OFFICIAL REPORT (Hansard)

Committee for Infrastructure OFFICIAL REPORT (Hansard) Brexit and Current Issues: Northern Ireland Port Representatives 1 July 2020 NORTHERN IRELAND ASSEMBLY Committee for Infrastructure Brexit and Current Issues: Northern Ireland Port Representatives 1 July 2020 Members present for all or part of the proceedings: Miss Michelle McIlveen (Chairperson) Mr David Hilditch (Deputy Chairperson) Ms Martina Anderson Mr Roy Beggs Mr Cathal Boylan Mr Keith Buchanan Ms Liz Kimmins Mr Andrew Muir Witnesses: Mr Maurice Bullick Belfast Harbour Commissioners Mr Brian McGrath Londonderry Port and Harbour Mr Roger Armson Port of Larne Mr David Holmes Warrenpoint Port The Chairperson (Miss McIlveen): I welcome Roger Armson, general manager and director of the Port of Larne; Mr Maurice Bullick, the finance and compliance director at Belfast Harbour Commissioners; David Holmes, the chief executive officer of Warrenpoint Port; and Brian McGrath, chief executive of Londonderry Port and Harbour Commissioners or Foyle Port, as it is also known. Gentlemen, you are all welcome to today's meeting. In normal times, we would have met already and would probably have visited each of your facilities and had lengthy and detailed conversations, but, due to the circumstances, we have our meeting set up in this way to allow for social distancing. If you are content, I will ask each of you in alphabetical order to speak for around five minutes. Members will ask questions, and each of you can answer if you want to contribute to a response. Maurice, you can start off, and we will follow up with Foyle, Larne and Warrenpoint. Mr Maurice Bullick (Belfast Harbour Commissioners): Thank you, Chair and Committee members, for the invitation to today's meeting. We have a relatively short briefing for you that I have put on one piece of paper. I will go through the briefing paper and add some explanations and illustrations to explain our rationale. Just to set the scene, you will be aware that the Belfast Harbour Commissioners is a trust port. It is the largest port in Northern Ireland and the second largest on the island of Ireland. It handles about 70% of Northern Ireland's seaborne trade by way of cargo tonnage. Those figures move up and down slightly each year, but that is roughly the steady state. The significant thing for us on the Northern Ireland protocol is that about 70% of the traffic is directed to and from the island of Great Britain to Northern Ireland, so that, obviously, dominates our traffic. That 70% is the overall figure, and it 1 includes cargo going both ways: from Northern Ireland and into Northern Ireland. When you break that down into the export and import leg, you see that it has a slightly different pattern, with 85% of the export side going directly to the island of Great Britain and 60% on the import side. The reason the import side is a good bit lower is that, as well as bringing cargoes from Great Britain, we bring them from the European Union, but, actually, we do more cargo with the rest of the world, so a lot of the import cargoes are bulk cargoes that come from elsewhere in the world. The 85% out represents the markets of Great Britain. Obviously, some traffic goes through Great Britain to the European Union, and some traffic comes back through Northern Ireland to the Republic of Ireland, but we have never been able to get definite metrics on that. We have some anecdotal figures from carriers, but it tends to be very low percentages. Our conclusion is that the predominant amount of that traffic is staying in Northern Ireland at the overall level, albeit that the border does not really exist for trade flows, because, historically, some cargoes come in here and go south of the border and some cargoes come through Dublin, but there is not really a properly validated data source to put hard numbers on that. That gives you a summary of the overall position. Probably the greatest concern for us is freight ferry traffic. Obviously, all ports operate in different cargo modes. We have three principle cargo modes in the Port of Belfast. There is bulk traffic, which is things like oil, animal feeds and coal. We have container traffic, almost all of which is routed through Europe, albeit that most of it belongs elsewhere in the world, and, finally, freight ferry or roll-on roll-off traffic. Freight ferry traffic is about 50% overall, and that is 100% of our traffic flow. I imagine that, when my colleagues speak, they will mention that as well. The 550,000 freight movements each way with Great Britain is our primary concern from the port operation perspective. Obviously, if we had one aspiration coming out of the process, it would be to preserve the free-flowing nature of traffic between Northern Ireland and Great Britain insofar as is possible given the constraints that will apply from 1 January 2021. I mentioned in my paper that the figure for all of the ports and freight ferries is 850,000 freight units: that is a lot. To illustrate that, the Port of Dover, for example, does 2·6 million freight units, so the amount of freight traffic moving from Great Britain to Northern Ireland is very substantial, I suggest. I want to go into more specifics on what we are doing around the level of preparedness or 1 January. Currently, the position is that the Port of Belfast is engaging directly and quite extensively with both the Department of Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs and HMRC. The position on that is that we are basically working with DAERA on a point-of-entry facility in the Port of Belfast, and it is important to note that that will represent an expansion of the previously existing point-of-entry process. There is already an inspection facility in the Port of Belfast for dealing with things like sanitary and phytosanitary (SPS) measures, which are referred to in various things, in products of animal origin. Those are for the food-type industry, and it is probably easier to refer to that as "agri-food". The Port of Belfast already has the facility to do that, but that facility needs to be expanded to cater for the effect of the Northern Ireland protocol. We are well advanced with DAERA on an in-principle agreement on how that point-of-entry facility will be structured and how it will operate. The second agency that we are dealing with is HMRC. We are engaged with HMRC because we know, at the moment, that there will certainly be processes to take into account in coming into Northern Ireland from Great Britain. Probably the biggest uncertainty for us at the moment comes from the fact that the Northern Ireland protocol exists and the United Kingdom Government have issued the command paper on Northern Ireland on 26 May or thereabouts. Subsequent to that date, government agencies have been able to ramp up their engagement with us in getting a level of preparedness. We note that the command paper is not agreed in the current form with the European Union, so that obviously represents something of an uncertainty in the current circumstances. That is a notable point for the Committee, because, obviously, from a port operations perspective, we would like to get as much certainty as possible. That said, we are still well advanced on the work with HMRC. The other significant point is that Brexit has been going on for a while. We have all attended lots of stakeholder events held by government bodies. Obviously, the port has an important function in Brexit, but the focus of the impact will not be the port; it will be elsewhere. On the government side, it will be the requirement for HMRC and DAERA to run their processes. On the commercial side, the emphasis and onus will be more on ferry operators, hauliers, the owners of cargo — traders — and, finally, their various intermediaries. The port, inside its business model, has a role to play in facilitating DAERA with a new and expanded point of entry, but it does not engage directly in any cargo operations or handling or in the pre-existing customs processes. About 18% of our traffic through the port is already non-EU, so there is a body of expertise in the port among shipping agents, but those are the intermediaries. 2 My final point is that, over the years, many of the conversations with government bodies have started with the port, but then, as officials and others delve into the matter in more depth, the focus of attention pivots fairly quickly towards where the real impact will be, which is on ferries, traders and hauliers. That concludes my remarks. Thank you, Chair and Committee members. Mr Brian McGrath (Londonderry Port and Harbour): Good morning, Chair and members of the Committee. Thank you for your invitation. I speak on behalf of Foyle Port and the Londonderry Port and Harbour Commissioners. I provided a briefing paper that Committee members should have. I do not intend to go through that line by line. I will point out a couple of the issues that members may be interested in. Foyle Port operates in a unique situation in the United Kingdom. We are the only trans-jurisdictional harbour commissioners or port, in the sense that we span the United Kingdom territory and operate in the Republic of Ireland. We are a gateway to Europe and the United Kingdom simultaneously, which is a fantastic position to be in. Our most pressing issue is not so much the east-west trade between Great Britain and Northern Ireland but ensuring that the gateway for the north-west regional economy is maintained and protected and that the competitiveness of what we do for the regional economy is not eroded by any new red tape or bureaucracy.

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