Lisburn, Northern Ireland: Three logistics companies in Northern Ireland, including McCulla (Ireland), have written to the Telegraph about their concerns over the Windsor Framework.
The Windsor Framework is a proposed post-Brexit legal agreement between the European Union and the United Kingdom, announced on 27 February 2023. It is designed to address the problem of the movement of goods between the European single market and the United Kingdom in the current Northern Ireland protocol.
In the letter, Peter Summerton, managing director of McCulla, along with Mark Tait, managing director of Target Transport, and Paul Jackson, managing director of Palyn Transport Management, stress that that the much-vaunted “green lane”, which was supposed to remove the Irish Sea border, was a “complete misnomer due to its heavily fettered access”.
The bosses point out that even normal business will be “red laned”, undergoing full EU controls with duty and tariffs collected before entry into Northern Ireland.
“At best, it’s a bureaucratic “express lane”; at worst, it’s something the Soviets would have dreamt up to control the supply chain,” they say.
The three managing directors also say: “To make matters worse, the EU’s new demands for a labelling system will either unravel or realign Northern Ireland’s supply chain.
“Sadly, far from being a practical solution, the Framework has cemented a hard border, operating to the most complex set of customs and food and animal safety processes found anywhere in the world.”
