Their objectives were set by an advisory panel chaired by the two most ardent supporters of freeports in the government: Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak. The panel was composed of two public officials, two economists, five industry lobbyists, one cities advocate, one venture capitalist and two members of dark-money thinktanks (lobby groups that refuse to reveal who funds them). No trade unions, political rights, environmental or public interest groups were represented.
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There is a further, extraordinary aspect, which is beginning to come to public attention. While the “tax sites” and “customs sites” in a freeport cover a maximum of a few hundred hectares, the operators are allowed to set an “outer boundary” with a diameter of up to 45km (28 miles). Where a “very strong case”, with a “clear economic rationale”, is made, the area can be even wider. There must have been some very strong cases, because some of these zones are 75km from point to point. The Plymouth and South Devon freeport incorporates the whole of Dartmoor and the entire South Hams region. The Southampton freeport includes the New Forest and the Isle of Wight. The East Midlands zone extends from Nottingham to Leicester and Burton upon Trent to Upper Broughton. In Suffolk and Essex, everywhere from Sudbury to Felixstowe and Needham Market to Clacton-on-Sea is included. The Humber freeport boundary extends from Spurn Head to Howden; Teesside’s from Peterlee to Staithes and Redcar to Dinsdale; East London’s from Barking to London Gateway, and Liverpool’s from Birkenhead to Urmston.
What these boundaries mean is, as always, clear as mud. When I asked the government to show me the “very strong cases”, its spokesperson told me “we don’t publish that information”, then refused to elaborate. Perhaps it’s because the government has told private operators that the information contained in their bids is “commercially sensitive”. This is another way in which they’re protected from democracy: they are not subject to the transparency and accountability required of public bodies.
The Department for Levelling Up tells me: “It is categorically not the case that the entire area has been earmarked for development or has special planning status.” But if there is one thing we’ve learned in recent years, it’s to attend to what the written policy says, not to what the government says it says. I think I have now read every public official document on freeports in the United Kingdom, and I have found no such assurance. On the contrary, one of them states: “Outside of customs and tax sites, wider Freeport levers, including planning freedoms … should be targeted within the Freeport Outer Boundary.”
Understandably, all this opacity is beginning to cause alarm. Some people have proposed an even more sinister agenda: the government wants to turn these places into “charter cities”, corporate fiefs in which environmental and workplace protections are almost entirely stripped away. There is, as yet, no evidence of this. But if any senior politician is biddable and extreme enough to extend the stupidities of freeports, it is Liz Truss. Last month she started promoting the idea of low-tax, low-regulation “investment zones”. As usual, she seemed to have little idea what she meant by this: the line was probably fed to her by some unaccountable thinktank. Is it a repackaging of freeports, or something else?
George Monbiot wrote a piece about them a couple if years ago: Welcome to the freeport, where turbocapitalism tramples over British democracy: