Welsh ports have been treated with “disregard” in the post-Brexit arrangements and trade could be hit further by moves to eliminate most checks between Britain and Northern Ireland.
Ports like Holyhead remain at around 80% of pre-Brexit trading levels thanks to a divergence of trade to direct routes between Ireland and the EU as well as to sailings between English and Scottish ports and Northern Ireland. Those rival routes offer the advantage of either zero or limited trade barriers - putting Welsh ports with routes to Ireland at a competitive disadvantage.
A vote this week to scrap parts of the post-Brexit deal between the UK and the EU and make it easier for some goods to flow from Great Britain to Northern Ireland could mean the situation may deteriorate further and be here for the long term.
A paper by Colin Murray and Jonathan Evershed for the London School of Economics said the damage to Welsh ports has not been factored in by UK Government despite warnings from ministers in Wales.
The report says: “The way that Brexit has unfolded since 2019 has essentially put paid to the central corridor’s competitive advantage. As of January 2021, goods coming from Holyhead into Dublin have been subject to the full weight of new barriers to trade between the UK and the EU – including burdensome new customs processes and sanitary and phytosanitary (SPS) checks.
"However goods moving between Cairnryan and Belfast became subject to a number of (indefinitely extended) grace periods. Simply put, it is now more attractive for those trading into Northern Ireland to send their goods up to Western Scotland and over the North Channel than it is to send them to Dublin and then up through the Port Tunnel and on to the M1.
“At the other end of the UK landbridge, the now ubiquitous footage of long queues of lorries at Dover is testament to the new barriers to trade that exist across the English Channel. Irish traders are increasingly loath to risk seeing their goods end up stuck in this logistical snarl up. Instead, they have been turning to the booming number of direct-to-Europe sailings from Irish ports.”
It added: “Continuations of grace periods for Northern Ireland, therefore, are not cost free. They come at the expense of considerable and potentially irreparable damage to the Welsh ports. This is, quite simply, not factored into ongoing debate about whether and to what extent the Protocol can or should be renegotiated.
"The indefinite extension of ‘grace periods’, which is widely anticipated to form part of any potential ‘landing zone’ for current negotiations around the Protocol, would enshrine and deepen the disadvantage currently being experienced by Welsh ports.”
They added: “A hard Brexit is making it unattractive to trade through Welsh ports, and there is little that the Welsh Government can do to shape national policy. The disregard for Welsh ports during and since Brexit is part and parcel of Wales’ wider marginalisation and peripheralization within the political economy of the United Kingdom, which inchoate processes of ‘levelling up’ do not appear apt to address.”
UK Government was asked to comment. Foreign Secretary Liz Truss said the Northern Ireland protocol is undermining the Belfast (Good Friday) Agreement, and it was the duty of the government to act.
■ Jonathan Evershed is Newman Fellow in Constitutional Futures at University College Dublin. Colin Murray is Reader in Public Law at Newcastle University.
