The government’s PEACH system for import clearance went down again this week, causing delays for agents and importers alike and leading to increased costs.

The Rural Payments Agency (RPA), which administers the system, confirmed it was down for about 18 hours between Sunday and Monday.

A spokeswoman said: “The RPA apologises for any inconvenience caused by the downtime on PEACH from 6am on Sunday, June 1 until 12.30am Monday, June 2, and a further 30 minutes on Monday, June 2 between 2pm and 2.30pm. The outage resulted from a final piece of work involving the replacement of the servers that support PEACH.

“RPA stresses that all that can be done is being done to ensure the efficiency of the system. We understand the importance of PEACH to traders, and are confident we now have the level of infrastructure in place that will give the system the stability it requires going forward.”

But the trade has been very disappointed with the response. Fresh Produce Consortium (FPC) chief executive Nigel Jenney said: “We have raised concerns with regard to the effectiveness and responsiveness of PEACH on a number of occasions at very high levels within Defra.

“We fully appreciate the inconvenience caused to the trade and its lack of confidence in the system, and we require the RPA to resolve these problems once and for all.”

Individual traders are also frustrated that there is a lack of understanding on the part of the authorities of the increased costs incurred. Mike Parr of agent Perishable Movements Ltd told freshinfo: “On Sunday, we had to do everything manually, which takes twice the amount of time. The system is an absolute joke; it is so unreliable. There was one inspector for the whole of Heathrow on Sunday issuing manual release notes, so you could have a consignment arriving at 7am that wouldn’t be cleared until 3 or 4pm.”

Parr complained that outages occur at least once or twice a month, and that instead of the one person required to operate the online system, manual inputs require two to three extra people and therefore extra cost, for which there is no reimbursement.

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