Lord Dodds & Jim Allister: Safeguarding the Union - the promise versus the reality
One of the elements of ‘Safeguarding the Union’ which was used to persuade some unionists that significant progress had been made in addressing the problems caused by the Irish Sea Customs and SPS Border, was the provision of the ‘Internal Market Guarantee’.
It pledges that ‘more than 80% of all freight movements from Great Britain to Northern Ireland would take place under the UK Internal Market System.’
Safeguarding the Union also made provision for an Independent Monitoring Panel (IMP) to ensure that the Guarantee is met.
The panel published its first report in November on the period January to June 2025 and its report on the second period July to December 2025 is now expected any time.
Before looking at the first report in detail, and anticipating the second, it is important to acknowledge that the IMP has been asked to measure something that is inherently misleading.
The term ‘internal market’ has an established meaning. It relates to the territorial extent of the free movement of for goods, without encountering a customs and internal Sanitary-Phyto-Sanitary (SPS) Border, and provides the economic foundation for the nation state.
However, rather than dealing with the established meaning of an ‘internal market’, the government has sought to mislead by applying this language to arrangements that regulate its exact opposite, navigating a trade border. Rather than removing the customs and international SPS border, as its name implies, the so-called ‘UK Internal Market System’, offers shorter customs and SPS forms in return for taking on other border frictions like having to join a trusted trader scheme and having ‘Not for EU’ labels.
In this context the ‘Internal Market Guarantee’ is no more than a guarantee that at least 80% of goods moving from GB to NI must navigate a trade border by one means rather than another.
As if the attempt of the government to use misleading language to generate the false impression that the economic foundation of the UK remains largely intact was not bad enough, the first IMP report compounded the difficulty.
The report, which claimed that 96% of goods moving from GB to NI did so within the terms of the Guarantee, departed from the Safeguarding the Union parameters which define its remit in two key respects.
In the first instance, rather than ensuring that ‘more than 80% of all freight movements from Great Britain to Northern Ireland would take place under the UK Internal Market System’, the IMP report measures 80% of trade by value.
We met the IMP and asked why they had departed from Safeguarding the Union in this way. The change necessarily risks obscuring the assessment of the extent of border friction because the movements of lots of smaller value goods through the border (as one would expect when moving goods from one part on an economy to another, rather than between economies) means that measuring on the basis of value rather than movements will inevitably minimise the presenting border friction.
The IMP sought to justify their approach on the basis that international trade is conventionally measured by value.
We responded by pointing out that, quite apart from the fact that we are dealing with domestic rather than international trade, the government promised through Safeguarding the Union to measure on the basis of movements, not value.
The IMP conceded that they had the relevant figures both by value and movements and we strongly pressed them both to release the figures by movement, for the first reporting period, and to report on this basis for all future reporting periods.
In the second instance, rather than ensuring that ‘more than 80% of all freight movements from Great Britain to Northern Ireland take place under the UK Internal Market System’, the IMP chose to measure goods just on the basis of whether or not duties were charged in relation to them.
This is very odd because under the UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA), goods move between the EU and GB ‘duty free’ in any event, subject to rules of origin.
In this context one might just as well produce a report on trade flows without the payment of duty between GB and the whole EU and call it an Internal Market Guarantee!
Moreover, it is important to note that under this arrangement some goods movements from GB to NI will be duty free, thanks to the TCA, but still subject to full length customs and international SPS forms.
Thus, the misleading nature of the ‘Internal Market Guarantee’ has again been further compounded by the decision of the IMP to depart from Safeguarding the Union in a way that minimises to an even greater degree the reality of border frictions that are incompatible with an internal market.
Going forward it is not only important that the next IMP report returns to the parameters set by Safeguarding the Union, measuring freight movements under the UK Internal Market System, and that the figures for the last report are corrected to this metric.
Much more importantly, it is vital that the government acknowledges that the reason why it wants to give the impression that over 80% of goods moving from GB to NI do so as internal market movements is because they know 100% of goods movements within the UK should be internal market movements.
Rather than trying to generate the image of the UK Internal Market where it patently does not exist, it should re-establish the reality of the UK Internal Market by backing our EU Withdrawal Alternative Arrangements Bill.
This would remove the Irish Sea customs and SPS border, recreating the economic foundation of the UK, the UK Internal Market for Goods, and protect the integrity of that market without forming a hard border with the Republic of Ireland.
l Lord Dodds of Duncairn and Jim Allister KC MP, chair and deputy chair of the Anti-Windsor Framework Parliamentary Group