The scale of red tape created by the Northern Ireland Protocol and Brexit was exposed for the first time on Thursday by new government figures.
Businesses made more than one million customs declarations to ship goods from Britain to Northern Ireland in 2021, which was the first year that the Protocol was in force.
A total of 10,400 companies had to make the declarations on goods worth roughly £12.4 billion, even though the goods never left the UK, because of Protocol rules.
The HM Revenue and Customs statistics were seized upon by the DUP, which is refusing to restore power-sharing at Stormont unless the Protocol is removed or replaced.
Lucy Frazer MP, Financial Secretary to the Treasury, warned that the red tape would only get worse if the Protocol was fully implemented and not renegotiated.
The former Solicitor General told The Telegraph: “If nothing changes, every year thousands of traders will have to complete millions of forms despite their goods never passing international borders.”
“Some businesses will spend longer completing just one form than it would take to fly from London to Belfast – this is time-consuming and expensive,” said the Tory MP for South East Cambridgeshire.
The treaty created a customs border between Northern Ireland and Britain to prevent a hard border with the Republic of Ireland, an EU member, which could put the peace process at risk.
Northern Ireland continues to follow hundreds of EU rules and gets lucrative dual access to the Single Market and UK market in return.
Customs checks are performed on British goods to ensure that they meet EU standards in case they cross the Irish border into the Republic of Ireland.
The Government argues that the Protocol has a chilling effect on trade with Northern Ireland and is too burdensome when many goods will stay in Northern Ireland.
It has demanded sweeping changes to the treaty, which Brussels has refused.
The House of Commons has now passed a bill handing ministers the power to unilaterally tear up parts of the treaty, which the EU says would break international law.
Both Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak have vowed to press on with the Northern Ireland Protocol Bill if chosen to lead the Conservative Party,
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The HMRC statistics were published as the Office of National Statistics released GDP data suggesting that a “Protocol bounce” for Northern Ireland’s economy was either mistaken or had petered out.
Experimental ONS data for the third quarter of 2021, published last year, showed Northern Ireland outperforming the other regions of the UK, which was credited by some to the Protocol and the access it gives to the EU’s Single Market.
But new GDP data for quarter four of last year showed that Northern Ireland had 1 per cent growth, less than England (1.4 per cent) and less than the 1.6 per cent in Scotland and Wales.
Sir Jeffrey Donaldson, the DUP leader, accused supporters of the Protocol of “wanting to destroy Northern Ireland’s economy and bury our supply chains under a mountain of Protocol paperwork”.
“The incoming prime minister must keep [the NI Protocol Bill] moving at pace in the Lords and ensure that we are able to roll back the economic and constitutional damage,” he said.
Stephen Farry, an Alliance MP, said the Protocol was “a necessary but imperfect measure to address the particular circumstances of Northern Ireland from a hard Brexit”.
“The currently unilateral Protocol Bill is entirely counterproductive,” he said, because trade frictions could only be removed through negotiations with the EU.
Stephen Kelly, CEO of Manufacturing NI, said the statistics did not reveal the value of trade between Britain and Northern Ireland or how the Protocol had impacted it.
The data should be used to find adjustments to ease the burden on traders, he said.
