Member

Of course, it should be stated that the reason we are even debating how goods are moved between one part of the United Kingdom and another is the deplorable situation that Northern Ireland now finds itself in, where our country is divided by a customs border due to the implementation of the protocol/Windsor Framework accepted by the previous Government. The reality is that there is no such need for any kind of legislation or processes for moving goods between London and Edinburgh or from Cardiff to Bristol or anything else like that; we are part of one country. Yet when it comes to Northern Ireland, for the first time, we have a situation where a panoply of complex, difficult, hard to understand and operate rules are in place, to the extent that the Government have had to put in place a traders’ support service, which up to now has cost over £0.5 billion, to help people move goods within the United Kingdom—this at a time when the Northern Ireland Executive are really strapped for cash in terms of hospitals, infrastructure and everything else.