Who will profit from post-Brexit freeports?
A port: How will making them tariff-free bring any money into the UK Treasury?
Let’s see if I’ve got this straight:
The Conservative government wants to create 10 post-Brexit ‘freeports’.
In these ‘freeports’, there will be no import/export tariff in goods if they don’t actually move off-port and into the UK.
If they are re-exported, no duty is payable. And where raw materials are imported and processed to become a consumer product, duty would only be paid on that product – if it came off-port and into the UK.
The government is happy to invest in infrastructure, construction and machinery in freeports to make it possible for raw materials to be processed into products – and exported offshore.
And it would work to cut costs of processing goods.
No doubt the businesses involved in taking raw materials, processing them and re-exporting them would have their head office based in a tax haven.
So, who benefits? The UK economy won’t!
Source: Government set to announce new post-Brexit freeports – CityAM : CityAM
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watch the same material coming back and forth
We don’t really need these, many companies including the one I used to work for have “Customs Warehouses” which operate in exactly the same way but on the company’s own premises or operated by a third party warehouse operator such as a freight agent, depending what suits the company better. (I know this because I was the person in charge of managing the Customs warehouse and sending monthly reports to HMRC). This system has been in operation for years, we also used to have freeports in the past but they were mostly discontinued as companies started using Customs Warehouses for the same purpose instead. The difference is that most Customs Warehouses are inland rather than actually at the port but the goods can still travel to and from UK ports/airports without the payment of Customs duty or VAT. I think it’s just a complete waste of money and shows that the government hasn’t got a clue how companies who import and export actually work.
Wow!
But I didn’t know.
I wonder how many people do?
I sorta guessed this happens when I worked, I had a good watch on stock particurly in relation to one area and was surprised at how the same part, with the same quantity kept going back and forth, did not take a lot of working out
This right up is fantastic 👌
Even better: “On the Today programme, Chief Secretary to the Treasury Rishi Sunak claimed that the EU doesn’t “really” have free ports—areas within a country that have different customs rules. The next day Conservative party chairman James Cleverly almost repeated the claim, saying that the EU has precluded the UK from having free ports for decades.
Mr Cleverly is simply incorrect to say that the EU has stopped the UK from having free ports for decades. There are free ports in the EU. There were free ports in the UK until 2012, when UK legislation establishing them expired.”
https://fullfact.org/europe/free-ports/
I didn’t know and given the government supposedly have expert advisers they should know about companies already using this method! It isn’t rocket science! I wonder how much money has been wasted on this latest fascist tory scheme?
I used to work nextdoor to one on a bottling plant. From memory, it’d have fell under the ‘Type C’ category as described
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonded_warehouse
The one we had was a type E warehouse, that meant that our inventory systems kept track of the stock as long as we had at least one physical stock check per year. The awkward bit for our company was that I not only ran (administratively, not physically) our bonded warehouse in Scotland, but also the one in Belgium, all from my desk near Reading, Berkshire. The uncertainty around Brexit meant that the company moved the entire export department from the UK to Holland, (most of the exports were from the Belgian warehouse) and the problem now is that it is unlikely that the Belgium warehouse will be able to be administered from the UK, so that will mean staff in Belgium will need to replicate the job I did – so, staff in the UK losing jobs, and extra costs in Belgium…great for the economy and great for businesses? I think not!