EU Imports and Exports: Food and Agricultural Products

Question for Short Debate

Asked by

To ask His Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the checks on imports and exports of food and agricultural products to and from the European Union, and in particular with regard to the import controls introduced on 30 April.

My Lords, I am delighted to have secured this timely debate and look forward to hearing contributions from other noble Lords. I welcome my noble friend the Minister to his place and look forward to his response.

The purpose of the debate is to evaluate the extent to which that elusive level playing field of parity of access to imports and exports on both sides of the English Channel and the North Sea has been achieved. I will look at border controls in the round, and in particular developments this week. I seek to assure parity of treatment across UK ports, whether goods are coming into Dover, Hull, Grimsby, Immingham or Holyhead, and between the UK and EU ports. This week the Government introduced the second phase of controls on EU imports, following the health requirement certificates in January this year. I congratulate all involved on achieving this—the Government, the ports, the importers and the traders. These are important measures of food safety and food security.

Will the Government review the operation and effectiveness of the border control posts and the new parallel border IT process, particularly for entry via Dover, before the next stage is introduced in October this year? Will they commit to treating the short straits as one entity to ensure that the critical supply chain of food imports functions well and for supermarket shelves to remain full—a point made by the Dover Harbour Board in its consultation response? Many of the controls introduced this week would have been pre-empted by a phytosanitary agreement with the EU. I seek to explore whether we are any closer to achieving such an agreement.

The risk levels and frequency of controls appear to be greater for those exporting from the UK to the EU than those entering the UK. It begs the question whether it is inherently unfair and unequal that it is easier for imports to enter the UK than for UK food and agricultural exports to enter the EU.

Is it still the case that there are no border control posts in the EU to permit the export of UK breeding stock? In effect, this means that there is a trading embargo on the export of live animals for breeding purposes to the EU mainland that damages UK livestock production. Are we seeking to help British farmers to access what remains their largest export market, namely the EU? These measures were promised to assist farmers to meet these challenges, as set out in the Agriculture Act.

The Food Standards Agency welcomes the measures introduced this week yet remains concerned about the continued threat of personal imports of animals, plants and foods, as well as potential food fraud. How do the Government intend to address this threat—a concern shared by farmers and the NFU, which notes that the danger of potentially infected meat entering through personal imports remains? What resources will be made available, particularly to address the risk through personal imports?

My Lords, this is a wretched affair and, I will argue, an unnecessary one. A mass of our businesses are unable to plan because they simply do not know what the compliance requirements or timescale of the new system of import controls will be. They know only that the bureaucratic burdens and costs will be onerous, especially for SMEs, to the point that not a few will go out of business.

I was talking to a florist friend, who told me that there is already an extra 24-hour lead time for orders. The price that he has to pay for lisianthus, for example, has almost trebled and everything imported from Europe has gone up. He foresees only the rich being able to give flowers. The dead hand of this Government is even withering romance—an outcome that the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh of Pickering, surely desires no more than I do, or perhaps even the Minister secretly does. People running delicatessens, importing from niche suppliers in the EU, are already unable to replenish their shelves. Why are the Government killing off small businesses? Why are they exacerbating food inflation?

Can the Minister tell us why the Government consider that they have to inflict this policy on us at all? I can imagine three possible reasons, none of which seems to me convincing or satisfactory. Maybe they have been persuaded by vets and our own food producers that, without a great apparatus of import controls, we are vulnerable to animal and plant disease, and food fraud. To this I say that, while we were in the single market, we were entirely comfortable to rely on EU-level sanitary and phytosanitary controls. Why should we not continue to rely on them? Or maybe the Government have been railroaded by our domestic agricultural lobby arguing that it is not fair that there are strict controls on UK exports to the EU and no equivalent controls on our imports from the EU. To this I say that raising the cost of imports is bad for consumers and their interests should come first.

The third argument I can imagine is that the Government are nervous that if we do not control imports from the EU in the same way as we control imports from other trading partners, we could be deemed to be giving the EU unjustified preferential treatment and thereby be in breach of World Trade Organization rules. I am not persuaded by that argument, either. If the Government really believed that, they would have imposed the full range of import controls to match the EU’s on 1 January 2021, the day the EU applied its third-country customs and regulatory regime to goods imported from the UK. But they did not, and they have proceeded at a most leisurely pace.

The UK could have made a strong case that preferential treatment for EU imports was justifiable. Our trading relationship with Europe is special, by virtue of centuries of history, geographical proximity and inextricable entanglement. If we remind ourselves of the foundational principles of the WTO, we see that we did not have to conclude that there was a need to introduce new import controls. Our response to the most favoured nation principle of trade without discrimination could have been to reduce trade barriers for the other countries against whose imports we have obstacles in place. That would be a great thing for us to do for the developing world, particularly given the reduction in our aid budget and the amount of it that has now been diverted by the Government to footing their bill for asylum seekers. The WTO states that it is opposed to the raising of trade barriers. Just because the EU has put up protectionist shutters, we did not have to do the same.

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh of Pickering, for initiating this debate today; it is incredibly topical. The only problem with being quite so topical is that it is so close to the start date that it is quite difficult to see what exactly will happen in the next few days. It is only a couple of weeks since we had the debate on the report from the House of Lords Horticultural Sector Committee, which I had the pleasure of chairing. The major concern raised with that committee by people in the industry, and going on certain information from Defra, was that the whole system was going to crash from the first day, and that does not seem to be happening so far.

At this point, I take the unusual step of not being highly critical of the Government but welcoming the hard work of the Minister and the Defra team, who are often criticised even though they undertake a great deal of hard work on this. I congratulate them on bringing about a scheme that so far seems to work, although, from my discussions, the administrative burden is hard and snagging is still going across. I make myself a hostage to fortune by making that statement if it crashes tomorrow.

However, I will now get back to normal and start criticising the Government again. There are a lot of concerns about the new controls and their implications, especially for those in the horticultural community, given the financial and administrative burden of the new checks and considering that so many of those companies are small. They will have a really adverse effect on their ability to conduct business.

I start by regretting the need for these controls in the first place, as raised by the noble Lord, Lord Howarth. As a strong remainer—indeed, I personally would advocate for rejoining the EU as soon as possible—it is hard not to see the real damage being done to the UK economy by these trade barriers, especially to individual sectors, with horticulture being particularly hard hit at the moment. I believe that there is a majority in the country today who would happily re-enter the EU—the Minister might not agree with that but I think a referendum would be really interesting, and perhaps we should have another one. The real issue is that our leaving the EU has led to enormously high costs for business, by the creation of those barriers. I do not think this Government will do it, because of the ideology of the Conservative Party, but I hope that the next Government will start a new chapter with the European Union, by introducing an SPS regime that would help the entire sector. I am sure that Europe itself would welcome such a move. However, that is perhaps a debate for another day.

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh, on securing this debate, and declare my interests as a veterinary surgeon and co-chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Animal Welfare.

The introduction of these risk-based checks on imported medium-risk and high-risk animal and plant products from the EU is to be welcomed. As noble Lords might imagine, I will focus particularly on the import of animal products. These checks simply create parity with imports from all other third-party countries, and parity with the checks that the EU carries out on our exports to it in the absence of a sanitary and phytosanitary agreement. In that respect, it creates a level playing field for our farmers, and should help rebalance, to some extent, a very distorted trade balance, to which the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh, has already referred. In spite of that, as she also mentioned, the EU remains the UK’s biggest market for agri-food exports.

Apart from fairness, the real importance of these checks is biosecurity. These checks, particularly the physical checks, in a risk-based approach, will reduce the risk of importing to the UK infectious diseases in plants, animals and indeed humans. Since imports from the EU constitute such a large proportion of all the food products of animal origin imported into the UK—80% of all the animal-origin foods in 2022—it is critical that the EU is included in biosecurity checks. Despite the relative sophistication of EU animal disease control and surveillance, a number of animal pathogens occur in continental Europe that we want to exclude from the UK animal population. There are also potential public health threats that we want to exclude from food.

Delays in introducing these checks—there have been five since they were announced in 2021—have, historically, created a vulnerability in our UK biosecurity. During that period we have seen, for example, an outbreak of disease in over 200 people in the UK caused by salmonella, likely to have been imported in frozen poultry products from Poland. The new checks should prevent such issues and, much more importantly, reduce the likelihood of major outbreaks of infectious disease in the UK, such as African swine fever, a highly fatal disease of pigs that is spreading westward in continental Europe and can infect a wildlife reservoir—the wild boar. The UK Government estimate that an outbreak of African swine fever in the UK would cost £570 million-odd per annum. Since we import nearly 1 million tonnes of pigmeat every year, mainly from the EU, and the African swine fever virus will persist for many weeks in pig products, African swine fever poses a potent threat to the UK pig population.

I thank the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh of Pickering, for bringing this topic to the Chamber. I draw attention to my entry in the register, as I work for a veterinary practice.

The veterinary industry and some in the farming industry welcome the introduction of these controls and the increase in the number of inspections on imports of plant and animal products. In January, in the debate on biosecurity tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Trees, I raised the issue of African swine fever, which the noble Lord just mentioned again. In September 2023, there was an outbreak of African swine fever in wild boar in Sweden, many hundreds of miles away from any previous outbreak. The source was unknown. After the debate, a statement on Defra’s website stated that the source of the infection was found to be infected meat in a rubbish dump, found at the epicentre of the outbreak.

Some vets in the pig sector have concluded that this devastating disease for pigs will reach the UK at some point in the near future. The most likely source of this infection will be contaminated meat, just like the outbreak in Sweden. There is real concern and high uncertainty within the sector regarding the changes made this week. With the launch of the second stage of the border target operating model on Tuesday, I hope we will see an increase in the number of physical inspections on medium-risk animal and plant products and high-risk foods at some of the newly established border control posts, such as Sevington. These inspections are welcome, as they will improve the country’s biosecurity if importers comply, or attempt to comply, with these regulations.

With the move of the border control to Sevington, 22 miles from the Port of Dover, there could now be fewer physical inspections at the Port of Dover, so individuals intending to bring illegal or possibly infected meat products into the country and to ignore the regulations will be less likely to be intercepted. The possibility of fewer inspections in Dover has been reinforced by Defra reducing the funding of Dover Port Health Authority by £2.1 million this year. Last weekend, Dover Port Health Authority seized 3.4 tonnes of illegal meat products, the largest haul this year, taking seizures since the new ASF control measures came into force in September 2022 to 85 tonnes. A National Pig Association spokesman said:

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh, for securing this debate. I am going to focus my comments on the second part of her question on the border target operating model. In part, that is because on Tuesday morning, purely by chance, as the model was going into operation, I was joining an official from the Horticultural Trade Association on a visit to Rochford nursery in Hatfield, so I heard live, first-hand reports that were coming in from the environmental horticultural sector about what was happening as the controls came into place. I should declare that I was making that visit as part of my fellowship with the Industry and Parliament Trust.

One of the things I was hearing that morning was that many companies had pre-ordered to make sure they beat the deadline or had delayed orders for a couple of weeks. Is the Minister aware of just how much the Government are putting into operation now? Many companies in the horticultural sector, and I have no doubt in the broader sector as well, have ensured that there is a much slower flow now, but it is going to ramp up over coming weeks. Are the Government ready for that ramp up?

I also heard that, even before the model officially came into operation, there had been considerable confusion with the paperwork. If customs agents ticked the wrong box, they were being precharged for the inspections before the inspections had actually started. More than that, the cost of the inspection was being charged to the customs agents, when it should have been charged to the companies. They were then going to add 10% to those charges as a handling charge. That gets to the complexity that small and medium-sized enterprises in particular are facing when dealing with this.

I shall focus primarily on the environmental horticultural sector, which is vital to greening our urban areas, expanding our agroforestry and generally contributing to public health. More than 90% of our tree and plant growers, members of the HTA, import plant products. Many of those are plug plants, some of which I was shown during my visit. They are tiny and extremely prone to drying out, but I am told that the warehouse in Sevington, and the other warehouses, have no temperature controls. Sometimes the plants are moved in temperature-controlled trucks but, if they are held up at a border control post, they can quickly die and become worthless.

My Lords, ensuring that essential food items reach shelves without delay has significant implications for our economy and food security, yet the potential for disruption due to increased border checks, leading potentially to shortages of essential food and agricultural products, is real. New checks, procedures on imports and exports, the impact of import controls, supply-chain disruptions, the maintenance of food safety standards, staffing capacity, the level of collaboration between UK and EU authorities and the impact on farmers and producers mean that long-term solutions on both sides of the Channel are imperative. The challenge, particularly for SMEs, is adapting the regulations and required targeted support measures to navigate the complexities to ensure their continued competitiveness.

With time not on our side this afternoon, but in wishing to establish whether the Government’s approach is on track and addressing the many issues before us, I have this week taken the liberty to place 12 far-ranging Questions for Written Answer that I hope will clarify all, possibly beyond the response from the Minister this afternoon. External observers may care to note that they range from HL4184 to HL4189 and HL4250 to HL4255.

I will not replicate the many points that have been drawn attention to. However, I have been in discussion over the past two years with Enigio, an advanced tech company from Sweden, on its solution for creating fraud-safe digital original documents. In declaring that I have nothing to declare, but building on the provisions of the Electronic Trade Documents Act, its software is used to create documents, and then documentary checks can be performed in such a way that any type of fraud and/or manual mistake is detected and prevented, with a process of both electronic and paper documents that will fully meet security requirements. Its digital trace original, with next-generation PDF, will be the fastest way to universal digitalisation with interoperability built in. This can play a crucial role in the readiness of our border infrastructure and staffing to handle the increase in import controls and prevent disruptions in the supply chain.

I instigated yesterday the formation of a politically balanced fresh produce network APPG which Sir John Hayes, a senior Lincolnshire Member of Parliament who fully understands the issues, has agreed to chair, supported by colleagues from both Houses. The Minister may wish to be informed that I am also hosting fresh produce producers and associated industries in this House on 21 May. He would be most welcome to join the discussion, in order that participants can hear directly from the powers that be on what discourse has taken place with EU counterparts; and with what outcomes to ensure the upholding and integrity of our shared food market, working together to ensure a resilient, efficient and sustainable environment that serves all our peoples.

My Lords, I am grateful for this time to say two things about Lincolnshire. One is that 24% of jobs there depend on the food chain, so are deeply impacted by our import and export arrangements. One of the things that has been brought to my attention is that the Grimsby Fish Dock receives its fish from Iceland over the weekend, for auction and distribution on Monday and Tuesday. Will there be enough environmental health officers on duty over the weekend to ensure that these auctions and distribution can take place under these new rules?

Secondly, on food security and the protection of animal species in particular, I was recently in a pig unit in Lincolnshire which is almost carbon zero in how its waste is turned into power and dry fertiliser, and where the pigs have decent enrichment. This business is undermined by not only this tough security but cheap imports relying on carbon prodigality. I would be keen to hear what the Minister has to say about that.