Wednesday newspaper round-up: Brexit border outages, Boeing, Stellantis
Lorries carrying perishable food and plants from the EU are being held for up to 20 hours at the UK’s busiest Brexit border post as failures with the government’s IT systems delay imports entering Britain. Businesses have described the government’s new border control checks as a “disaster” after IT outages led to lorries carrying meat, cheese and cut flowers being held for long periods, reducing the shelf life of their goods and prompting retailers to reject some orders. – Guardian
Boeing has violated a settlement that allowed the company to avoid criminal prosecution after two deadly crashes involving its 737 Max aircraft, the US justice department told a federal judge on Tuesday. It is now up to the justice department to decide whether to file charges against the aircraft maker amid increasing scrutiny over the safety of its planes. Prosecutors will tell the court no later than 7 July how they plan to proceed, the justice department said. – Guardian
The owner of Vauxhall is to sell cheap Chinese electric cars in Britain as it hit out at a decision by Joe Biden to impose tariffs on cars imported from China to the US. As part of a joint venture with Chinese carmaker Leapmotor, Stellantis will launch the Leapmotor T03 supermini and the C10 SUV in mainland Europe from September and in the UK from March next year. – Telegraph
About 1,650 British jobs are hanging in the balance after Anglo American’s decision to drastically curtail and delay the completion of its ambitious Woodsmith fertiliser mine under the North York Moors. While Duncan Wanblad, Anglo’s chief executive, insisted that it was still going to be a “stonking business” one day, he has slashed capital spending on the project from a planned $3 billion over the next three years to only $1 billion. – The Times
Taxpayers spent a total of almost 800 years last year waiting on the phone to speak to HM Revenue & Customs amid a “declining spiral” of customer service, according to the government’s spending watchdog. In a damning report, it said that HMRC failed to answer up to 45 per cent of calls to its tax helpline. People who did manage to speak to an adviser waited 23 minutes on average, up from five minutes in 2019. – The Times