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Agreement that in effect makes territory part of Schengen free-travel zone ends years of post-Brexit uncertainty

The UK has agreed to allow Spanish officials to check passports at Gibraltar’s airport and port in return for an open land crossing into Spain, in a long-awaited deal on the British territory’s status after Brexit.

The concession by London ended one of the last issues created by Brexit, and paved the way for the announcement on Wednesday of an agreement between the UK, EU and Spain on Gibraltar’s frontier.

It came after UK foreign secretary David Lammy flew to Brussels from Gibraltar on Wednesday for talks with his Spanish counterpart José Manuel Albares and EU Brexit commissioner Maroš Šefčovič.

Gibraltar had been in limbo since early 2020 when Brexit came into effect, with London, Brussels and Madrid unable to agree on border issues that had inflamed UK-Spain tensions over the territory’s disputed sovereignty.

The UK — backed firmly by Gibraltar’s chief minister Fabian Picardo — had resisted the presence of Spanish border police on its territory.

However, Spain and the EU insisted Spanish police at the airport were the price the UK had to pay for an open land border between Gibraltar and Spain, which in effect makes the territory part of the EU’s Schengen free-travel zone.

In a joint statement on Wednesday, the UK, EU and Spain said: “For the EU, full Schengen checks will be carried out by Spain. For the UK, full Gibraltar checks will continue to be carried out as they are today.”

Albares, Spain’s foreign minister, said the Spanish police would be able to turn away British passport holders, for example if they had already hit a 90-day post-Brexit limit on the time they can stay in the EU every 180 days. 

“The Spanish police will guarantee the full integrity of the Schengen area and of course Gibraltar is connected with the Schengen zone,” Albares said.

He said the “historic accord” would “benefit above all the 15,000 people who every day move between Gibraltar and [Spain]”.

Lammy said the agreement “protects British sovereignty, supports Gibraltar’s economy and allows businesses to plan for the long-term once again”. 

Referring to the UK’s previous Conservative administration, he said the Labour government “inherited a situation from the last government which put Gibraltar’s economy and way of life under threat. Today’s breakthrough delivers a practical solution after years of uncertainty.”

UK shouldn’t be faulted for its decision to press the button on the Sizewell C project

Technologies to generate green electricity follow one of two trajectories. Some get cheaper, such as solar panels, which are small, modular and factory produced. Others, like nuclear plants, tend instead to be plagued with overruns and delays. Nonetheless, the UK’s decision to press ahead with a new nuclear project, Sizewell C, still makes sense.

Much has been made of the project’s potential cost. Hinkley Point C, its precursor, has a dismal record. It will now be ready at the end of the decade, and cost about £46bn to build.

Even if contractors learn from their mistakes and Sizewell C only requires about £40bn, that would put the cost of electricity it produces over its lifespan somewhere between £170 and £186 per megawatt hour, according to ICIS, a data and analytics company. That looks like a lot. Last September, the UK got developers to bid to build offshore wind power by offering them £89/MWh in 2025 money.

Yet the cost of nuclear power doesn’t necessarily reflect its value. It can be built relatively close to where the electricity will be consumed and, once up and running, produces almost all the time. That saves money on grids, batteries and other power storage devices that are necessary to turn offshore, intermittent wind into reliable electricity.

Aurora Energy, a consultancy, models a “high nuclear” UK net zero energy system, which includes Sizewell C plus a number of additional projects. It concludes that, should the UK be able to reduce the cost of nuclear power to that achieved in Finland, having a lot of nuclear power would be cheaper than relying mostly on renewables.

There are some other real but hard to quantify benefits of having nuclear in the mix. While optimised energy models spit out the lowest cost combination of power generation technologies, it is generally a bad idea to put too many eggs in a single basket.

All that suggests that the UK shouldn’t be faulted for its decision to press the button on Sizewell C. If anything, it should have been more forthcoming on the size and timing of its overall nuclear ambition. A cookie-cutter plant construction programme is the best way of bringing down costs.

As things stand, Sizewell C will still be among the world’s most expensive nuclear projects. And, to get it done, the UK government has had to step in directly and offer investors a guaranteed return on the money they spend. That shunts some of the risk of cost overruns to the consumer, in the form of higher electricity bills. None of this is ideal. But it is still better than letting the UK’s nuclear ambitions decay further.

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