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.”
The UK economy showed strong growth in the first three months of the year, according to official figures.
Gross domestic product (GDP) – the standard measure of an economy’s value – grew 0.7% in the first quarter of 2025, the Office for National Statistics said.
The rise is better than expected. An increase of just 0.6% was anticipated by economists polled by the Reuters news agency.
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It’s significantly better than the three months previous, in which a slight economic expansion of just 0.1% was reported for the final quarter of 2024.
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The ONS also said there was a small amount of growth last month, as GDP expanded 0.2% in March, which similarly beat expectations.
No growth at all had been forecast for the month.
How did the economy grow?
A large contribution to high GDP growth was an increase in output in the production sector, which rose 1.1%, driven by manufacturing and a 4% increase in water supply, the ONS said.
Also working to push up the GDP figure was 0.7% growth in the biggest part of the UK economy – the services industry.
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‘Here’s the concern with GDP figures’
Wholesale, retail and computer programming services all performed well in the quarter, as did car leasing and advertising, the ONS said.
It shows the economy was resilient, as the country headed into the global trade war sparked by President Trump’s so-called ‘liberation day’ tariff announcement on 2 April.
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The data is welcome news for a government who have identified growing the economy as its number one priority.
Chancellor Rachel Reeves is taking the figures as a political win, saying the UK economy has grown faster than the US, Canada, France, Italy and Germany.
“Today’s growth figures show the strength and potential of the UK economy, ” she said.
“Up against a backdrop of global uncertainty, we are making the right choices now in the national interest.”
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Such GDP numbers may not continue into April as businesses and consumers were hit with a raft of bill rises, and Mr Trump’s tariffs fired the starting gun on a global trade war.
Last month, water, energy and council tax bills rose across the country while employers faced higher wage costs from the rise in their national insurance contributions and the minimum wage.
But above-inflation wage growth and fading consumer caution could continue to boost the economy.
UK
Assisted dying law ‘unworkable, unaffordable and naive’ says partnership of UK’s leading social care groups
A partnership of the country’s leading social care and end of life organisations has told Sky News of their deep frustration at being excluded from important discussions around the assisted dying debate – describing the proposed change to the law as “unworkable, unaffordable and naive”.
The Coalition of Frontline Care for People Nearing the End of Life is worried about the impact of introducing assisted dying will have on their three million-strong workforce, which they say is on the frontline for delivering care to terminally ill adults.
The partnership includes The Gold Standards Framework Charity (GSF), National Care Forum (NCF), British Geriatric Society (BGS), Care England (CE) and the Community Hospital Association.
It submitted evidence at the committee stage of the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, but was not called to give evidence
Professor Martin Vernon, consultant geriatrician and spokesperson for ethics and law at the British Geriatric Society, told Sky News: “This is a huge problem for us.
“The majority of people this law will impact on are going to be older people with complex needs, and there has been virtually no engagement in the consultation process around this proposed legislation.”
Professor Martin Vernon says the majority affected by the bill will be older with complex needs
Professor Vernon and his coalition colleagues are especially concerned about sick and vulnerable adults being pressured into making choices.
“We then may see, increasingly, older people with life-limiting diagnoses like dementia, like frailty, feeling the need to opt for assisted dying or indeed feeling coerced either by their circumstances or societally,” he added.
“This may place a heavy burden on some individuals to choose assisted dying when, actually, the creation of better alternatives – supportive care, and palliative care to enable them to have a dignified and comfortable last few years of life should be the way to go.”
Caroline Southgate, founder and managing director of home care company Doris Jones, told Sky News there was simply not enough information about the impact assisted dying would have on her staff.
‘The way that the bill is presented doesn’t give us enough information,’ Caroline Southgate says
“I think we are concerned that we don’t have enough clarity about how we would train staff, how we support people if they make that decision,” she said.
“At the moment, the way that the bill is presented doesn’t give us enough information to know how we would deal with those issues.
“If someone chooses this route, all I need to know is what’s my role, where are my boundaries?”
Mrs Southgate is also worried about her staff being accused of coercion. Because of the nature of their work, home carers build up a strong bond with the people they tend to, often seeing them multiple times a day.
And sometimes, they might be the only contact their service users have.
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“I think we’ve got lots and lots of experience of being in homes with people, dealing with families, who trust us to look after the person who needs care and support at home,” she added.
“I need to know that we would be insured and protected should a family decide that one of our staff was accused of coercing someone, or the other way around, talking someone out of a situation.
“We really need a lot more information to make that safe for us and to make sure that our staff are really well supported.”
Katy Betz works for Mrs Southgate. She is a trained nurse originally from Germany but has lived and worked as a carer in England for over twenty years.
Kate loves what she does, but echoes the same concerns expressed by her employer: Assisted dying could change the relationship she has with her service users.
Driving along Southend’s seafront, she explains there is little else she and her care colleagues talk about these days.
Katy Betz tells Sky News the debate on assisted dying is all she and her colleagues talk about
“It is important”, she says. “Even within my friendship group, everyone has got a different opinion, a strong opinion actually.
Katy says she needs more detail: “More training, safeguarding – what do we do? Where do we go? Who needs to be informed about the client’s decision?
“You are there to make their life, and their end of life, bearable and as good as possible. I can’t explain how I deal with it, but I think you just have to be born to deal with it.”
Katy is on her way to see John and Brenda Barber for one of their daily visits. Brenda is 85 and John is 90.
John took Brenda on their date to a jive dance in Southend.
He was twenty years old and had just returned from army service in Gibraltar. Brenda was just sixteen.
They have been inseparable ever since.
John’s arthritis makes every day tasks almost impossible, and he says if he did not have a carer like Katy, his life would be intolerable.
Paul Barber said his life would be intolerable without Katy Betz
He says: “It’s becoming increasingly difficult with different parts of my body. My wife and I are together and that’s what we want. We would never want to be separated.”
There’s a pause while he reflects on that thought. “That’s despite the bickering,” he says before breaking into a mischievous laugh.
The bond that is shared between Katy, John and Brenda is clear to see. They are worried that this might change irreversibly if the assisted dying law is passed.
The Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill returns to the House of Commons on Friday, where it will face greater scrutiny.
Earlier this week, two Royal Colleges, Physicians and Psychiatrists, withdrew support for the bill, saying it was “not fit for purpose”.
But campaigners in favour of assisted dying have told Sky News the bill includes more protections and safeguards for all dying people than any other jurisdiction where the choice is legal.
Sarah Wootton, chief executive for Dignity in Dying, said: “MPs voted by a clear majority to progress Kim Leadbeater’s Bill in November because they recognised that the blanket ban on assisted dying is failing dying people and their families.
“Every year, dying people are forced to endure unbearable pain, despite good care, travel overseas to die alone, or take matters into their own hands, often dying violent and lonely deaths without support.
“This Bill – already hailed as the strongest in the world – has been strengthened even further during committee stage, with amendments accepted to involve a range of skilled professionals in every application, specific training requirements around coercion, and that assisted dying can only be discussed within the context of all end of life options.”
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