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A lobster exporter who is liquidating his 60-year-old family business has blamed the government for not being honest about the Brexit bureaucracy and hidden costs.
Sam Baron, who worked alongside his father to establish Baron Shellfish in Bridlington, East Yorkshire, said the government has not been direct with the fishing industry.
Industry insiders said Baron Shellfish, the first lobster tank business in Europe’s largest seafood port, appears to be the first major exporter to announce its closure.
Speaking from Bridlington on Monday, where he is in the process of dismantling hundreds of crates of lobster, Baron said: “All we’ve had is bullshit from the government, promises that have not been kept. I’m going to close the business while I still have enough to pay for my staff layoff.
“People say that Boris has done everything possible, but it has not been enough,” he said. “It’s the additional costs and the uncertainty. We have new health notes to fill out and there is a lot of new paperwork, including catch certificates. Every time you put lobsters in transport, if something in the paperwork is wrong, you’ve lost everything.
“It’s all about Brexit – the extra costs, the extra paperwork and the extra gamble, and it’s all up to the government and the EU.
“Every time you send a lobster transport, it’s like playing Russian roulette with five bullets in your gun.”
While within the common market, Baron’s company bought lobsters from business in Bridlington and sold to countries such as Spain, Belgium and Italy. It has exported up to five tonnes of lobster a week to continental Europe.
Baron, 58, who voted to stay but came up with the idea to leave the EU, plans to pay three staff members and sell their boxes and vehicles.
“I voted to stay because I was worried about the business. But I wish we had never gone to the EU in the first place, “he said.
Many fishers have been unable to export to the EU since catch certificates, health checks and customs declarations were introduced earlier this year, delaying their deliveries and causing European buyers to reject them.
Trucks with slogans such as “Brexit slaughter” and “incompetent government destroying seafood industry” parked meters off Downing Street in London last month. Boris Johnson has described the changes as “initial problems” and said they had been exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic.
The prime minister has said that an additional £ 23 million fund has been created to compensate companies that “through no fault of their own have experienced bureaucratic delays, difficulties in getting their goods where there is a genuine buyer to the other side. of the Chanel”.
Baron said his late father, Mick, who died three years ago, would have been furious at the way the EU and the government have treated his family business and industry. “I would have been on a war footing. He could have his 12 gauge [shotgun] outside. This is not what we were promised. “
