Brexit: All ideas to replace Irish backstop flawed, leaked UK government analysis finds

Problems range from being ‘easily exploitable by criminals’ to being inappropriate for small businesses

All the so-called “alternative arrangements” looked at by the government to replace the Irish Brexit backstop have problems, leaked government analysis shows.

The document, marked official-sensitive and dated to the end of August, is the “latest state of play on the work on alternative arrangements” – which the UK has promised to present Brussels with.

But all the options surveyed by the government’s working groups of experts have significant issues, such as being costly and inappropriate for small businesses, having technical limitations, and being “easily exploited by criminals”.

Meanwhile, Sky News reports that a draft legal text drawn up by the government to present to the EU is simply the existing backstop protocol in the treaty, with the relevant articles on the backstop crossed out.

Back in Brussels, EU chief negotiator Michel Barnier has drawn up a slide presentation for EU leaders laying out the conditions a British replacement for the backstop would need to meet. Key among them is the maintenance of the “status quo for cross-border exchanges” – which none of the proposed alternative arrangements meet.

Speaking in County Dublin today, Irish prime minister Leo Varadkar said: “The backstop is a means to an end. It’s there to ensure that we continue to have frictionless trade north and south, that there’s no physical infrastructure, that there’s no checks, no controls, no tariffs. We want that to continue to be the case.”

He added that any proposals he had seen for alternative arrangements so far “just manage the border”.

“They facilitate tariffs, they facilitate checks, they facilitate controls, but try to do it in a way that’s invisible and unobtrusive and that’s better than nothing – but it’s not the outcome that we want to achieve,” he said.

Mr Varadkar and Mr Johnson are expected to meet to discuss the issues surrounding the backstop next week. The UK prime minister has said the backstop must be completely removed from the withdrawal agreement; the EU side has said it is willing to engage with “concrete proposals”, but warned that any replacement must do the same job.

French president Emmanuel Macron notably said in late August that he does not believe any replacement for the backstop would be that different to current plans.

The leaked UK government document spelling out possible alternative arrangements says so-called “mobile units” proposed as one solution to the border have “multiple practical issues” including the need for refrigeration, security concerns, and week-long quarantines. Vehicle telemetry, another proposal, would be “likely to experience real world problems that lead to unintentional non-compliance”, the experts warned.

Radio ID tagging of products (RFID) is “not widely used by industry except for high value items” and “is currently costly and unlikely to reduce significantly in cost”, they said. The working groups also warned that there are “technical limitations to the technology” and that it was “easily exploitable by criminals”. Work on trusted trader schemes was at an early stage and would require the EU to make exceptions and outsource the integrity of the single market.

Another idea, “smarter risking”, would require cooperation from industry, who could be put at a disadvantage by it, while data sharing was seen as “difficult for smaller businesses”, with some aspects “particularly challenging”. AI and machine learning was deemed difficult to implement within the timeframe and in any case seen as lacking consumer confidence.