UK spent at least £100m on post‑Brexit inland border sites that were never used

The UK has spent at least £100 million of taxpayers' money on border control facilities built after Brexit that were never used or never operated at full capacity, official data show.

Records from HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) indicate that five of seven planned inland border sites in England and Wales never opened for operations. The Conservative government subsequently abandoned plans for full checks after deciding that food arriving from the European Union met the same standards as before Brexit.

Costs concentrated on a handful of projects

Portsmouth, owned by the city council, spent £23 million constructing its border control facility but never used it at full capacity because the scale of checks was reduced. The port received £17.1 million in public funding for the project, with the council covering the remaining £6 million.

The most controversial site, dubbed the "White Cliffs of Dover", has cost taxpayers £28 million so far despite being little more than a field. The Department for Transport allocated £21 million to buy the land and a further £7 million for preparatory groundworks, including archaeological surveys to check for Roman remains. Villagers in Gaston only learned of plans for the inland site on 31 December 2020, hours before the new post-Brexit checks were due to take effect.

By contrast, only two inland checkpoints — Sevington and Holyhead — remained in use, though their construction and upkeep have also run into the hundreds of millions of pounds. The National Audit Office last year put the overall cost of Brexit at £4.7 billion, a figure that includes multi-year transformation of customs-declaration software and other systems developed because of the UK leaving the single market.

Photo: press material from the event