MARKS & Spencer is drawing up plans to close some of its stores in France as Brexit red tape leaves it with empty shelves in Paris. The high street stalwart is reviewing whether to shut a number of its 20 shops in the country, and may even stop selling chilled food in France altogether after hundreds of tons of food was wasted due to Brexit border controls, the Mail on Sunday reported. The move comes months after M&S chairman Archie Norman argued that his company would not be able to get all of its Christmas food range into sites in Northern Ireland this year due to custom checks imposed between Britain and the province under the terms of the Northern Ireland Protocol which made it impossible. To get clearance at ports, M&S said at the time that it had to sift through 40,000 pages of paperwork a week for goods in Ireland. From October that number is expected to treble to 120,000 a week. One error in those documents could result in a truck of 650 items being refused.