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 KingstonMariner |
| February 6, 2021, 12:40am |
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Meths Drinker  Posts: 22,096
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| Through the door there came familiar laughter,
I saw your face and heard you call my name.
Oh my friend we're older but no wiser,
For in our hearts the dreams are still the same. |
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| DB |
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Barley Wine Drinker  Posts: 18,739
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Having read the article it reminded me of a TV program our ex MP Austin Mitchell did in, I believe, in Boulogne. The program was about undersize fish and the harbour master whose job it was to check the fish.
The harbour master came up with ridiculous answers for the under size fish pointed out to him. How do I know where the fish were caught, how do I know if the fish were caught on the boat you showed me, they could have been left there by someone else, etc. I think you see what was happening. They weren't interest in a common EU fish and just wanted to carry on as normal.
Today I think this is a lot of sour grapes especially by the French, and their bureaucracy. Macron's polls seem to have taken a dive and he needs support from anybody especially the French fishing industry, who I read some weeks ago were not Macron supporters.
Our government could underwrite any loses our fishing industry makes until this mess is sorted out. Our government could also introduce the same type of bureaucracy on French imports, re proof of each grape variety in each bottle of wine and any other produce.
As we know from the migrant crisis the French are not keen on helping us at all. As the Yanks say 'we have a situation' which can be resolved, how I'm not sure.
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| You can please some of the forumites some of the time but not all the forumites all of the time |
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Champagne Drinker  Posts: 2,342
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As David Stevens hauls up the nets on the Crystal Sea, his 24-metre trawler, he can see them writhing with john dory, dover sole, monkfish and plaice.
Having followed the shoals 20 miles south of the Isles of Scilly he’ll soon head back to Cornish waters to land his catch in Plymouth, where exporters are eager to supply their customers in Europe by the next day.
However, since Brexit the journey of a fish from British port to European plate has become increasingly protracted and risks sinking huge numbers of seafood businesses.
Having followed the shoals 20 miles south of the Isles of Scilly he’ll soon head back to Cornish waters to land his catch in Plymouth, where exporters are eager to supply their customers in Europe by the next day.
However, since Brexit the journey of a fish from British port to European plate has become increasingly protracted and risks sinking huge numbers of seafood businesses.
The price of fish has fallen by about 20 per cent in recent weeks as lorryloads of fresh seafood have got caught in a net of red tape trying to reach the Continent.
A range of new processes and paperwork is costing exporters precious time and money.
“At the moment we are being hit with extra costs while getting less for the fish and there are less people buying the fish because the delays at the borders are hitting customer confidence,” said Charlie Samways, of Samways Fish Merchants, a Dorset-based exporter.
To chart the complexities of the new export system The Times has spoken to businesses throughout the supply chain.
At sea
There are three main ways in which fish caught in British waters can travel to the EU. They are either landed in a UK port and sold at auction; landed in a UK port and sold directly to a buyer, or they are caught by a UK registered fishing boat and landed in an EU port.
“For us fishermen very little has changed in what we do but when the fish get to the exporters it’s causing them a lot of extra work and headaches,” Stevens said as he spoke over an internet connection from the rolling Atlantic.
“The only thing I’ve changed is switching to five-day trips instead of six days to compensate for the delays at the borders. We want the fish to be as fresh as they would be without the delays but the only thing I can do is deliver fresh fish to the market,” he added.
As before, fishing boats have to record their catches by location, species and weight in a daily log book to ensure they are staying within the rules on quotas.
When they return to shore and the catch is landed in the evening at an auction house or to a direct buyer, the captain must complete a landing declaration recording the fish they have brought to land for the Marine Management Organisation (MMO). This was also done before Brexit.
Landing the catch
Once the catch is landed it is graded by species, weight and quality and then a whole new series of certificates and processes created by Brexit kick into gear, running down the clock on delivery times and ratcheting up the cost to UK businesses.
The new catch certificates, export health certificates and customs agent packs are requirements that have been set and designed by the UK government to comply with EU rules, some of which were introduced into EU regulations under a British presidency.
Industry figures say that the UK government could have created a more integrated system instead of several standalone systems.
Before Brexit the exporters would simply buy the fish, process and package them and then transport them to their EU customers without any need for paperwork at the border.
“I don’t think in the last five years we were ever pulled over for inspection at the crossing,” Samways said. “It was like ‘nothing to declare’ at the airport.”
Samways Fish Merchants in Bridport, Dorset, has a £9 million turnover, of which 95 per cent is generated through exports. It buys fish from direct landings and at the three largest fish auctions in England, at Newlyn in Cornwall and in Brixham and Plymouth in Devon.
Since January 1, it now has to take its fish back to its processing unit and complete a catch certificate for each delivery being exported. This has to be validated digitally by the MMO. Each catch certificate has to record, as separate entries, detailed information about the species of fish, its weight and the boat that caught it.
“We have a lady in the office and she has to manually input that information onto a government website. It can take between one and two hours for a lorryload,” Samways said.
“For those like us transporting our own products in our own lorries it is easier than smaller exporters sharing a lorry with each other [a system called groupage], because then each delivery package needs their own certificates and if anything is wrong with one of them then the whole lorry gets held at the border.”
Samways, 25, who is the third generation involved in the family business, believes that catch certificates could become manageable if the process were digitised and more streamlined.
What appears less manageable are the export health certificates, which can run to about 50 pages per lorryload of fish.
These certificates have to be obtained from a local authority environmental health officer or even a certified vet for each delivery consignment. Much of the same data from the catch certificate has to be manually input again.
Additional checks are also carried out on the condition of the seafood as well as the packing, loading and sealing of the lorry. This is to certify that the fish being exported have met public health processes and the standards prescribed by the EU.
“It is yet another sheet that needs to be filled in by another member of staff. It’s maybe taking one to two hours for someone to complete,” Samways said. “A vet or environmental health officer has to come on site and manually ink stamp every page and sign and number every page. The ink has to be the correct colour.
“They also have to cross out every empty box that hasn’t been filled in. I have seen Vietnamese paperwork for exporting into the EU where the empty boxes have been digitally crossed out. Why haven’t we got that?”
The checks are done to notify the Animal and Plant Health Agency so that the certificate can be issued.
The fees charged by vets and health officers vary across the country and so do their interpretations of the requirements. The vet used by Samways charges about £450 for the three hours it takes to check per lorryload. They have heard of environmental health officers spending an hour doing the paperwork before leaving the exporter to finish the process on trust.
“We are asking people who are not specialists in seafood to sign off on seafood. It’s farcical,” Samways said.
Rodney Anderson, a consultant to the Plymouth fish auction and a former director of marine and fisheries at Defra between 2004 and 2008, said that Plymouth landed seafood from 350 boats and the bulk were smaller day boats under 20 metres.
“An exporter might buy from 20 different boats at one market and maybe from as many again at the two other markets in the southwest in a morning,” he said. “They will be buying a particular grade and species of fish. They will now end up with lots of bits of paper to process for each boat.”
Anderson said that the new system would favour the bigger fishing operators and exporters who buy and sell in single bulk quantities.
“The processes, costs and sheer inconvenience with documenting each consignment works against smaller boats and small processors,” he said.
Getting the deliveries on the road
After the hours spent completing the catch certificate and the export health certificate, and with the seafood still on site at the processing unit, the exporter needs to send an export pack to their customs agent, who they are legally required to pay to get their delivery across the border. Samways have paid customs agents €3,600 for their 16 deliveries so far.
The UK government accepted last year that companies would need to employ 50,000 additional customs agents after Brexit but industry figures suggest that less than a quarter of that number had been trained by the time Britain left the single market.
Exporters and auction houses have suffered daily delays of six to 15 hours
“The agents input the information into their software and it produces a barcode which it now takes about an hour to receive back but it was about four hours at the start,” Samways said. “Once we have got our barcodes we get our Kent access pass to get to Dover for the crossing.”
The Kent access permit is designed to avoid tailbacks near Dover and the Eurotunnel by stopping HGV drivers entering Kent without the correct documentation to meet the requirements of EU border control.
The haulage company, which can be the exporter using their own transport, must then collect up all the correctly signed and stamped documents and certificates from each exporter and for each consignment.
Getting through the border
Unexplained delays at the borders have been a nightmare for exporters and auction houses. They describe a complete lack of feedback from overwhelmed customs agents and the government as to why delays of six to 15 hours are happening on a daily basis.
“We are travelling into Dunkirk and essentially we have been held up every single day,” Samways said. “The only clarity we seem to have had is that the whole system was overwhelmed in the first four weeks of trading and they are now trying to train more customs officials and border staff to process this information faster and more efficiently.”
Goods have to pass through an EU-designated fisheries border control post, such as at Dunkirk and Boulogne-sur-Mer. The exporter must notify the post before arriving and have the correct customs documents to first get through Calais, which is not a border control post for seafood.
If a lorry containing a mix of exporters’ consignments has one mistake then all the consignments are held up.
Delivering to EU customers
Once through the border control post the lorryload may need to be split up to reach different buyers and the right documentation must go with the right consignments.
“The wider you go into Europe with your deliveries the more transporters and connections you are missing if you are delayed at the border, and the bigger the knock-on effect,” Samways said.
Britain will not enforce customs checks on EU goods until July
“Our business also depends on backloads, where you come back with a lorry full of food and produce to import into the UK, but because of delays at the border we are missing our slots for the backload deliveries and having to bring back empty lorries or waiting a day to get another backload.
“EU companies are starting to ask: how can UK importers and exporters be relied upon if we don’t know when we are going to clear the border? It tarnishes the name of your businesses.”
Getting back to the UK
Coming back through the UK border has proved seamless so far because the British government has given the EU until July before it starts enforcing customs checks.
“Even if they iron out these paperwork issues and the delays, once everything is working as well as it can, you still have all these extra burdens on time and cost,” Samways said.
“How are businesses operating on extremely fine margins supposed to accept all these additional costs? With Brexit we accepted there would be more costs and we would have to make sure our service was, if not the same, then better than pre-Brexit.
“But we are now asking customers to pay more for a worse service and not just slightly worse but much worse. We are saying you might get it Tuesday but it might be Wednesday or even Thursday.
“Our whole business plan for Brexit has been destroyed because we can’t give any clarity for our customers and we are not getting any clarity on what the hold-ups are.
“If we can get back to what it was like before and provide a premium service quickly to customers then I would like to think we could still be a profitable business.”
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“There's nothing wrong with the car except that it's on fire.”- Murray Walker
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| KingstonMariner |
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Meths Drinker Posts: 22,096
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So Johnson is presiding over the Balkanisation of the UK, 30 years after Yugoslavia fell apart. We even had longer as a United country than them - at least they only had 70 years to get stitched together as one country. We’ve had 3 times as long in the case of NI and over 4 times as long with the Anglo-Scottish Union. That’s some going.
Way to go Boris. Are you sure you’re ancestor was Turkish and not Russian? I mean ‘Boris’ is a bit of a giveaway. Talk about sleeper operation. Your dacha awaits.
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| Through the door there came familiar laughter,
I saw your face and heard you call my name.
Oh my friend we're older but no wiser,
For in our hearts the dreams are still the same. |
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| KingstonMariner |
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Meths Drinker Posts: 22,096
Posts Per Day: 6.08
Reputation: 79.33%
Rep Score: +42 / -11
Approval: +23,440
Gold Stars: 218
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Having read the article it reminded me of a TV program our ex MP Austin Mitchell did in, I believe, in Boulogne. The program was about undersize fish and the harbour master whose job it was to check the fish.
The harbour master came up with ridiculous answers for the under size fish pointed out to him. How do I know where the fish were caught, how do I know if the fish were caught on the boat you showed me, they could have been left there by someone else, etc. I think you see what was happening. They weren't interest in a common EU fish and just wanted to carry on as normal.
Today I think this is a lot of sour grapes especially by the French, and their bureaucracy. Macron's polls seem to have taken a dive and he needs support from anybody especially the French fishing industry, who I read some weeks ago were not Macron supporters.
Our government could underwrite any loses our fishing industry makes until this mess is sorted out. Our government could also introduce the same type of bureaucracy on French imports, re proof of each grape variety in each bottle of wine and any other produce.
As we know from the migrant crisis the French are not keen on helping us at all. As the Yanks say 'we have a situation' which can be resolved, how I'm not sure.
It may well be pettiness by the French. But the rules apply whichever EU country we want to export to. And before this year they couldn’t do this no matter how much they wanted to. It’s a problem that we’ve created for ourselves. This didn’t exist before. And it just proves the old saying. Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer. |
| Through the door there came familiar laughter,
I saw your face and heard you call my name.
Oh my friend we're older but no wiser,
For in our hearts the dreams are still the same. |
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| KingstonMariner |
| February 6, 2021, 10:12pm |
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Meths Drinker Posts: 22,096
Posts Per Day: 6.08
Reputation: 79.33%
Rep Score: +42 / -11
Approval: +23,440
Gold Stars: 218
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| Through the door there came familiar laughter,
I saw your face and heard you call my name.
Oh my friend we're older but no wiser,
For in our hearts the dreams are still the same. |
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| KingstonMariner |
|
Meths Drinker Posts: 22,096
Posts Per Day: 6.08
Reputation: 79.33%
Rep Score: +42 / -11
Approval: +23,440
Gold Stars: 218
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| Through the door there came familiar laughter,
I saw your face and heard you call my name.
Oh my friend we're older but no wiser,
For in our hearts the dreams are still the same. |
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| lew chaterleys lover |
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Those bloody leftist remoaner businessmen clearly know nothing about the business that they’re in. They should stop moaning about a messily 65% drop in exports to the EU. https://amp.theguardian.com/po.....d-by-68-since-brexit
That headline is a bit misleading. The drop in exports to the EU was partly due, obviously, to extra paperwork which as the article says will sort itself out over time, but the main reasons are the pandemic and the fact that companies stockpiled prior to Brexit in case of any difficulties including no deal. The port of Dover has already announced that the volume of trade has been on an upward trajectory since early January when most of the problems occurred, and is already back to 90% of normal, even in these difficult times with covid and drivers needing a negative test. Companies will always find a way to trade, and teething problems with the new arrangements will be ironed out and lucrative new markets to explore outside of the EU. You could be forgiven for thinking the Guardian was putting an anti Brexit slant on things. |
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| KingstonMariner |
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Meths Drinker Posts: 22,096
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Approval: +23,440
Gold Stars: 218
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| Through the door there came familiar laughter,
I saw your face and heard you call my name.
Oh my friend we're older but no wiser,
For in our hearts the dreams are still the same. |
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 Humbercod |
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