Britain to take light-touch approach to enforcing customs rules with North

British authorities will take a light-touch approach to enforcing new customs rules on businesses trading between Great Britain and Northern Ireland, officials have told MPs.

Aidan Reilly, director for customs and border design at HM Customs and Revenue (HMRC) told the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee at Westminster that many traders would find the new procedures unfamiliar.

“We will of course want to be sympathetic to traders in the early days of the regime who are trying to do the right thing but are not clear on what exactly they need to do,” he said.

HMRC estimates the Northern Ireland protocol will require 11 million customs declarations a year, although other estimates put the figure at 30 million.

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Northern Ireland secretary Brandon Lewis told the House of Commons on Wednesday that Britain was committed to fulfilling its obligations under the protocol while ensuring unfettered access for the North’s businesses to the market in Great Britain.

“We are pushing hard to secure agreement with the EU on a number of outstanding issues that relate to the protocol, including that of at-risk goods. We accept that tariffs should be paid on goods moving from Great Britain into the EU, but there should not be any tariffs on internal UK movements that begin in Great Britain and end in Northern Ireland; they are internal movements,” he said.

“We have accepted the sanitary and phytosanitary checks. We are working with the EU, and both the UK and EU have committed to that intensified process, as colleagues will have seen, and to resolving all outstanding issues with the implementation of the Northern Ireland protocol, including securing the flexibilities that we need for trade from Great Britain to Northern Ireland.”

Mr Lewis defended his government’s intention to restore treaty-breaking clauses into the Internal Market Bill when it returns to the Commons next week.

The Lords removed clauses that would allow British ministers to breach the Brexit withdrawal agreement by determining unilaterally how the Northern Ireland protocol is implemented.

“Actually, what those clauses have been about is ensuring that we have unfettered access for Northern Ireland businesses to Great Britain. That is something inherent in the protocol. It plays a part in delivering on one of the key sentences in the first few paragraphs in the Northern Ireland protocol that says we will ensure that we do not disrupt the everyday lives of people in their communities,” Mr Lewis said.

“That is what those clauses are about, as an insurance policy, but obviously our main focus and aim is to secure the right agreement for a wider free trade agreement with the EU, and, indeed, to work with the specialist Joint Committee.”