M&S chair attacks ‘pointless’ post-Brexit rules for Northern Ireland

theguardian.com:

The chairman of Marks & Spencer has backed government plans to override parts of the Northern Ireland protocol, saying that some food exported south of the border now requires 700 pages of customs documents, partly written in Latin.

Archie Norman, a former Conservative MP, called on the UK government and EU to come to an agreement, saying the rules for sending food between them were “highly bureaucratic and pretty pointless” given that British food standards were in line with or higher than those of Brussels.

He said the UK government’s proposal to override parts of the agreement signed as part of Boris Johnson’s Brexit deal and remove checks on goods crossing the Irish Sea was a “triumph of common sense over rules-based mentality” and “will make sure at a time of inflation that the Northern Ireland people can get the fresh food they are used to and are entitled to”.

Norman told the BBC that since Brexit, exporting to Ireland now took 30% more driver time and required the employment of 13 vets in Motherwell, Scotland, to oversee the required checks and paperwork, costing M&S an additional £30m. “It’s very onerous,” he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

The protocol requires similar rules to be imposed on goods travelling between mainland UK and Northern Ireland because of its border with the Republic of Ireland, but the checks are currently being held off under a series of “easements”.

Removing those easements would mean “that every piece of butter in a sandwich has to have an EU vet’s certificate”, Norman said.

“The EU are looking for us to impose comparable controls for Northern Ireland and were that to happen it would mean that quite a lot of products from the UK simply wouldn’t get to Northern Ireland and what does go