An EU-UK showdown over Brexit's Northern Ireland Protocol will take place on Thursday, Michael Gove has revealed.
The Cabinet Office Minister told the Commons European Scrutiny Committee he will meet the European Commission's vice-president Maros Sefcovic this week to thrash out difficulties over the system.
Mr Gove told the Commons European Scrutiny Committee there were "disruptions and difficulties faced by Northern Ireland citizens in their daily lives that need to be resolved".
Progress over the Protocol “is being made but we are very far from resolving all those problems," he warned MPs.
Asked if the protocol was "fit for purpose", Mr Gove "It's not working at the moment."
The agreement on post-Brexit trade to keep open the 310-mile border between the Republic and the North – the UK's only land frontier with the EU – has caused disruption to goods travelling from the rest of the UK.
The row turned nasty last month when Brussels threatened to trigger Article 16 – part of the pact which keeps Northern Ireland following the EU's customs rules – in a dispute over coronavirus vaccines.
The clause was designed to allow the bloc or Britain to intervene unilaterally if the Protocol causes a major problem within its borders.
Mr Gove suggested the European Commission should explain its actions to EU national governments following the Article 16 row.
"The speed with which some in the commission acted took others in the commission and others – not least in Ireland – by surprise,” he said.
"One of the things that I think, if I may say so, the commission probably owes its member states is a fuller explanation of why it acted in the way that it did."
He said the consequences "were undoubtedly damaging for the smooth operation of the Protocol and they had an adverse impact on trust in Northern Ireland".
Mr Gove believed issues could be resolved without needing to trigger the Article 16 procedure to effectively override it.
