A right Irish stew
Brexit red tape , Issue 1542 ONE of the many large numbers that didn’t appear on the side of any bus before the Brexit referendum was the cost of customs red tape required to move goods from Great Britain to Northern Ireland.

Last August, as it became clear that promises of free-flowing trade after the transition period were nonsense, the government unveiled “a new free-to-use Trader Support Service [TSS] backed by funding of up to £200m [to] complete digital processes on behalf of businesses importing goods into Northern Ireland”.

An old friend
By the time a hasty procurement process for operating the service had been completed, the contract had already gone over budget by 20 percent. Awarded to IT botcher par excellence Fujitsu (of Post Office IT and lost police records infamy – Eyes passim), the contract is valued at £241m and will run for a couple of years.

By that time the government will have spent a further £155m on “new technology to ensure the new processes can be fully digital and streamlined”, and traders will have no trouble dealing with the bureaucracy themselves.
(Of course they won’t. Ed.)

Volume controls
So, how is this new support service going? About as well as would be expected based on Fujitsu’s record, as the Commons Northern Ireland select committee heard last month. Sarah Hards, an executive from County Antrim-based distribution company AM Nexday, reported how “volumes of freight have really dropped” due to difficulties in getting lorries in from Great Britain, “so we are running trailers back to Northern Ireland empty or leaving them in GB”.

That’s the bit the TSS should be helping with, especially when it comes to trickier “groupage” freight – when a lorry contains more than one consignment of goods, typically for smaller exporters.

“While they pick up the phone and are very pleasant,” explained Ms Hards of the TSS operatives, “I feel like their training just has not been in-depth enough… They have been brought into this role and have no previous experience in customs or logistics whatsoever, so they really sometimes fail to grasp what you are talking about, even after a long conversation.” It would, she added, “be good to have someone on the TSS with customs experience or from a logistical background”.

Passing the parcel
The “service” follows a now familiar pattern of addressing a big problem by finding an external consultancy that stuffs the job with people who don’t know what they’re doing.

What details have been released of the Fujitsu contract show it anticipates sub-contracting 72 percent of the work – to whom, nobody knows. Thus does another large, unmentioned Brexit bill land on the taxpayer’s doormat.