Tracking lorries won't solve Irish border issue, hauliers say

The use of tracking devices on lorries crossing the Irish border after Brexit would bepointless, the Brexit secretary, David Davis, has been told during a hastily arranged visit to Northern Ireland.

The Freight Trade Association told Davis that knowing when a lorry crossed the border would serve no purpose and that the idea was not a potential solution to the problematic border issue.

“We told him that it doesn’t work and is a non-starter,” said Seamus Lehany, the head of the Freight Trade Association in Northern Ireland.

“A haulier could lift a full trailer in Birmingham but it could contain 40 different consignments from 40 different producers. Then it comes to Northern Ireland and is broken down with mixed loads on different trucks going to different places, so a tracking device telling you the original truck had crossed a border doesn’t tell you anything,” said Lehany.

“The Irish border situation is complicated, with physical and political constraints that need careful consideration before a workable solution can be found,” he added.

The Brexit secretary met business representatives in Stormont on Sunday as part of his cabinet team’s research into the “max-fac” (maximum facilitation) customs systems he favours for UK borders with the EU after Brexit.

Davis was accompanied by the Northern Ireland secretary, Karen Bradley, and the business secretary, Greg Clark.

One haulier at the meeting, William Dennison, said Davis repeatedly told them there would not be any infrastructure on the border. “If there was going to be no hard border why were we having a meeting?” said Dennison, who transports furniture across Ireland for companies including DFS and Marks & Spencer.

“We told them that customs was only the tip of the iceberg and the biggest problem was sanitary and phytosanitary checks on agrifood. Twenty per cent of meat has to be checked and 50% of chicken,” said Lehany.

The FTA also pointed out that an invisible border raised the prospect of Northern Ireland becoming a smuggler’s paradise for goods that were cheaper in the UK.

“So if TVs are cheaper in the UK, for example, they can come over to Northern Ireland [and] next thing they are in Dublin and in no time at all in France. The EU won’t tolerate that,” said Lehany.

Jennifer McKeever, the president of the Derry chamber of commerce, said: “Ninety per cent of our 400 members want to remain in the customs union and the single market and they are looking for pragmatic solutions from a starting position that we don’t agree with.

“They need to understand businesses are people: people run businesses, their customers are people. We asked them to try to understand this and suggested if they imagined what would happen if they put a border down the middle of Glasgow or Leeds or Birmingham, they could get to understand what the impact of a border is.”