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Richard Evans, a retired lorry driver, and his family were travelling in Spain last summer when their camper van broke down. They left it to be brought back by the AA. But customs officers at Dover claimed it was being used for smuggling. They seized the vehicle and all its contents, including 9,000 cigarettes and 20 bottles of spirits. The van, worth £20,000 ($30,800), is still impounded. It even took Mr. Evans six months to recover his 90-year-old mother-in-law's wheelchair.
Under European Union regulations, people may import an unlimited quantity of alcohol and tobacco, so long as it is for their own personal use. Had Mr. Evans been driving his van himself, he would probably have had no trouble. Cases like this are putting Customs and Excise's considerable powers under scrutiny. A recent stinging High Court judgment about another vehicle seizure said, "the mindset of those determining these policies has not embraced the world of an internal market where excise goods can move freely across internal frontiers." And, on September 18th, the EU announced that it was giving Britain two months to prove that customs officers were not breaching consumers' rights to shop freely in Europe. "Cross-border shopping...is a fundamental right under EU law and should not be regarded as a form of tax evasion," said Frits Bolkestein, the internal market commissioner.
Customs officers have an impossible job. Excise duty and VAT on a pack of premium brand cigarettes account for 79% of the recommended retail selling price of £4.51. An identical pack costs £1.97 in Belgium. One in every five cigarettes smoked in Britain--some 17 billion altogether--has been smuggled. The Tobacco Manufacturers' Association reckons that 80% of hand-rolling tobacco is smuggled.
The main weapon Customs and Excise has in tackling abuse is to seize cars in which it suspects goods are being smuggled. Guidelines suggest "personal use" can mean only up to 800 cigarettes, for example. Anyone bringing in more can be asked to explain. In the past three years, customs officers have impounded more than 22,000 vehicles. Tellingly, only a fifth of seizures are contested, and fewer than 1% of appeals are successful. Officials say the value of cross-channel smuggling has fallen sharply in the past year, from £1.6 billion to £400m.
Some customs officers, though, have clearly been over-zealous. And the recent High Court case ruled that the legislation under which Customs and Excise operates wrongly reverses the burden of proof. The defendant must prove that he is not bringing in tobacco and so forth for a commercial purpose. It also said that customs officers must have "reasonable grounds" for searches: suspicion and instinct are not enough. The government is appealing.
The minister in charge of Customs and Excise, John Healey, accepts that there is an urgent need to respond to questions about the "legitimacy" of the Customs regime. But he says the charge that Customs are abusing their powers is wrong: "Customs," he says, "never stop at random, they never do blanket searches. They always have some ground for stopping people." Tell that to Mr Evans. |
