UK delays post-Brexit checks on goods entering Great Britain from Ireland

LONDON — The U.K. government is delaying post-Brexit checks due January 1 on goods entering Great Britain from the island of Ireland.

Under plans announced in September, goods entering the U.K. from the EU will be subject to customs and food-safety controls as well as safety and security declarations.

But the U.K.’s Brexit Minister David Frost announced Wednesday that controls on goods moving directly into Great Britain from Northern Ireland or the Republic of Ireland will be delayed, and recognized implementing them now would be “particularly complex.”

Frost said checks on imports from the island of Ireland will not be introduced until the U.K.’s talks with the EU on the Northern Ireland protocol are resolved. Discussions, which have intensified in the last couple of weeks, are expected to extend into the new year.

“The government believes that this pragmatic act of goodwill can help to maintain space for continued negotiations on the Protocol,” Frost said. “It also ensures that traders in both Ireland and Northern Ireland are not faced with further uncertainty while the Protocol arrangements themselves are still under discussion.”

During the Brexit negotiations, the U.K. government committed to “unfettered access” for goods entering Great Britain from Northern Ireland, but one year after leaving the EU it is still unclear how this policy pledge will be delivered in practice.

Raoul Ruparel, a former Brexit adviser under former Prime Minister Theresa May, said the delay is a “sensible decision” given the lack of a definition for goods qualifying for unfettered access from Northern Ireland to Great Britain.

But Anton Spisak, policy lead at the Tony Blair Institute, said the move shows Prime Minister Boris Johnson might struggle to sustain the “the myth of sovereignty” that helped him rise to power. “It will keep running into the hard realities of political economy until it exhausts itself,” he added.

The decision to postpone some of the checks come a day after the head of the International Monetary Fund, Kristalina Georgieva, said Britain is braced for more EU trade disruption due to the planned checks coming into force in January.

Last month the National Audit Office, the public spending watchdog, said the U.K. was not ready to introduce controls on EU imports next year. It warned British ports do not yet have the infrastructure needed to carry out such checks because of uncertainty regarding the nature of arrangements that need to be put in place, difficulties finding the right locations for the necessary facilities and funding uncertainty in the case of sites in Scotland and Wales.

* This article was originally published here