London, UK: The government will explain over the next few days in more detail how the new deal to replace the Northern Ireland protocol will work, said Chris Heaton-Harris, Secretary of State for Northern Ireland.
He said London would seek to provide assurances around Northern Ireland’s place within the United Kingdom by amending legislation, a process that could take much longer and raises the prospect of a long delays.
The deal introduced a new mechanism called the ‘Stormont brake’ that will allow London to stop the application of new or amended EU laws on goods in Northern Ireland if requested by a third of the region’s lawmakers. “Just to make sure that we get this exactly right, in the next few days, we’re going to codify this,” Heaton-Harris told BBC Radio Ulster, referring to the Stormont brake.
“We are giving time and space to the DUP and other parties to digest what’s in here, we are going to clarify exactly how the Stormont brake will work and bring forward amendments to the 1998 Northern Ireland Act to absolutely demonstrate that Northern Ireland’s place is in the United Kingdom,” he said.
A spokesman for the prime minister said the UK government will provide firms in Northern Ireland time to prepare for a phased introduction of the new scheme. The new Brexit trading arrangements in Rishi Sunak’s revised Northern Ireland protocol could take more than two years to be fully implemented, government sources say.
Businesses in Northern Ireland say they expect a mass educational campaign to be launched across the country by HMRC and other government departments if it is approved by parliament. But with legislation required to bring the Windsor framework into force, the first of the new measures could take months to become operational.
A government source said if the new deal was ratified it would be “intentionally giving industry time to prepare. Essentially, it is a phased introduction over this year and in 2024.” However, the introduction of updated labelling for products travelling across the Irish Sea via the new customs “green lane” will be staggered, with the last stage being implemented as late as July 2025.
Businesses are still trying to work out what the deal means for them. “It is important to emphasise this is a framework but there’s a lot of operational detail to work through,” said Stuart Anderson, the head of public affairs at the Northern Ireland chamber of commerce.
“There is also a quite significant political, practical and legal work to get through as part of the process. For example, the timeline for labelling is until July 2025 underlining that this is very much a process over time.”
Labelling products as “not for the EU” will be one of the most visible changes to result from the new deal. Under the new arrangements producers of fresh meats, such as sausages, and dairy products will have to start labelling goods for sale in Northern Ireland from this October. The government has promised swift reimbursement to cover the cost. From October next year, labelling requirements will be extended to include all other dairy products, such as UHT milk and butter, across the UK. The final phase of labelling will enter into force in July 2025 and apply to fish, fruit and vegetables and composite products such as ready meals.
“As businesses we had to shout from the sidelines in the past, sometimes we had to kick down the doors to get heard but now we know we are going to be invited into the room,” said Stephen Kelly, chief executive, Manufacturing NI, one of a group of business representatives who met Sunak last week. The process to bring the deal into operation will start later this month after a meeting of the UK-EU joint committee, a body established to enforce the original withdrawal agreement. Legislation may be needed for some elements of the deal such as the application of UK VAT rules and alcohol duties in Northern Ireland, but sources say that could happen swiftly. Kelly said some of the “low-hanging fruit” such as the tariff reimbursement schemes could be up and running by early summer.
This is a repayment scheme for any businesses that are not certain of the end destination of their product but who bring materials in through the red lane and pay an EU tariff on a component. If that product ends up being sold and remaining in Northern Ireland they can claim a refund of the tariff. “We expect HMRC will have to implement changes to some systems and a campaign to educate traders, but there are relatively simple things they could get started with in the early summer.”
The new deal explained
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen agreed a new post-Brexit deal for Northern Ireland, called the Windsor Framework, and designed to tackle the issues impacting Northern Ireland since the UK left the EU replacing the Northern Ireland Protocol that came into force post Brexit.
Trade
The agreement will introduce two new routes for goods when they are travelling from Great Britain into Northern Ireland. Products which are travelling through NI to get to the Republic of Ireland – which is in the EU – will go via a red lane, ensuring they pass all the customs checks they need to before crossing the Irish Sea. But products which are set to stay in NI – and therefore in the UK – will go via a green lane, which Sunak said would see the current “burdensome customs bureaucracy scrapped”, so no more documents. Snak said food available on supermarket shelves in Great Britain would also be available in Northern Ireland. “This means we have removed any sense of a border in the Irish Sea,” he said.
Taxes and medicines
The legal text of the protocol has been amended to make sure the UK government’s decision on VAT and excise will also be implemented in Northern Ireland. Under the previous Brexit agreement, those decisions were taken in Brussels as the region had to follow single market rules. But now any changes in Westminster will come into force in Northern Ireland, with the PM using the example of alcohol duty, “meaning our reforms to cut the cost of a pint in the pub will now apply in Northern Ireland”. He said British products like trees, plants, and seed potatoes will also be available again in Northern Ireland’s garden centres. A “landmark” settlement has been agreed on medicines, meaning drugs approved for use by the UK’s medicines regulator will be automatically available in every pharmacy and hospital in Northern Ireland.
The Stormont Brake
Sunak said some rules would remain but the “only EU law that applies in Northern Ireland under the framework is the minimum necessary to avoid a hard border with Ireland and allow Northern Irish businesses to continue accessing the EU market”. However, what the PM has agreed with the EU is to give members of the Northern Ireland Assembly a say on any changes to EU law by offering them “the Stormont brake”. If 30 members of the NI Assembly across two parties vote against a change or new law, the brake is pulled, it gets stopped and the Westminster government steps in. They will argue out the case with the EU in a joint committee and decide whether it should be adopted across the whole of the UK, or be vetoed – meaning it would not come into force anywhere across the country.
However, it is not yet clear what happens if the two sides cannot agree, with the documents published so far only saying it would be solved through a process of “independent arbitration”. Sunak said the brake “gives the institutions of the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland a powerful new safeguard, based on cross-community consent”.
