Jim Shannon

It is a real pleasure to serve under your chairship, Dr Huq. I thank my right hon. Friend the Member for East Antrim (Sammy Wilson) for his continued dedication to highlighting the absurdity of the Windsor framework and the need for an end to this disastrous mechanism. All hon. Members who speak in this debate have outlined and will outline the barriers that affect business across the whole of Northern Ireland. We are aware of the problems that we are raising, but I urge the Government to fully consider their impact. The Minister is a good man; he listens, and always tries to respond, so we look forward to his response on behalf of Government. The Government will say that this is only a small additional bit of paperwork to do, and that businesses should be able to comply with the two-lane system and the administration, but the fact is that, while they could comply, it is more hassle, so at the system’s worst they are simply not complying. I will give two examples that affect households throughout Northern Ireland. Morris & Son Ltd specialise in near-date sales and clearance lines that are cheaper and enable shops to pass on deals. Morris Ltd has said that the product margins on such products are too small to justify the time it takes to administer the additional protocols, when it can sell with no hassle on the GB mainland. I do not say this to shame Morris Ltd, because that is not what this is about; the shame is on the current and the previous Governments for not rectifying the issue, but the losers are those on low incomes, who used to be able to get a good deal on short-dated stock. The constituents of every hon. Member in this House can take advantage of that, barring my constituents in Strangford and people in other constituencies of Northern Ireland. At a time when food inflation stands at 4.5%, and is predicted to be 5.1% by the end of this year, why should my constituents, and people across Northern Ireland, not be able to take advantage of those offers? The hon. Member for North Down (Alex Easton) referred to dog treats: cheaper companies will not pay the vet fees to go through the shipments line by line. I heard Roger Pollen, from the Federation of Small Businesses, doing an interview at the end of June, in which he highlighted that 1,000 Marks & Sparks products have to be re-labelled, and 400 M&S items have been moved into the red lane—all that when Government had promised us that things would get easier, instead of getting worse. When M&S is struggling with the complexity, why would small retailers such as Morris & Son Ltd waste time and money? The fact is they will not, they are not, and my constituents are the losers. We were promised the rewards of a dual market, yet there has been no drive to entice business to come in and make the most of that supposed draw. The reason is that no one can actually quantify what the benefits are, and how we can assess them. The Minister is a good man. We all know that. He always tries to be helpful. We have posed a lot of questions, and hopefully he can give us some answers. I urge him to go to the Cabinet to arrange a meeting with the EU to end this nonsense once and for all. Small businesses are crying out, and it is now affecting big business, which is where it gets even more difficult, but what is worst of all is that my constituents and all the other Northern Ireland constituents are paying more for their products than people on the mainland, and wondering why they are paying the price for Europe to maintain its death grip. End that death grip, Minister. Make the changes and end it soon, before small businesses are choked to death.