion for new infrastructure and IT systems – which wouldn’t be required if we had stayed in the EU – it looks like we are heading for chaos because we are still not properly prepared.

Instead of having to process some 55 million customs declarations a year Customs and Excise will have to handle 270 million.

And some 219.5 million tonnes of freight crossed the border between the UK and EU in 2019 and only between 30 and 60 per cent of lorries are prepared for the change.

And guess what? With eight weeks to go the government doesn’t know how much trade there is between the UK and Northern Ireland which is subject to the new Northern Ireland protocol that Boris Johnson signed last year. This will require new documentation and registering with a new import control service. And again the government doesn’t know how many firms have to sign up pointing to potential chaos on sea routes across the Irish sea between Wales, Scotland and England.

worst case scenario

And in the worst case scenario there could also be queues of up to 7000 lorries trying to access the Channel ports.

The scale of the exercise in Whitehall is shown by the number of departments involved As the report says:

“This includes HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC), the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs, the Home Office, the Department for Transport, and the Border and Protocol Delivery Group (BPDG) and Transition Task Force (TTF), which are both situated within the Cabinet Office. BPDG is responsible for coordinating government’s preparations in relation to the border and TTF has oversight of overall EU Exit preparations, following the closure of the Department for Exiting the European Union in January 2020.”

Auditors have also engaged with departments within the
Northern Ireland civil service which have the most significant roles in relation to the Northern Ireland Protocol.

The picture is not pretty. The first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic led to a three month pause in ministerial meetings to organise the new border regulations and as a result many of the new customs declarations will be delayed until July 2021 rather than January. Yet for political reasons the Cabinet would not extend the transition period,

computer glitches

Then there is a good chance of computer glitches in the operating of the new system at all ports. The report says:

“Integrating the processes, IT systems, infrastructure and resources to operate together for the first time from 1 January 2021 is inherently complex and high-risk. In addition third parties, such as ports and community software providers, who need to develop new software
which integrates with new or changed government systems, have been given very little time in which to prepare and are unlikely to be able to do so in time for 1 January 2021. “

Can you imagine the mess there will be on the first day and it won’t just be teething problems.

The government is hoping to get round it by appointing customs intermediaries – at a cost of £84 m – to help firms negotiate the new system. But it has started slowly, not all the money to appoint them has been used and Whitehall has given the plan a red light because they fear it would not be ready in time.

Covid-19

Also the present second wave of Covid-19 could make matters worse as firms will have to cope with that and a new system. The report says:

“The emergency response to COVID-19 has placed strain on local authorities, industry and supply chains’ ability to plan and put in place contingency arrangements. Disruption at the border maybe harder to manage if it also happens alongside further COVID-19 outbreaks and a background of economic uncertainty.”

Details of the Northern Ireland arrangements are partly in the hands of the Northern Ireland government. But report says: “Its ability
to take forward this work has been severely hampered by the ongoing
negotiations and, in the case of infrastructure, the lack of clarity about
the level of checking that will be required.”

Boris the Bodger

The final picture is dire. The report says:

“It is very unlikely that all traders, industry and third parties will be ready
for the end of the transition period, particularly if the EU implements its
stated intention of introducing full controls at its border from 1 January 2021.”
If the EU keep to its word and the government is as unprepared as this report suggests – the chaos with lorries stranded in new overflow car parks, delays and confusion in operating the system and computer systems failing all on the same day will be very bad news. Boris the Builder will become Boris the Bodger and no one will thank him for the mess.

Shambolic Stansted: How you can grab duty free booze without leaving the country unchecked by short staffed customs and immigration

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stansted airport pic credit:London Stansted Airport

CROSS POSTED ON  BYLINE.COM

Just before Stansted  was  hit by a bus fire which wrecked people’s Easter holiday flights Parliament received a damning report on the state of border controls at the airport by David Bolt, Independent Chief Inspector of Borders  and Immigration.

Rushed out with four other reports from the inspectorate at the close of Parliament it went unnoticed by mainstream media.

What it disclosed is that the airport has been at the centre of a duty free scam  under the noses of the border force enabling  UK residents to get cheap duty free fags, perfume and booze without leaving the country.

It worked like this. Buy the cheapest  air ticket from say Ryanair or Jet 2.com, get through customs and immigration control, go to duty free. Once there stock up with booze, fags, perfume. designer goods and then walk out of another exit to the baggage hall pretending you are on an incoming flight. Then leave the airport.

The scam first discovered in an earlier report in 2013 has been claimed by Stansted Airport’s management to have been stopped though inspectors are sceptical.

The report says: “Border Force and Manchester Airport Group (MAG)  (owners of Stansted) told inspectors that they had addressed this issue, and the number of such incidents had been greatly reduced. Border Force reported that “the newly created Stansted Crime Team had prioritised working with Duty Free Retail Partners as part of its routine to combat fraud and engagement with partners in this area had had demonstrable results with a number of cigarette seizures that were illicitly obtained.”

However inspectors checking arrangements last year had a different view.

It says they didn’t see any fraud but “they did witness individuals who had not travelled exiting the restricted zone via a channel marked “Returning Passengers”. A MAG employee was tasked with verifying that individuals using this channel
had not arrived from abroad (by asking to check their ticket) before allowing them to enter the baggage hall.
“There were no Border Force staff in the “Returning Passengers” channel, and the MAG employee did not appear to notify Border Force of individuals entering the baggage hall via this route. Inspectors did not observe any customs checking of these individuals as they exited.”

The report also finds a whole series of discrepancies between the management of the airport and the staff views of what is really happening. Management say staff are content while staff say they have low morale.

For a start it has never had a full complement of borders force staff and over a  third of its 199 full time equivalent staff is on stand by – so called seasonal workforce (SWF)- mainly retired ex policeman- called in during peak periods which now extended to most of the time  who can only monitor e-gates and sit on the immigration desk.

“Inspectors were told that levels of experience at Stansted were “dwindling” with fewer and fewer staff with the skills required to carry out a range of duties. As a result, managers were finding rostering increasingly difficult and time-consuming. Inspectors were also told that rosters were dependent on the availability of SWF, because there were not enough permanent staff. ”
“The main complaint from frontline staff was that they were not able to access skills training,especially the nationally-managed “Core Skills” training required for different Border Force roles.

“As well as impacting morale, particularly where staff believe that Border Force has failed to deliver on promises made to them about developing them as “multi-functional officers” and providing job variety, the failure to provide skills training has created inflexibilities in terms of how staff can be deployed.

“This is inefficient and damaging to Border Force’s operational effectiveness. It therefore needs to be dealt with as a priority.”

The inspectors found safeguarding issues – particularly in checking whether 12 to 17 year olds who could use e-gates  by themselves with hardly any monitoring.

And a disastrous re-organisation and centralisation of parcels checks meant that seizures of illegal drugs  collapsed at one stage and only just recovering. “This function was centralised to the fast-parcel hub at East Midlands Airport, which now generates alerts and targets for itself and for Stansted. Staff at Stansted told inspectors that, initially, this change had resulted in a “collapse” in seizures.”

Added to that :The customs teams working with freight and fast parcels told inspectors that they were hampered by a lack of suitable detection equipment, for example to test and identify controlled substances.”

And inspectors suspect that border force people may miss people being trafficked into the UK due to shortages of skilled staff.

The report concluded that management has just ” a tick box mentality” which did not correspond with the reality on the ground.

Stansted is the nation’s fourth busiest airport. Half the people using it are British and all but 10 per cent are from the European Union. One wonders what will happen post Brexit and post a plan to double the size of the airport if it cannot cope at the moment. This is not a pretty picture of British competence.