Here's a more detailed breakdown on this evening's Joint Committee mtg between @michaelgove and @MarosSefcovic and their teams (@DUPleader and @moneillsf joined the meeting and made interventions)
2/ The meeting lasted around 90 minutes, and said to have been "heavy". Much of it appears to have focused on the European Commission's view that the UK is not implementing the flexilibities and obligations from last December's Gove-Sefcovic side agreement
3/ The UK is pressing for extensions to two grace periods from that Dec deal, one 3 month period (absolving GB-NI agrifood suppliers from expensive export health certificates) and one 6 month period, suspending the ban on sausages, non-frozen mince etc
4/ London wants the Commission to consider a plan that would see supermarkets/retailers enhance their own surveillance and traceability systems to such a refined degree that these systems wd approximate EU traceability requirements (and remove the need for export health certs)
5/ In essence the UK ask is: if you extend the grace periods until, say, the end of the year, we'll have those systems up and running.
6/ EU sources say they cannot give such an undertaking until they see exactly what the UK has in mind, how it would work etc. Sources say they are not ruling out extending grace periods a priori...
7/ But they need to know how this model will work, and more importantly, neither the Commission nor member states will agree to anything until the UK gives a strong commitment to implement the flexibilities and requirements from the December deal.
8/ Maros Sefcovic publicly outlined in his letter to Gove what those shortcomings were... ec.europa.eu/info/sites/inf…
9/ In particular, EU sources say the trusted trader scheme which facilitated the grace periods for supermarkets was meant to be extended to a "restricted" number of large and trusted suppliers to NI supermarkets...
10/ However, they say that when the UK first provided the list of large, trusted suppliers, which meet a range of trusted criteria, it ran to almost 2,000 firms... "That's not particularly restricted," says source
11/ Source: "We're ready to look into what is needed beyond [the grace periods] but in order to do this we absolutely need to see that the flexibilities we already, with a lot of difficulty, managed to agree in Dec are being used, + to have a strong + credible commitment to that"
12/ Other complaints: The UK is still not labelling all packaging showing that food should not be sold outside NI. Documentary checks are not happening, there's no channelling procedure, no UK designed export health certificates have been received.
13/ All these points were made by Sefcovic to EU European affairs ministers at the General Affairs Council yesterday
14/ Arlene Foster is understood to have made a number of robust interventions at the Joint Committee mtg, raising again the issue of Article 16, and insisting that the checks carried out at NI ports so far had meant that nothing "at risk" had crossed the border into the South
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