(paywall) Have Brexiteers shot themselves in the foot by not putting customs first?*
*
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/have-brexiteers-shot-themselves-in-the-foot-by-not-putting-customs-first-2h3q08x7bb**
If you think there are 19 months until Brexit D-Day, March 29, 2019, think again. *
Britain has just six months.
*
If there is no customs agreement, transitional or permanent, by March,
the country will have to start preparing to leave the EU with no deal.
Thousands of border and customs staff will have to be hired,
exporters will have to upgrade systems at vast cost
and Kent county council may have to send in the bulldozers to flatten Dover.
*
There is no more critical Brexit issue than our future customs arrangements with the EU.*
More than £700 billion of goods cross the border annually, roughly £350 billion from Europe.
*
Half of the UK’s food is imported, 70 per cent from the EU.*
About 180,000 UK businesses export
without a thought for customs controls because they trade solely in the EU.
When politicians talk about “frictionless” trade,
think about those trucks rolling on and off ferries at Holyhead, Harwich, Hull and Dover,
not to mention the Channel tunnel.
Lorry freight accounts for 69 per cent of everything the UK buys and sells with the EU.
About 2.6 million trucks pass through Dover alone each year,
carrying £120 billion worth of wine, cheese and the rest, 17 per cent of all the goods we trade.
.....
To be ready for Brexit, the diggers need to break ground by March.
.....
Exporters have a lot on their plate, too. *
Outside the customs union,
the 180,000 businesses* that have been trading solely with the EU will need to make complex “rules of origin” declarations,
which the government estimates could add up to 15 per cent to the cost of the product.
*
Currently, 55 million declarations are made a year by 170,000 companies exporting beyond the EU.*
Volumes are likely to rise to 255 million once we leave, at an annual estimated cost to business of £4 billion to £9 billion.
That’s the easy bit.
At the moment, Britain’s customs system, which has capacity for just 100 million declarations a year, cannot handle Brexit.
.....
HMRC is cutting it fine.
On its new timetable, the system is not scheduled to go live until two months before B-Day.
“We cannot accelerate it any faster than that. Not safely,”
Even assuming HMRC delivers,* 
the service can handle no more than 180 million declarations a year,*
70 million short of what’s needed, the National Audit Office says.*
As Charlie Elphicke, Dover’s Conservative MP, put it:
“If this system isn’t ready, the whole economy goes into gridlock along with all the roads.”
This is Britain’s Plan B then:
an untested customs service short on capacity that will probably be delivered late.
...
That’s the big charge Leave politicians have to answer:
that they didn’t know what they were doing and never had a plan.
Nothing illustrates it better than the customs mess.