Portsmouth, UK: The new £24m border control post in Portsmouth may have to be demolished because repeated changes to post-Brexit border arrangements have made it commercially unviable. 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.
The post at Portsmouth International Port, built with a £17m central government grant and £7m from Portsmouth City Council, which owns the 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. This means 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 (Defra) 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 site, built for a very specific purpose inside a secure area, has no obvious commercial use, so the port is considering building a new, smaller site and decommissioning, or even demolishing the existing building to make space for a commercially viable project.
“This was built to a Defra specification when the border operating model was announced and it’s been mothballed for two years while the checks were delayed,” said Mike Sellers, director of Portsmouth International Port and chairman of the British Ports Association.
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.
Portsmouth, the UK’s second busiest cross-Channel port, is the main alternative route to Dover, providing 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,” 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.”
The British Ports Association meanwhile has raised concerns with ministers about the preparedness of the new inspection regime at new border control posts, due to be enforced in less than six weeks. It says ports have still not been told what hours post 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 post at Sevington in Kent, 20 miles inland from Dover. Given the dominance of Dover in UK food imports, the common user charge will set the price for the rest of the market, but other ports still have no idea where to set fees.
The Portsmouth Border Control Post was built to a deadline of July 1, 2022, as part of the government’s Border Operating Model to process goods from the EU after Brexit. Since January 2021, the UK government has delayed checks on EU imports five times and changed the control regime. 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.
