My Lords, again, I thank all noble Lords and—almost exclusively—Baronesses for their valuable contributions to this debate. I laid out the need for this SI in my opening remarks. I will try to address some of the questions and concerns that have been raised.
I will turn first to the issue of Dover, which the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, raised. It is a really important point that has been conflated in multiple different ways, and is being used rather unhelpfully to demonstrate what is not happening. Before the introduction of the BTOM, the Government provided a level of financial and other support to Dover Port Health Authority to assist with checks at the Port of Dover for the narrow straits. That was a significant sum of money: £3.5 million a year, and quite a lot of additional bits and pieces.
At the time of developing the BTOM model, we looked very carefully at how it might work at the Port of Dover. We explored the Bastion Point option, which is also quite close to the Port of Dover but not actually there. We also looked very closely at Sevington, which, as we all know, is some 21 or 22 miles further up the road. The analysis and outcome of that very detailed process showed extremely clearly that it is impossible to have a border control post at Dover.
We could have gone with a combined Bastion Point and Sevington option, but if anybody has been to Bastion Point, they will know that it is in an industrial park just outside Dover and that the access is terrible. The confusion would be appalling and the cost to have a split facility would be much greater, so the decision was taken to take the whole border control post to Sevington.
I get questioned a lot that this does not make any sense, because Sevington is 22 miles away. How on earth can that be safe? This is where the conflation of different thoughts and ideas comes together, and it needs to be disentangled. Anybody importing several pigs in the back of a white van that have been slaughtered in Poland is not going to comply with our import controls. They are not going to sign up with an IPAFFS, get a veterinary certificate, register on the system and come into the Port of Dover, saying, “Here I am; do I go to Sevington or do I carry on?” as part of our risk-based model for all other products. These are illegal imports, which are dealt with by Border Force, not border control posts. We have been funding Border Force in the Dover Port Health Authority to deal with that issue, which is largely around African swine fever and pigs—the pork industry.
Border Force also deals with drugs, guns and a range of other things, so the Dover Port Health Authority has been supported financially to assist Border Force. We are now taking the new function of the risk-based border target operating model and moving it away from the Port of Dover, because it cannot be done there, given the logistics of large lorries having to be checked at the port. The whole thing would be clogged from end to end: it would simply not be possible. I accept that, if we were starting this entire process with a clean piece of paper and no infrastructure on the south coast of England, we would probably not do it this way. But, in the absence of being able to flatten Dover and build a border control post there, we really do not have many options.
I am very sympathetic to Natalie Elphicke’s issues at Dover. In all honesty, it has been a real challenge dealing with the port health authority and the council down there—they have been extraordinarily unco-operative and, in my opinion, have deliberately provided misinformation about the fact that we are reducing the £3.5 million to £1.5 million because we are taking that whole function away from them and asking them, with the residual £1.5 million, to provide a different level of support to the Border Force arrangements at Dover. These are very separate issues. I know it takes a while to get your head round them, and it does not sound very intuitive, but it is important to try to get those two bits and pieces disentangled.
I am very happy to take any other questions on Dover, Sevington and what we are doing down there as a separate issue; I will not clog up today’s debate any further on that.
I will start by addressing the general concerns expressed about consultation, particularly with the Horticultural Trades Association and others. There has been, as I think everybody will recognise, extensive consultation on this. It predates my time in office very considerably and, since I took up office at the end of last year, I forget how many conversations and meetings I have had with the HTA. The chairman of the HTA, James Barnes, is a friend of mine who rings me up pretty much daily on this issue. I am acutely aware that this issue is of concern to the association, but we have signalled that we would do this for a very long time. In fact, we have had several false starts, so this should not be any surprise to anybody.
Furthermore, I have been explicit in all of those consultations with the HTA and others that this is not nought to 60 in one go: we are not going from nothing to everything in one go. We are looking to phase in a way of improving biosecurity on goods coming into this country. We will take a pragmatic approach to that process and we are in control of the number of people we pull in for inspections. We will not pull in everybody for inspection on day 1, because this will obviously take a little time to bed in.
I have been down to Sevington, looked at the facilities there and spoken to the staff. I have looked at the training being given to them, which is a concern of the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, who asked, “Who does this? Is it just a random person?” No, we have done a lot of training and a lot of work has gone into this. So we are ready for business at Sevington, which is the main short straits point. It really has been an extensive exercise in communications training. We have done a lot of recruitment and built a purpose-built facility at Sevington for this. I have been down there, and noble Lords are welcome to come down and have a look at it. It really is incredibly impressive. If they visited, I hope it would allay many of the concerns raised about possible cross-contamination or delays or issues that will go on in that space, because it will take a bit of bedding in. I am not saying it will be entirely smooth on day 1, but we have put an awful lot of effort into this.
Just to go back to conversations with the HTA, one of the things we put in place is a hotline with the team in Defra directly to the HTA and the NFU, for the week preceding 30 April and any amount of time thereafter until those concerns are allayed, to say, “Look, we know we’re going to get some teething problems here, so let’s get them fed in directly”, so that we have the process in place to unravel those difficulties and smooth them through. Absolutely the last thing the Government want to do is to create a delay to trade, which would cause all the sorts of issues that the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, raised, which would then cause issues around compensation and all the rest of it. We do not want to go there. We want to manage the process and build it up slowly. We will definitely go through a bedding-in process here. We will not go from one end of the spectrum to the other in one go.
I hope that that general background allays some of those concerns. Again, I would be delighted to take any further questions. If anybody would like to, I suggest a visit to any of those facilities so that noble Lords can look for themselves.
I put my hands up on the common user charge: I totally accept that it is late in the day for letting these guys know. I have been in business—I ran a retail business for 15 years—and I cannot comprehend how the Government thought it would be a good idea to let these guys know just six weeks beforehand. It has happened; we cannot go backwards; it is there. In mitigation, it is within the consultation parameters that were set, and what was coming was pretty well signalled to everybody. We have put a cap on those charges to allay some of the fears that were rightly expressed by a lot of those organisations.
There were a number of comments from the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell, on the charges, full cost recovery and the waiving of charges. What I have in my notes on the question of whether the SI removes the commitment of competent authorities to do cost recovery is that the answer is no. There is still a commitment to cost recovery. The existing provisions in the official control regulations also still specify that charges should not exceed costs. This remains untouched, so it is not a profit-making exercise.
To reference that back to the other questions on what happens at non-governmental border control posts, commercial operators elsewhere are free to set their charges where they want. They have obviously all been waiting to see what our common user charge is; they will want to align with that because, if they do not, people will simply choose not to go there. If they simply price themselves out of the market, that will not work. Our analysis of our own cost recovery process should be comparable to their own. I think that the charges are in the right place. They will also remain under review on a very regular basis, following the first tranche of information that we get.
I hope that that also answers the questions from the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell, on the impact on smaller businesses. This is a flat charge across all businesses; it does not differentiate between large or small, but we hope that it is within the right range.
The noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, asked a number of questions around readiness for 30 April. I hope I addressed them in my earlier comments. Again, if there are any questions that she would like to ask on that or the staffing arrangements, I would be very happy to take them.
That covers all the questions that I have written down here, I think. If I have missed anybody’s questions, I will of course be delighted to write to them in future. I hope everybody shares my view that these instruments are absolutely necessary. As I have outlined, they facilitate the implementation of the border target operating model, which I think we have all agreed is a necessary biosecurity process, and are necessary to enable the relevant import controls and associated fees on imported sanitary and phytosanitary goods.
With that, I commend these instruments to the Committee.