Portsmouth’s new Brexit border post could be demolished
A new £24m border control post may have to be demolished because repeated changes to post-Brexit border arrangements have left it commercially unviable.
The facility at Portsmouth International Port is due to begin physical checks on food and plant imports from the EU at the end of next month, but changes to border protocols since it was built mean half of the building will never be used.
Built with a £17m central government grant and £7m from Portsmouth City Council, which owns the port, it is designed to carry out checks on up to 80 truck loads of produce a day. The port now expects to process only four or five daily.
As a consequence, half of the 14 loading bays will never be used, and annual running costs of £800,000 a year will not be covered by the fees charged to importers for carrying out checks.
Portsmouth is not alone, with ports across the country puzzling over how to make the over-sized, over-specified buildings commissioned by the government pay for themselves with far less traffic.
The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs says it spent £200m part-funding new facilities to cope with post-Brexit border controls at 41 ports. It acknowledges that fewer checks will now be required and says ports are free to use spare capacity as they wish.
The problem in Portsmouth is that the facility, built for a very specific purpose inside a secure area, has no obvious commercial use, so the port is considering building a new, smaller facility, and decommissioning or even demolishing the existing building to make space for a commercially viable project.
The new border control post in Portsmouth
“This was built to a Defra [Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs] specification when the border operating model was announced and it’s been mothballed for two years while the checks were delayed,” Mike Sellers, director of Portsmouth International Port and chairman of the British Ports Association, told Sky News.
“Now the border will be operating with far fewer checks, we are going to struggle to cover the running costs of around £800,000 a year.
“So we have to look to the future and work out what strategically is the best way to minimise the impact to the port and to the council.
“I know it sounds ironic, but that could be building another border control post much smaller than this facility, and looking to find commercial ways to get income either through this facility or to demolish it and use the operational land for something else.”
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‘Total and absolute mess’
Port owner Portsmouth City Council meanwhile wants its £7m share of the £24m build cost reimbursed by the government.
“We as a council had to find £7m to help build this facility and now we’re on the fifth change of mind about how much inspection there will be. Half of this building is going to be left empty, idle, unused, and yet it’s costing council taxpayers of Portsmouth a great deal of money,” said councillor Gerald Vernon-Jones, transport lead for the council.
Were the Portsmouth facility to close it could impact the security of UK food imports, as the port is the main alternative route to Dover, providing much-needed resilience to a supply chain heavily reliant on the Short Straits route.
“It’s a total and absolute mess, we have an enormous white elephant here,” Mr Vernon-Jones said.
“If we can’t afford to keep port health people here all day, every day, to do those examinations then everything will have to come through Dover, and that’s enormously risky for this country. If Dover is closed for some reason, industrial action or whatever, then the whole country’s food is at ransom.”
Portsmouth is the UK’s second busiest cross-Channel port
The British Ports Association meanwhile has raised concerns with ministers about the preparedness of the new inspection regime at new border control posts (BCPs), due to be enforced in less than six weeks.
The trade body says ports have still not been told what hours BCPs will be required to open, or how many staff from two state inspection agencies will be required on site.
Crucially, they also do not know how much they will be able to charge importers for inspections because the government has not revealed what price it will levy at the wholly state-owned and run BCP at Sevington in Kent, 20 miles inland from Dover.
Given the dominance of Dover in UK food imports, the so-called common user charge will set the price for the rest of the market, but other ports still have no idea where to set fees.
Defra says it will inform the industry shortly of the fees it has determined following consultation.
The fate of the Portsmouth facility, obsolete before it has even opened, symbolises the delay and indecision around import controls since the Brexit deal came into force in January 2021.
While UK exports to the EU have faced border and customs controls since 1 January 2021, the UK government has delayed similar checks on EU imports five times and changed the control regime.
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The original July 2021 deadline for physical checks of plant and animal produce was postponed because the BCPs were not ready, and further delays followed, with the government citing the impact on the food supply chain and the cost of living crisis.
In April 2022 the government announced a wholesale revision of its plans for the border, introducing a new risk-based approach that limits checks to certain high and medium-risk food and plant categories.
This was then delayed again, with a staged introduction finally beginning in January, with medium-risk food and plant imports requiring health certificates signed off by vets or plant health inspectors, followed by physical checks from 30 April.
Even with reduced checks on importsm the government’s own analysis suggests border controls will add £330m a year to the cost of trading with the continent and increase food inflation.
A spokesperson for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said: “Our border control posts have sufficient capacity and capability, including for temperature controlled consignments, to handle the volume and type of expected checks and the authorities will be working to minimise disruption as these checks are introduced.”
Business
Shellfish industry on a ‘knife edge’ as sewage dumped in designated waters for 192,000 hours last year
Untreated sewage was released into designated shellfish waters for 192,000 hours last year, new research has found.
The dirty water pouring into English seas was a 20% jump from 159,000 hours in 2022, according to the analysis of Environment Agency data by the Liberal Democrats, shared with Sky News.
The hours of sewage dumping were spread across 23,000 separate incidents – a slight fall from the previous year, but still an average of 64 times a day.
Some fishing waters in Cornwall were forced to close last year after high levels of e.coli were found in oysters and mussels, and norovirus can also be transported via human waste.
While the fishing industry can usually clean its catch before it reaches the plate, it has branded the situation a “stitch-up” because it foots the bill for the process.
Liberal Democrat environment spokesperson Tim Farron MP said: “This environmental scandal is putting wildlife at risk of unimaginable levels of pollution.
“The food we eat, and the British fisheries industry, must be protected from raw sewage.”
The Lib Dems are calling for an investigation into shellfish water quality – which should be protected from deterioration under the Water Framework Directive – and a government clampdown on polluting companies.
“It is getting worse on their watch and there will be real concerns for the fishing industry if this trend continues,” added Mr Farron, whose party is targeting many rural seats in the upcoming general election.
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Why are some forced to live with bad smells and trails of sludge?
The worst offender was South West Water, responsible for 13,000 sewage discharges, totalling 98,000 hours, followed by Southern Water, which released sewage 7,000 times for 73,000 hours.
Southern Water pointed to the fact 2023 fell in the wettest 18-month period on record, while South West Water said it has a high proportion of shellfish waters across its vast West Country coastline.
Just 9% of shellfish waters in England reach the top “class A” status – clean enough that shellfish harvested from them can be sold without being purified first.
Anything caught from lower quality waters must be cleaned first in depuration tanks, where the molluscs purge themselves with sterile water, or cannot be sold at all.
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Martin Laity, of Sailors Creek Shellfish, and his son. Pic: Martin Laity
Fishing industry on a ‘knife edge’
Martin Laity, of Sailors Creek Shellfish, has been catching native oysters from the waters of Cornwall for 34 years.
He tracks alerts on the latest sewage discharges, so he can avoid fishing in those waters, and sometimes soaks the oysters in purification tanks for days longer than mandated just to be safe.
He calls the situation a “stitch-up” because it pushes up producers’ electricity and labour costs, and reduces the value of their catch, for which they receive no compensation.
Joe Redfern from the Shellfish Association Of Great Britain said producers “live on a knife edge”.
“Just one bad result can shut down their business overnight, leading to huge impacts to their business. It is a desperate situation and one that seems to be getting worse, with some businesses shutting for good,” he said.
It wants compensation for producers from the fines the government imposed on water companies for excessive sewage releases.
A spokesperson for industry body Water UK said: “Water companies understand and sympathise with the issues these businesses and coastal communities are facing, which is why we are proposing to spend £11bn to reduce spills as quickly as possible, halving spills into shellfish water by 2030.”
An environment department (Defra) spokesperson said: “We’re already taking action to clean up shellfish sites by driving the water industry to deliver the largest infrastructure programme in history – £60bn over 25 years – to cut spills by hundreds of thousands each year.
“Shellfish sites will be prioritised alongside bathing waters and sites of ecological importance.”
Defra is also increasing inspections and regulator funding, and considering banning some water company bonuses, they added.
South West Water said its plans will ensure all shellfish sites in its area meet the government’s target of less than 10 spills per year by 2030, and Southern Water said shellfish can also be infected by farming, run off from roads, boats, marine life and pesticides.
Shifting expectations for UK interest rate cuts have contributed to a dip in house price growth, according to a closely watched measure.
Nationwide reported a 0.4% fall in average property costs last month compared with March, taking the annual rate of growth to 0.6% from 1.6%.
Economists polled by the Reuters news agency had expected month-on-month growth of 0.2%.
The lender’s report said the easing reflected “ongoing affordability pressures, with longer term interest rates rising in recent months, reversing the steep fall seen around the turn of the year”.
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The cost of fixed rate mortgage deals has risen due to market expectations that a Bank of England interest rate cut is looking further away than had been anticipated at the start of the year.
According to the latest data from the financial information service Moneyfacts, the average two-year fixed residential mortgage rate is still creeping back up towards the 6% mark last seen since December.
It charted a figure of 5.9% on Monday – up from 5.87% seen last Friday.
The average five-year rate is nearing 5.5%.
The increases reflect rising borrowing costs for lenders themselves.
It is all based on market expectations that a UK interest rate cut will now not take place until August.
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Interest rate cut hopes pushed back
Earlier bets had been on May but the Bank has recently signalled no let up in its concerns about the outlook for inflation, with those including the pace of wage growth remaining too high.
Nationwide said wider cost of living pressures continued to weigh on buyers during April, despite the pace of wage growth standing at almost double that for price growth.
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Robert Gardner, Nationwide’s chief economist, said: “Recent research carried out by Censuswide on behalf of Nationwide found that nearly half (49%) of prospective first-time buyers (those looking to buy in the next five years) have delayed their plans over the past year.
“Among this group, the most commonly cited reason for delaying their purchase is that house prices are too high (53%), but it is also notable that 41% said that higher mortgage costs were preventing them from buying.
“Coupled with this, 84% of prospective first-time buyers said that the cost of living has affected their plans to buy, for example through having less money each month to save for a deposit.”
Premier Inn owner Whitbread is set to axe around 1,500 UK jobs as part of plans to build more hotel rooms and slash its chain of branded restaurants by more than 200.
The company said, while announcing a 36% hike in annual profits to £561m, that it was to begin a consultation on cutting roles under an “accelerating growth plan”.
That was to focus on hotel investment, Whitbread explained, that could see some of the jobs saved through redeployment.
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The group’s restaurant arm includes the Brewers Fayre and Beefeater brands.
The division has dragged on Whitbread’s performance since the pandemic, with the end of public health restrictions being followed by the energy-led cost of living crisis that has raised costs and damaged consumer spending power.
The company, which employs 37,000 staff in the UK, said it was to “optimise” its food and drink offering to add more than 3,500 hotel rooms across its estate and increase “operational efficiencies”.
Whitbread said it wanted to sell 126 of its less profitable branded restaurants, with 21 sales already having gone through.
Brewers Fayre, the pub/restaurant chain, is among Whitbread’s brands
It will also convert 112 restaurants into new hotel rooms.
The company revealed a 2% dip in sales across its food and beverage arm in the first seven weeks of its financial year to date.
Dominic Paul, Whitbread’s chief executive, said: “We recognise that our transition will impact some of our team members so we will be providing support throughout this process and we are committed to working hard to enable as many as possible of those affected to remain with us.”
Shares were down almost 15% in the year to date ahead of the company’s announcements.
They rose by 1.7% at the open.
Analysts said it reflected the focus on achieving more profitable growth in the UK core market and a rise in awards covering the year to 29 February.
They included plans for a share buyback of £150m on top of a £110m final dividend.
The latter award was 26% up on the previous year’s payout.
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