British goods going to Northern Ireland will always require more paperwork, says EU’s Šefčovič

However, there is still a gulf between the plans. The government says the green lane should involve no extra bureaucracy, with most goods moving as freely between London and Belfast as they do between London and Birmingham, while the EU says that form-filling for the green lane can be reduced, not eliminated.

When asked if the EU would ever accept the idea that some goods crossing the Irish Sea would need no documentation or there would always be a need for something, Mr Šefčovič told the Belfast Telegraph: “I think it’s always going to be something.

“I think we can push it to the bare minimum if we would have very good cooperation from our UK counterparts. What we are looking at with our trusted trader scheme, with our two-and-a-half pages of SPS certification, with the super-reduced data sets needed for the customs procedures... most of the checks could be done remotely via IT and this green lane or express lane could operate in a very express way.”

He said that if the two sides cooperated, “it would be a few dozen trucks checked every day”, and that if it worked, “maybe we could push it even further down”. He likened it to what the EU has done on medicines, saying it could involve “extraordinary flexibilities that the EU never offered to anyone else” but they need “political engagement”.

The EU’s most senior figure dealing with the Northern Ireland Protocol insisted that the EU’s proposals would bring “certainty and stability” to the situation, whereas the Northern Ireland Protocol Bill introduced this week by Boris Johnson’s government would give so much delegated power that “ministers could change everything at a whim and create uncertainty”.

When asked if the EU had got anything wrong in thee process, Mr Šefčovič did not identify any mistakes, instead focussing on the fact that Mr Johnson’s government had welcomed the deal after negotiating it line by line.

However, unlike some other EU figures, he admitted there were problems stemming from the protocol which were “cumbersome” for Northern Ireland.

Last year there was a report from EU inspectors who said that they wanted to see more checks between Great Britain and Northern Ireland, as well as more documentation, fees charged for firms moving food, plant or animal goods, and pets requiring more documentation and more checks when travelling with their owners.

When asked if he still wanted to see those processes, Mr Šefčovič said: “On all these issues, I would really just like to say that the solutions are there, but our impression is that the UK doesn’t want them.”

He cited the example of goods judged not at risk of going into the Irish Republic, where the UK agreed to a special sticker on them saying, ‘For sale in the UK only’. But he said nothing had happened and the vow had been broken. Laughing, he asked how it could be so difficult to put a sticker on goods when it was easy to put ‘three for the price of two’ stickers on products.

Firms in Northern Ireland are not being charged for the sea border bureaucracy — something EU law requires. Mr Šefčovič declined to be drawn on whether he wanted to see those charges introduced, saying that it was “very technical”.

When asked if the protocol could survive when unionism is overwhelmingly against it, Mr Šefčovič said he maintained contact with Sir Jeffrey Donaldson and had told him: “We are not looking for political victory in this discussion. We just want to sort out your practical issues.”

The EU has repeatedly said the protocol is required to protect the Good Friday Agreement, yet Lord Trimble, an architect of the deal, previously said the arrangement “rips the heart out of the agreement” — and all the surviving unionist negotiators of the deal agree with him.

When asked how he can say he knows more about how the agreement should be interpreted than the former first minister, Mr Šefčovič said: “I would not compete with such an important political leader who has done so much for peace. I’m not in competition with Mr Trimble.”

He said the EU had spent four years trying to find solutions with the UK, and “at the express wish of the British prime minister”, they had jointly concluded that the best solution was the protocol. He added that the EU was “in no way trying to interfere in the internal politics of Northern Ireland”.

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