This is not just an Irish Sea border... this is a major headache which might be even more severe for Marks & Spencer, and others, by October.
hat is when a grace period limiting the extent of checks on food products entering Northern Ireland from Great Britain under the NI Protocol is due to expire. There may be an extension or new arrangements agreed.
The protocol was agreed by the UK and EU as a means of avoiding a hard border on the island of Ireland following Brexit.
It keeps Northern Ireland in the EU single market for goods but has brought bureaucracy and costs to anyone transporting products, and food in particular, from GB to here.
Any hassles have been reduced by agreements which mean Northern Ireland ports do not have to enforce all EU single market rules to the extent that applies in the Republic, an EU country.
But M&S said that even under the grace periods, there is still much more paperwork. For a load of arrabbiata, the paper trail to get to Northern Ireland from GB has gone from six pages to 200, taking four hours to fill out. There is:
- A Scheme for Authorised Movements to Northern Ireland (STAMNI) form, which includes vehicle details and Common Health Entry Document (CHED) number for products of animal origin.
- A commercial invoice, packing list and a copy of the CHED for the load. Most of the pages are in commercial invoices due to the high number of products on each load.
M&S, famous for its ‘this is not just food… this is M&S food’ slogan, has talked us through the journey taken of a chicken arrabbiata from England to the Republic. It says it illustrates what could lie ahead here.
It said: “As it stands, our products destined for stores in NI will be subject to the same checks and paperwork that our products destined for ROI are already subject to when the grace period ends, currently on October 1.”
The M&S lorry carrying loads of food like ready meals from Scotland to Northern Ireland and the Republic has the slogan, “the adventure starts here”.
Certainly there have been many twists and turns for grocers like M&S in the adventure of the NI Protocol.
The EU and UK have been at loggerheads over how the protocol is applied in Northern Ireland. It is hoped that political talks can solve the issue, although there is no sign of a resolution.
M&S says the story of one load of chicken arrabbiata shows what can go wrong when it exports to the Republic — an EU country. It describes it as a cautionary tale about what could happen from October 1 in Northern Ireland “if the current political impasse is not resolved”.
CHICKEN ARRABBIATTA – A STORY
Monday 1pm
A complete chicken arrabbiata is made by producer Bakkavor Meals in Boston, near Peterborough, a supplier to M&S. It is destined for customers in Dublin.
As soon as an order is placed suppliers manually input information on each and every individual order to comply with the EU Traces scheme — for example batch code, sell by date. That takes two to five hours of data entry per order and there are multiple orders per day per supplier.
Monday 5pm
The load of chicken arrabbiata is driven to M&S’s new export centre in Motherwell in Scotland. Formerly, the dish went straight to Dublin from Motherwell within less than 12 hours with all the other food. But now Brexit means that a ready meal of that kind — and hosts of other products — are segregated and put in a corner of the warehouse for veterinary checks.
Tuesday 3am
For six hours, M&S people, vets and agents are filling in lots of paperwork by hand.
There are things like customs forms, vehicle manifests detailing every product on the lorry and an export health certificate for each type of meat product as well.
A lot of paperwork has to be completed as there are over 650 different products on the lorry.
It is time consuming, and M&S estimates that the lorry will need 720 pieces of paper, equivalent to about four trees per week, fully checked just to get to Dublin via Belfast. In comparison, there were just four pieces of paper before Brexit.
Tuesday 9am:
Veterinary checks take place, looking at a variety of different things ranging from the ingredients to what abattoir the chicken came from.
Tuesday 2pm
More checks, this time with customs forms and uploading information about the arrabbiata line by line into a variety of UK and EU systems.
It is not an automated system, adding lots of extra time to the process.
Tuesday 5pm
The load takes off for Dublin on the back of the M&S lorry. But at a border control post in Belfast, there is a query.
Tuesday 8pm
Three hours later, it transpires that some the paperwork is in the wrong colour of ink and there is no possibility of onward travel to Dublin. Black ink was used instead of blue, M&S says.
Wednesday 6am
Still in Belfast, the arrabbiata is officially not safe to eat so it is back to Great Britain.
Wednesday 6pm
The return of a load of chicken arrabbiata back to a warehouse in Scotland is a dilemma now for M&S as it is unwanted food which has not been ordered for any stores.
Thursday
The load is to be sent to a store in Scotland and in Glasgow, where a store manager opens the lorry. But it is not looking good as there are only a few days until the chicken arrabbiata’s sell-by date, and there is already a healthy quantity of the same product in the fridges.
Monday 5pm
It is the arrabbiata’s sell-by date and it has been overlooked in favour of newer stock which was always intended for Scotland and not stock which was diverted from its original destination.
Monday 8pm
The store manager debates what to do with the unsold stock. It becomes a matter of giving it to a food charity or placing in a recycling bin. M&S says it’s an unfortunate situation, all because the wrong colour of ink was used.
M&S — and other grocers like Sainsbury’s and Asda, which transport food products from Great Britain to Northern Ireland, is planning ahead for October.
Due to Brexit, vets have to conduct sanitary and phytosanitary (SPS) checks on every product of animal origin on every truck being sent to the island of Ireland, or any other EU countries. It is understood that for M&S, that means checks on 650 products per truck on 55 trucks per week being sent across the Irish Sea. And if Northern Ireland requires the same level of checks as the Republic from October, that will mean checking 165 trucks per week.
At present, the operation requires five full-time vets, paid for by M&S, taking six hours per truck. But if full checks become required for Northern Ireland from October, it is expected M&S will need 13 full-time vets per week.
The chicken arrabbiata needs SPS checks for chicken, mozarrella and regato cheese.
And export health certificates (EHCs) are also required for meat and other animal products — though not for Northern Ireland at the moment, due to the grace period. An EHC is required for each component part of a composite product so a ready meal for example may require multiple certificates, each requiring veterinary sign off.
For plant-based products M&S has to provide the Animal and Plant Health Agency with 48 hours’ notice to conduct the horticultural product checks.
For its products to get through border control posts at EU ports, it is required to give 24 hours’ notice. The sea crossing takes less than six hours. However, that period of notice is not required for Belfast under the present grace period.
When products reach a border control post at an EU destination port, import agents have to combine all the data required through the chain, which creates an average of eight documents of 720 pages per truck.
That is 40,000 pages per week for goods into Ireland and — from October — that will be 120,000 pages per week, including Northern Ireland.
M&S says that one error in these documents, which could be completely unrelated to food safety, can lead to an entire truck of 650 items being refused. It and other grocers fervently hope for a resolution in protocol talks which will avoid its business here getting any more complicated.
