Page 94, the Private Eye Podcast. Hello and welcome to another episode of Page 94. My name is Andrew Hunter Murray and this week we have two stories about the fabric of British life today. The first takes us to the northeast to T-side where there have been some extremely interesting goings-on to do with something called a free port. If you haven't heard of a free port, get used to that word because you're going to be hearing lots more of it over the next half an hour. And after that, we're going to have Tim Minogue, who has been looking in the southeast of the country at some other interesting business decisions that have been made, particularly those going on in the London Borough of Croydon, which is now flat broke and very, very keen for a government bailout. Tim will be telling us all about the London Borough of Croydon and its absolutely awful finances in a little bit. But first we go northeast to T-side. Richard Brooks has been covering the very tangled and murky story of the T-side free port for many months now. He's actually written a special report for Private Eye all about it. And so it's high time that we got him into the studio and asked exactly what is going on there. It's a story that's still being uncovered, but it has absolutely everything in it. It has hundreds of millions of pounds of money sloshing unaccountably around. It has large amounts of scrap metal. It has industrial chemicals. It has the endorsement of the Prime Minister himself. So here is Richard Brooks. I started off by asking him the simple question, what is a free port? Here's Richard.

Free port is a special area that has a lot of tax advantages. Princeably customs duties. The idea is that a free port area isn't treated as part of the country that is in for customs purposes. So you move stuff in and out without it being considered as the stuff actually coming into the country. Right. Just to make

sure I'm understanding it properly.