Northern Ireland Agriculture Minister Gordon Lyons has said that “uncertainty” and challenges “outside his department’s control” have prompted his decision to halt work on customs infrastructure.
The Executive is understood to have sought legal advice on whether the minister had the power to stop work.
However, Minister Lyons told presenter Sarah Brett this morning (March 1) that he had been “looking at legal advice for a number of weeks now”.
“My officials have highlighted a number of concerns with me that are outside of their control which prevents us from moving forward in terms of these issues,” Lyons said.
We don’t know what type of infrastructure we will need because there is so much uncertainty right now. We don’t know the outcome of the negotiations on grace periods.
“Any decision we take is going to be dependent on the completion of the design on the movement of retail goods from Great Britain to Northern Ireland.
“There has been no final work done on the completion of the interface between the GB systems and the EU online systems.
“And there is much work that still needs to be done with HMRC to facilitate the easier movement of goods.
“So there are practical barriers to prevent us from being able to move any further on this, but there are, of course, legal uncertainties now.
“…We want to make sure it’s well thought out; we want to make sure all ministers views are taken into consideration.
“I don’t see how the decisions I have taken have impacted on that whatsoever. We will be around the Executive table later today, and we will be discussing my hope that we will be making progress on it very soon.”
Construction work yet to begin
Several other MLAs have slammed the move as a “stunt”, with BBC presenter Sarah Brett saying she understood physical construction work had yet to begin on the sites.
“So there was nothing really to halt… What other context can it be seen in as one of you trying to keep pressure up on this whole process?” Brett asked.
Lyons responded to say there were several “practical concerns” about the customs process.
“It would not be prudent to carry out any more planning or preparation or any work on this until we know what exactly the outcome is going to be,” he said.
“I hope that outcome is one that recognises that Northern Ireland is part of the United Kingdom and we should not have those unnecessary checks and delays on goods that are coming over to Northern Ireland or not at any risk whatsoever of going into the EU Single Market.”
