EU Imports and Exports: Food and Agricultural Products

Lord Howarth of Newport Excerpts

Thursday 2nd May 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Howarth of Newport (Lab) [V]]

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.

It is a shame to have taken all this trouble to come out of the EU only to saddle ourselves gratuitously with a whole lot of new bureaucracy and constraints on trade.