‘There are only so many hits you can take as a business’: Both sides being hurt by fishing dispute

Published

4 years ago

November 5, 2021

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Brexit is done, and for many, there’s genuine relief it’s over.

But ongoing disagreements and post-treaty disputes are having real world costs to businesses who say they feel let down and misled by the Brexit process.

The row over fishing rights and the threat of retaliatory action from the French have already cost one oyster producer in Kent tens of thousands of pounds worth of business.

Meanwhile, Sky News has learned that the Department for Transport has asked a Kent lorry park that is due to close shortly, to stay open for a few months longer over Christmas to help with anticipated extra pressure on an already strained supply chain.

“There are only so many hits, so many body punches you can take as a business and get back up and start again,” says James Green, director of The Whitstable Oyster Company.

Mr Green’s business is based in the picturesque north Kent town, famous for its oysters.

It has farmed oysters for generations and is responsible for about a third of the UK’s entire production.

But Brexit has already cost them dearly. New rules mean he can no longer export fully-grown market-sized oysters to France – those exports had accounted for around 50% of his orders, and that disappeared overnight.

He moved his focus to building up the domestic market, an encouraging albeit slow process, and continuing to export juvenile oysters to France.

This is still allowed because the juveniles are put back in the sea off the coast of France, to be harvested later by his buyers.

But last week as the post-Brexit fishing row intensified, French threats set him back further.

In a disagreement over how many licenses have been granted to French trawlers operating in British waters, France’s president Emmanuel Macron set an ultimatum, demanding the UK grant more or face retaliatory measures including British boats being banned from landing their catch in France and increased customs checks on exported British goods.

Such tightened restrictions might have included the removal of veterinary checks in France that are necessary for James to sell his oysters there. His buyers got nervous and cancelled orders – he lost roughly £25,000 worth in just a few days.

“With farms you can’t stop, you’ve got to continue otherwise the stock becomes unsellable,” he said.

“There are quite a lot of costs involved in continuing that process, so it’s frustrating.

“Coupled with COVID, coupled with Brexit, coupled with water quality from Southern Water, this is the fourth thing in the space of less than a year that has had a massive impact on our industry.

“You can’t just take away that main market overnight and expect these businesses to continue because they’re just not.”

Mr Green voted for Brexit in 2016, and said fishing rights were his key motivator. But the reality has not been as he was promised, and he said repeated reassurances that his exports would not be affected now feel misleading.

“I think the deal we got was very, very poor, very poor,” he said. “So I probably would change my vote, if I’m honest.”

The threats from France were deferred this week, paving the way for talks between Lord Frost, the UK’s chief Brexit negotiator and France’s Secretary of State for European Affairs, Clément Beaune.

Under the Brexit deal, French trawlermen who had traditionally fished between six and 12 miles off the coast of the UK would be allowed to continue to do so as long as they could provide proof they had fished there every year since 2016.

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While the French have said that too few licenses have been granted, the British have said that those not approved have not provided sufficient evidence.

But despite all the smiles and handshakes for the cameras, positions on both sides are still entrenched and no significant progress was made.

The context this side of the Channel is not just businesses suffering, but a supply chain already stacked up.

Some say a system still grappling with global delays and a shortage of lorry drivers can’t cope with much more pressure.

Any further delays or customs checks at ports may well be seen and felt in lorry parks across Kent.

Sky News has learnt that the Department for Transport has asked one such site, Ashford International Truck Stop that was due to close shortly in favour of a new bigger site next door, to remain open for a few extra months over Christmas.

A sense perhaps that preparations are being made for extra seasonal pressure.

On the other side of the Channel there is another side to this story.

Laurent Merlin fishes for crab from Boulogne sur Mer. He has been fishing in British waters since the 1990s and his father did the same for years before him. But he hasn’t been granted a license yet and he’s getting desperate.

“It’s frustrating because it has now been 10 months that we’ve been waiting,” he said.

“If we get nothing, we will have to react. If we don’t we won’t be able to continue. French waters have been overfished, there are no fish left there.”

Officials will talk again in the coming days and while they’re talking, threats are unlikely to be actioned.

On different sides of these waters there’s different sides to this story, but ongoing disputes are costing.

Business

M&S reveals cost of cyber attack as profit almost wiped out

Published

19 hours ago

November 5, 2025

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M&S reveals cost of cyber attack as profit almost wiped out

The cyber attack on high street department store Marks and Spencer is expected to directly cost roughly £136m.

The figure is only the cost of immediate incident systems response and recovery, as well as specialist legal and professional services support.

Combined with a loss in sales, as the retailer’s online systems were out of action from Easter into the summer, statutory profit before tax at the business has been nearly wiped out for the first half of the year.

This profit measure dropped from £391.9m last year to £3.4m this year. Statutory profit before tax is the official profit figure reported in a company’s financial statements before it paid tax, used for tax and legal purposes.

About £100m is being claimed back in insurance for the cyberattack, M&S said in its market update.

Using a different profit measure – the M&S group’s adjusted profit before tax – the figure is more than half that of a year earlier, down from £413m to £184m.

Sales were hit as online shopping was unavailable from the April attack date until June. Some shelves were also empty in the days after the attack.

Ransomware hackers broke into M&S systems by tricking employees at a third-party contractor.

The attack was just one of a series that struck major British businesses.

The Co-Op, Jaguar Land Rover and Harrods all had operations interrupted by cyber criminals.

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Business

Chancellor Rachel Reeves blames other people’s mistakes for her predicament but she bears some responsibility

Published

1 day ago

November 4, 2025

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Chancellor Rachel Reeves blames other people's mistakes for her predicament but she bears some responsibility

To say this wasn’t the plan is an understatement.

When Rachel Reeves said last year (and many times since) that she had no intention of coming back to the British people with yet more tax rises, she meant it.

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But now the question ahead of the budget later this month is not so much whether taxes will rise, but which taxes, and by how much? Indeed, there’s growing speculation that the chancellor will be forced to break her manifesto pledge not to raise the rates of income tax, national insurance or VAT.

Her argument, made in her news conference on Tuesday morning, is that she is in this position in large part because of other people’s mistakes, primarily those of the Conservative Party.

But while it’s certainly true that a significant chunk of the likely downgrade to her fiscal position reflects the fact that the “trend growth rate” – the average speed of productivity growth – has dropped in recent years due to all sorts of issues, including Brexit, COVID-19 and the state of the labour market, she certainly bears some responsibility.

A problem that is some of her own making

First off, she established the fiscal rules against which she is being marked by the Office for Budget Responsibility.

Second, she decided to leave herself only a wafer-thin margin against those rules.

Third, even if it weren’t for the OBR’s productivity downgrade, it’s quite likely the chancellor would have broken those fiscal rules, due to the various U-turns by the government on welfare reforms, winter fuel, and extra giveaways they haven’t yet provided the funding for, such as reversing the two-child benefit cap.

Now, at this stage, no one, save for the Treasury and the Office for Budget Responsibility, really knows the scale of the task facing the chancellor. And in the coming weeks, those numbers could change significantly.

But it’s becoming increasingly clear, from the political signalling if nothing else, that the government is rolling the pitch for bad news later this month.

Indeed, for all that this government pledged to bring an end to austerity, a combination of higher taxes and lower spending will be highly unpopular, not to mention deeply controversial. And while the chancellor will seek to blame her predecessors, it remains to be seen whether the public will be entirely convinced.

Business

Post Office hero Bates lands seven-figure Horizon payout

Published

2 days ago

November 4, 2025

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Post Office hero Bates lands seven-figure Horizon payout

Sir Alan Bates has reached a seven-figure deal to settle his claim over the Post Office Horizon scandal, more than 20 years after he began campaigning over what turned into one of Britain’s biggest miscarriages of justice.

Sky News has learnt that the government has agreed a deal with the former sub-postmaster after handing him what he described as a “take it or leave it” offer during the spring.

Sir Alan has previously said publicly that that proposal amounted to 49.2% of his original claim.

One source suggested that his final settlement may have been worth between £4m and £5m, implying that Sir Alan’s claim could have been in the region of £10m, although those figures could not be corroborated on Tuesday morning.

A government spokesperson said: “We pay tribute to Sir Alan Bates for his long record of campaigning on behalf of victims and have now paid out over £1.2bn to more than 9,000 victims.

“We can confirm that Sir Alan’s claim has reached the end of the scheme process and been settled.”

Sky News has attempted to reach Sir Alan for comment about the settlement of his claim.

Sir Alan led efforts over many years to prove that the Horizon software system supplied by Fujitsu, the Japanese technology company, was faulty.

Hundreds of sub-postmasters were wrongly prosecuted between 1999 and 2015, with scores of people either ending their own lives or making attempts to do so.

However, it was only after ITV turned their fight for justice into a drama, Mr Bates Vs The Post Office, that the government accelerated plans to deliver redress to victims.

Even so, the compensation scheme set up to administer redress has been mired in controversy.

Writing in The Sunday Times in May, Sir Alan described the process as “quasi-kangaroo courts in which the Department for Business and Trade sits in judgement of the claims and alters the goalposts as and when it chooses”.

“Claims are, and have been, knocked back on the basis that legally you would not be able to make them, or that the parameters of the scheme do not extend to certain items.”

Sir Alan had previously been made compensation offers worth just one-sixth of his claim – which he had labelled “derisory”, with a second offer amounting to a third of the sum he was seeking.

Sir Ross Cranston, a former High Court judge, adjudicates on cases where a claimant disputes a compensation offer from the government and then objects to the results of a review by an independent panel.

In 2017, Sir Alan and a group of 555 sub-postmasters sued the Post Office in the High Court, ultimately winning a £58m settlement.

However, swingeing legal fees left the group with just £12m of that sum, prompting ministers to establish a separate compensation scheme amid a growing outcry.

A significant number of other sub-postmasters have also complained publicly about the pace, and outcome, of the compensation process.

The first volume of Sir Wyn Williams’s public inquiry into the Horizon scandal was published in July, and concluded that at least 13 people may have taken their own lives after being accused of wrongdoing, even though the Post Office and Fujitsu knew the Horizon system was flawed.

The miscarriage of justice left the Post Office’s reputation, and that of former bosses including chief executive Paula Vennells, in tatters.

A subsequent corporate governance mess under the last government further dragged the Post Office’s name through the mud, with the then chief executive, Nick Read, accused of being absorbed by his own remuneration.

In recent months, the government has outlined a further redress scheme aimed at compensating victims of the Capture accounting software which was in use at Post Offices between 1992 and 2000.

Since then, a new management team has been appointed and has set the objective of boosting postmasters’ pay and overhauling technology systems to enable Post Office branches to offer a broader range of services.