BEYOND BORDERS

A couple of months after Britain finally took its great leap into the unknown, many businesses are still waiting to see where they will land. Others fear they have lost their footing for good

JILL BUTTER

Nothing much has changed. At least that is the view from sitting in lockdown in my flat in West London, as winter gives way to the first stirrings of spring.

My local supermarkets (in London, not Belfast) still have a decent supply of fresh fruit and vegetables from Spain. There’s been no need to modify my winter tangerine- or broccoli-buying habits. There are not obviously any more “out-of-stock” signs now than pre-Brexit or pre-pandemic. I haven’t tried to order anything online since Christmas, so for me at least, nothing’s gone awry there. Walking around the park, there still seem to be substantial numbers of EU citizens who haven’t joined the exodus from London. My brother got a blue-black passport when he renewed his old burgundy one, though he hasn’t had a chance to use it yet.

Casting my eyes up from my flat, some of the starkest problems that we were warned could arise have not come to pass. The 7,000 lorries backed up in Kent, a possibility laid out in Michael Gove’s “reasonable worst case scenario” last autumn, have not dominated our screens. The only time there were any newsworthy logjams was when we were still in the EU single market, in December, and those were seemingly due to a combination of pre-end-of-transition stockpiling and the French border closure, which was down to the new Covid variant rather than our breach from the EU. In one sense, Brexit proved handy: thanks to earlier fears of a disorderly no-deal departure, we had some overspill lorry parks prepared.

But the experience of a coddled think-tanker should not disguise the fact that the Trade and Cooperation Agreement, reached with the EU on Christmas Eve, is the first free trade agreement in history whose objective is to make trade less free-and on that score it has been an undeniable success. It has erected some very real barriers between the UK and the EU, as well as between Great Britain and Northern Ireland. The important question about how Brexit is going concerns the experience in and around these new barriers.

Freight pain

Businesses are already reporting a range of difficulties in moving stuff into the EU. There are lots of new forms to fill in and new systems to get to grips with. They were advised by the government to appoint a customs agent (advisers with knowledge of trade-not the people who check your suitcase at the border) to help navigate such procedures. But these are private businesses. Some exporters will be unable to shell out for relevant expertise, even if they can find it. Businesses that have only previously traded within the EU have not had to use such agents before, and now all of a sudden need similar help at once: there aren’t yet enough agents with the necessary know-how to go round. Over time, however, the number of experienced agents and exporters will grow. This may be a genuine example of what the government dubs “teething problems.”