Important story in today’s @FT from ⁦ @pmdfoster⁩ on just how far there is to go on the NI protocol and food trade - including quotes from me and others ⁦⁦- a expanding on my point in the article 1/ https://on.ft.com/2QJ8HTq 

Our modern profitable food trade is built on fast, complex and reactive supply chains. Innovation is a constant.  The protocol is a strait jacket that has made food trade slow, inflexible, and expensive. 2/

Ministers seem to be pinning their hopes on creating a hideously expensive, digital superstructure that firefights the most immediate and visible problems. The hope is it will hide the immediate harms they can’t ignore. 3/

They are not necessarily seeing how this will solidify the inflexibilities and leave Northern Ireland consumers at a permanent disadvantage. 4/

“The experience of the past 4 months has already done untold damage to business confidence.  Businesses across the supply chain are scaling back or writing off the opportunity to serve NI. The promise of an expensive complex IT project is not going to counteract that soon. 5/

Confidence relies on simple solutions and in the case of food trade between the UK and the EU there is one, a formal recognition that our food rules are the same and that paperwork serves no purpose in terms of protecting consumers. 6/

“It has been obvious for some time that the solution lies in a veterinary agreement that will remove bureaucratic hurdles, not some kind of digital superstructure that ‘bakes in’ the inflexibilities. 8/

A vet agreement is being ruled out of ‘sovereignty’ grounds but (a) an agreement freely entered and subject to change is a sovereign choice (b) no one across food sees a purpose to the opportunity for divergence Ministers want (c) divergence benefits will not outweigh harm