LETTER: A great British custom at risk

Chip night is a customary weekly favourite for many families across the West Midlands. Our British food is a tasty and popular delight especially during the current Covid 19 crisis.

We must never take our cultural culinary traditions and healthy food for granted. Fishing has been a primary industry, major employer, for hundreds of years. Fish aren’t grown in superstore freezers. Today growing concerns of people who catch, process, transport and eat those fish are on the rise and need urgent resolution. A multi-million pound industry is left filling in forms, on a process that is not fit for purpose and should never have been allowed to happen. A digital system and paperwork has lorry drivers involved in a system taking three or four hours that once was completed in fifteen minutes!

The facts, and pictures of lorries queuing, reveal the facts over the spin being cast by politicians. Delays and costs will lose markets, jobs and livelihoods. Chip night may becomes unaffordable.

Additional costs and complexity are here to stay so why are fish happy? Of course there will be no one left to catch, sell or transport them and no one will pay for fish over a kebab or burger on chip night and a British custom will die.

Doug James, West Midlands

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