Brexit: Lorry drivers ‘need 700 pages of documents partly written in Latin’ to export UK goods to EU

Brexit red tape is far worse for British exports to the EU than to Northern Ireland, a store chief is warning – with some documentation having to be completed in Latin and in a particular typeface.

Archie Norman, the chair of Marks & Spencer, revealed the mountain of bureaucracy that is making international trade impossible for small producers and is leading many to give up entirely.

The UK is preparing legislation to shred the Northern Ireland protocol, arguing that talks with the EU have failed to make the progress necessary to remove costly red tape.

But Mr Norman said that exports from Britain to Northern Ireland were currently able to avoid the quagmire thanks to a temporary grace period.

“At the moment we’re pretty much OK in Northern Ireland,” he said, though he warned that it requires 700 pages of documentation to send a “wagon” to the Republic of Ireland, which it takes eight hours to complete.

Mr Norman said that the 30 per cent increase in driver time, along with the need to employ vets in Scotland to oversee the process, has cost the company an extra £30m.

“We had our business exporting into France; we’ve had to close that because of customs rules,” he told BBC Radio 4.

“We have a big business in the Republic of Ireland, which we very much want to continue, but it’s proving very tough to make it work.”

Mr Norman said that companies exporting to Northern Ireland will be facing the same plight if talks with Brussels over the protocol fail. “The EU proposal is that we should have to do the same background checks to go into Northern Ireland,” he said.

London and Brussels are at loggerheads over the matter, with each side accusing the other of refusing to compromise in order to reach a deal that would avoid the worst of the extra bureaucracy.

Instead, Mr Johnson is pressing ahead with unilateral action to override the protocol that he himself agreed and hailed as “fantastic” in 2019. The proposed action by the government is almost certainly in breach of international law.

In Brussels on Monday, the prime minister came as close has he ever has to accepting responsibility for the crisis and for the risk of a trade war with the UK’s largest market.

Asked if the situation was “a direct consequence of the deal you signed”, the prime minister replied: “Yes, absolutely.”

Mr Norman was asked if the UK could reach a wider “shorter-term or time-limited deal” with the EU in order to ease the wider trading crisis that has been developing since the UK left the EU.

But he told the BBC: “I think that train has probably left the station, and right now the priority is to solve the problem in Northern Ireland.”

The government has declined to seek to fill in the gaps in the Brexit trade deal – despite a renewed warning from the Bank of England that it will swipe 3.25 per cent from the UK’s GDP over the medium term.

Mr Norman added: “At the moment, in Northern Ireland, we’ve got what’s called an easement, so the controls aren’t the same.

“But the EU are looking 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.”