It’s now more than eight years since the UK’s referendum vote and the huge complexity, costs, inefficiencies and negative impacts on GB food supply and trade of new Brexit bureaucracy agreed by UK government (UKG) with its largest trading partner – the EU – are becoming ever clearer.
Rules must be revised to ease legitimate trade with the EU, on which the UK depends for its food security. For example – getting just one type of newly-required document (Export Health Certificates, EHCs) signed off for GB-EU trade in products of animal origin since December 2020 has more than £200m to British food businesses. This is equivalent to the profit from more than £10bn food sales, which has not been realised through any trade deal for the foods in question.
Karin Goodburn highlights the irony of this: “UK consumers are paying for this, even though the UK led on the development of the relevant EU (hygiene) legislation, the UK agreed it and it is assimilated UK law. In other words, £200m spent on pieces of paper certifying we comply with our own law.”
Given the magnitude of these costs, which cannot be absorbed by businesses, UK Government has in effect self-imposed food inflation on the British public.
It has also taken a millennium of certifier time to complete EHCs, much of this being done by Official Vets who have also been managing bird flu etc in the context of a depleted workforce after many EU vets left the UK.
In addition, software for EU-GB trade developed by UKG is not reliable, causing delays and loss of food.
EU suppliers to GB businesses are now being hit with the same paperwork and are actively saying they will not supply to GB as intra-EU trade is thriving.
The SPS Working Group, (comprising 30 trade and professional organisations) which was set up by CFA and is chaired by Karin has recently written to the new Secretary of State for Defra, Steve Reed, outlining its concerns and offering numerous practical solutions to the BTOM issues in need of urgent resolution. The letter, and list, are updated versions of similar that were neither acknowledged nor replied to by the previous Government’s Defra Secretary of State.
The revised letter (which can be found here: https://bit.ly/3YRfaN8) received significant media coverage and includes warnings around delays to the flow of ‘just in time’ foods affecting food security and the risk to food safety caused by a 70% reduction in funding to front line defences against illegal meat imports and surveillance for diseases at Dover Port Heath Authority.
Karin continues: “A Sanitary and Phytosanitary agreement recognising the UK’s inherent compliance with EU rules is needed. Seeking to negotiate a veterinary agreement with the EU was one of Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s key election aims. Were it to become a reality, which, of course, we hope is the case, this could lessen and even remove the need for checks on “agri-food” imports altogether.”
Photo by Call Me Fred on Unsplash
September 2024