Let's just not have fresh food checks then
The Guardian tells us that checks on fresh food from the remnant EU are to be delayed again:
The delays could push back the full implementation of Brexit controls until 2023, sources said, with physical checks removed and a potential relaxation on the requirement for import of products, animals, food and feed system (IPAFFS) paperwork.
We’ve not had such checks for near 18 months now. In fact, we’ve not had such checks for some four decades if we include the time we were inside the EU.
The absence of such checks in the near 18 months since we left has produced no problem that anyone has reported upon. And we would have been told if there had been some outbreak of turnip trichinosis, shallot shigella or equine lasagna - that last being a real one and one that happened during our membership period.
The benefits of such checks would therefore seem to be zero. The costs of them will be something above zero. Doing something that costs but which gains no benefit at all is one of those things we shouldn’t be doing - it makes us poorer.
Yes, of course, it’s possible that the absence of checks could lead to problems. But having tried it for that near 18 months we’ve now found out that the could is actually does not. One of the values of experimentation is that we move from that world without the Rev Bayes to one with his insight. Given that we now have real world evidence we can assign a probability to the possibility of problems with not having checks. It’s zero.
So, let’s just not burden ourselves with the costs of those checks. For they’re not needed.
We can gain the same policy advice through another construction as well. The r-EU has armies of inspectors wielding their clipboards all over the fresh food production system. This was good enough for us while we were inside that system. Now we’re outside those r-EU inspectors are still there, doing their wielding. There’s absolutely no point in our checking their work, as we didn’t used to, so let’s not bother ourselves with the cost of doing so.
That is, the r-EU itself is already carrying all the costs of inspecting the fresh food they send us so why should we bother?