Built over the past 18 months at a cost of £25m, a cost shared by the taxpayer and the port’s owner, Portsmouth City Council, the high-end facility should be in its opening week of operation, handling post-Brexit checks on imports animal, plant and forest products arriving from the E.U. The building remains empty and silent, however, following the government’s decision in April to delay, perhaps for good, the EU’s introduction of physical inspections on fresh meat, fruit, vegetables and plants. The installation was completed ahead of the government’s earlier and long-delayed July 1 start date for the new border measures. The government is now working on a new operating model for imports – which will be published in the autumn and come into force at the end of 2023 – after Brexit opportunities minister Jacob Rees-Mogg announced in late April that all controls and documents at the border will be digitized. The decision has left ports such as Portsmouth counting the costs and wondering what to do with their impressive but unnecessary multi-million pound white elephants. The British Ports Association (BPA), an industry lobby group, estimates that £550 million of taxpayers’ money has been spent on these most unwanted new border control facilities. This includes the £300m spent on buildings at ports, as well as the £250m spent by the Government on building 10 facilities at internal borders, in places such as Dover and Holyhead where there is no room for a checkpoint next to terminal station. These buildings will be difficult to reuse. “It’s designed specifically for government inspections, nothing else,” said Mike Sellers, director of Portsmouth International Port. “The cheapest option would be to demolish it. It occupies two acres of business land. we’re not blessed with a lot of land, so it’s a big problem for us in terms of business.” Mike Sellers, director of Portsmouth International Port. Photo: Jill Mead/The Guardian The port would have made money from the border control station by charging importers fees for checking goods. Under the grant fund agreement agreed with the government, Sellers said the port was currently unable to use the facility for other commercial purposes. Even if this were allowed, it would be time-consuming and expensive to reconfigure for another use. Subscribe to the Business Today daily email or follow Guardian Business on Twitter @BusinessDesk Portsmouth, along with 40 other ports, received £200m of funding for the new control stations through the Government’s Port Infrastructure Fund. However, this was oversubscribed, resulting in the ports themselves paying around £100m to cover the shortfall. Portsmouth, the UK’s second busiest port, applied for £32 million in funding and received £17.1 million. It then amended its plans to cut costs, but Portsmouth Council took out a loan to cover the £7.8m shortfall. The council’s leader, Gerald Vernon-Jackson, said it was “left to pay the government’s bill” and faced repaying loans and interest at a time of bloated budgets. “The most serious issue is the staggering cost the council has had to absorb,” Vernon-Jackson said. “We have no way of recouping the costs and no offer of financial support from the government.” The port estimates it will cost £1m a year to keep the facility running, even in mothballed condition. Built to handle ‘high-risk’ products such as meat as well as plants and trees, the Portsmouth facility has 14 truck bays, as well as sterile areas and air-locked quarantine zones designed to prevent any cross-contamination between different categories of goods . . Inside the premises. Photo: Jill Mead/The Guardian Nearly 70 workers, including health staff, vets and porters, were expected to work at the facility, checking goods 365 days a year, along with officials from the government’s Animal and Plant Health Service and the Ministry of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. Dock health officers had already been hired. When the Guardian visited on Tuesday, workers were laying the final stones outside the building. Inside, the freezers – which would have been used to store meat products during the inspection process – were tested and operated at -20 degrees Celsius (-4F). Stephen Morgan, the Labor MP for Portsmouth South, wrote to Rees-Mogg to express his concern about public money being wasted on building border control facilities that may not be needed. Rees-Mogg said in response that the government would work with the port to “identify ways to minimize such costs or recover costs, if possible”. The Guardian understands that government officials have visited the Portsmouth facility in recent days, while ministers are exploring other possible uses for the border facility. Portsmouth City Council is calling on ministers to compensate it for the initial funding shortfall and give them clarity on whether border control stations will ever be needed. When the government announced its reversal on the introduction of import controls, Rees-Mogg said it was to avoid imposing additional costs on British businesses and consumers during a cost-of-living crisis. “The decision to postpone and reform sanitary and phytosanitary controls is probably the right one for the commodity industry and the economy,” said Richard Ballantyne, chief executive of the BPA. “But from a port operator’s point of view, this was two years late.”
