Next to Portsmouth International Port’s container terminal, just a few hundred meters from the shore, is a new high-tech border checkpoint.
Built over the past 18 months at a cost of £25 million, a cost shared by the taxpayer and the port’s owner, Portsmouth City Council, the high-spec facility is due to be in its first week of use, handling post-Brexit checks on animal imports, plant and forest products arriving from the EU.
However, the building stands empty and quiet since the government’s decision in April to delay, possibly forever, the introduction of physical checks on fresh EU meat, fruit, vegetables and plants.
The facility was completed ahead of the government’s previous and much-delayed July 1 start date for the new border measures.
The government is now working on a new operating model for imports – due to be published in the autumn and come into force at the end of 2023 – following the announcement by Brexit options minister Jacob Rees-Mogg in late April that all checks and documents at the border will be digitized.
The decision has left ports such as Portsmouth counting the costs and wondering what to do with their impressive but redundant multi-million pound white elephants.
The British Ports Association (BPA), an industry lobby group, estimates that £550 million of taxpayers’ money has been spent on these now mostly unwanted new border control facilities.
This includes £300m spent on buildings at ports, as well as an estimated £250m spent by the government on building 10 inland border facilities in places such as Dover and Holyhead where there is no room for a terminal checkpoint. These buildings will hardly be repurposed.
“It was designed specifically for government inspections, nothing else,” said Mike Sellers, director of the Port of Portsmouth International.
“The cheapest option would be to tear it down. Occupies two acres of operational land; we’re not blessed with a lot of land, so that’s a big problem for us in terms of operations.”
Mike Sellers, Director Portsmouth International. Photo: Jill Mead/The Guardian
The port would make money from the border checkpoint by charging importers fees for inspecting goods. Under the grant agreement negotiated with the government, Sellers said the port cannot currently use the facility for other commercial reasons.
Even if this were allowed, reconfiguring it for another use would be time-consuming and expensive.
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Portsmouth, along with 40 other ports, received £200m of funding for the new checkpoints through the Government’s Ports Infrastructure Fund. However, this was exceeded, prompting the ports themselves to pay around £100 million to make up the shortfall.
Portsmouth, the UK’s second busiest port across the Channel, applied for £32 million in funding and received £17.1 million.
It subsequently changed its plans to cut costs, but Portsmouth City Council took out a loan to cover the £7.8m shortfall.
The council’s leader, Gerald Vernon-Jackson, said he was “left footing the bill for the government” and faced paying back loans and interest at a time of stretched budgets.
“The most serious issue is the phenomenal cost the council has had to bear,” Vernon-Jackson said. “We have no way of recouping the costs and no offer of financial support from the government.”
The port estimates it will cost £1m a year to keep the facility running, even in a preserved state.
Designed to handle “high-risk” products such as meat as well as plants and trees, the Portsmouth facility has 14 truck bays, as well as sterile areas and quarantine areas with airlocks designed to prevent any cross-contamination between different categories of goods.
Inside the facility. Photo: Jill Mead/The Guardian
Nearly 70 workers, including port health staff, vets and port operators, are expected to work at the facility, inspecting goods 365 days a year, alongside staff from the government’s Animal and Plant Health Agency and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs . The port health officers were already employed.
When the Guardian visited on Tuesday, workers were laying the final pavers outside the building. Inside, the freezers – which would have been used to store meat products during the inspection process – were tested and operated at a chilly -20C (-4F) degrees.
Stephen Morgan, Labor MP for Portsmouth South, wrote to Rees-Mogg to express his concerns about spending public money on border control facilities that may not be needed.
Rees-Mogg said in response that the government would work with the port to “identify ways to minimize such costs or to recover costs where possible”.
The Guardian understands that government officials have visited the Portsmouth facility in recent days as ministers explore other potential uses for the border facilities.
Portsmouth City Council is calling on ministers to restore its original funding shortfall and give them clarity on whether border checkpoints will ever be needed.
When the Government announced the U-turn on the introduction of import checks, Rees-Mogg said it was to avoid extra costs for British businesses and consumers during the cost of living crisis.
“The decision to delay and change SPS is probably the right one for the freight industry and the economy,” said Richard Ballantyne, BPA chief executive.
“But from the port operator’s point of view, it came two years too late.”
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