Marks and Spencer’s chairman Archie Norman has criticised the government’s economic policy, branding the plans to ease post-Brexit trade “overbearing” and “baffling”.
As a result, Norman, has urged the Foreign Secretary during talks with the EU not to consider separate labelling for goods sold in Northern Ireland.
Norman wrote according to excerpts obtained by the Telegraph: “The overbearing costs of a labelling regime would raise prices and reduce choice for consumers, further disadvantage UK farmers and suppliers and impact UK retailers’ competitiveness in other international markets.
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“The simple fact is retailers already operate in real-time digital information – day or night, at the click of a button, we can locate our products, be that in a depot, in transit or in a store.”
Norman added: “In a digital era – when one tap of a mobile can check-in a customer at a store and locate their order in under 60 seconds, it’s baffling that the government and EU have rewound four decades to discuss an expensive ‘solution’ involving stickers and labelling.”
The news comes as last year, the retailers chairman claimed that EU proposals for administering the protocol are “highly bureaucratic and pretty useless”.
This comes on the back of the UK food standards are “equivalent or higher” than those set by Brussels.
At the time, he told BBC Radio 4 that the same background checks, which include veterinary checks, required for the Republic of Ireland are also needed to send goods from other parts of the UK to Northern Ireland.
