Could freeports help ‘level up’ the north?

It’s hard to think of a place more deserving of a post-Brexit boom than Grimsby. In the 1950s it had the largest trawler fleet in the world, brought in hundreds of tonnes of cod a day, and you could cross its harbour by walking over ships in the dock. But the Cod Wars were lost and the EU’s Common Fisheries Policy began to bite. Now Grimsby is one of the most deprived areas in the country, and its long road down to the docks is littered with shuttered shops.

Simply put, it’s exactly the kind of place the Tories are hoping to ‘level up’ and win over before the next election. In 2016, along with Hull and much of the rest of the Humber, it voted to leave the EU and it elected its first Tory MP in 75 years in December.

One way to revive Grimsby, the Tories believe, is through freeports. Last month, a consultation was launched which could see up to ten built across the UK — and it’s a pet project of the new Chancellor, Rishi Sunak, who was writing about freeports as far back as 2016. For Sunak, freeports are everything Brexit should be about. They hark back to Britain’s maritime and trading golden age, when one in three of the world’s ships flew the Union Jack, and now we’ve left the EU he hopes they can turn us once again into a prosperous, free-trading nation — while also restoring our coastal towns.

The idea behind freeports is simple. They would be ports inside the UK but designated as outside our customs border. When goods arrive at a freeport from abroad, tariffs or taxes aren’t levied on them unless they cross the new border into the rest of the country.

As well as being able to store goods on dry land without paying duties (which helps with cashflow), businesses can put factories within the freeport to make goods which are then exported or moved into the UK.