Marking of Retail Goods Regulations 2025

Lord McCrea of Magherafelt and Cookstown Excerpts

Monday 30th June 2025 Lords Chamber

We need to inject some common sense and proportion into what is happening. The European Union has a perfect entitlement to protect its internal market—nobody can deny that—but there has to be proportionality. What we have here is utter nonsense. If people are bringing a second-hand tractor into Northern Ireland, we are back underneath the tractor looking for lumps of soil from Ayrshire. That is what we were doing at the very start of this and we are back doing it again. This is the sort of nonsense that we have to deal with. I hope the Minister will take those points on board.

[Lord McCrea of Magherafelt and Cookstown (DUP)]

My Lords, I rise to express my strong opposition to the Marking of Retail Goods Regulations 2025, which I believe constitute a profound assault upon Northern Ireland, representing yet another indictment of EU imperialism tightening its grip around the neck of Northern Ireland.

When the then Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, first unveiled the Windsor Framework in February 2023, he hailed it as a decisive breakthrough, going on to say that:

“Today’s agreement … delivers smooth flowing trade within the whole United Kingdom … Protects Northern Ireland’s place in our Union … And safeguards sovereignty for the people of Northern Ireland … we have removed any sense of a border in the Irish Sea”.


If any pretence of a border in the Irish Sea had been removed, we would not be here debating these regulations; in fact, they encapsulate the opposite. Phase 3, the final phase of the Windsor Framework, with the retail movement regulations, represents a serious challenge for retail and businesses in Northern Ireland.

As others have mentioned, the Federation of Small Businesses, which is the foremost business campaigner and the UK’s biggest business organisation, released its report Windsor Framework Realities this month. Its findings are unmistakable and astounding. In the first instance, the report found that trade friction was immense, with 34% of those who experienced difficulties operating across the United Kingdom internal market reporting that they had ceased trade entirely with the other region—in this case Northern Ireland—rather than contend with the onerous Windsor Framework regulations.

Additionally, the report quashed any notion that the dual market access had brought a new-found economic prosperity to Northern Ireland. The notion that we are having the best of both worlds is at best fanciful, or, as I and others believe, utterly deceitful. I have no doubt that the usual suspects will tell us that we are so privileged to have the Windsor Framework and these regulations, but nothing could be further from the truth. The report quashed any notion that we would get this new prosperity. There is no compelling evidence to indicate that dual market access has served the region better than the unmitigated access to the UK internal market. To those who wish to inflate or exacerbate the apparent merits of dual market access, I draw attention to the fact that 99% of respondents to the FSB survey were small and medium-sized enterprise businesses that operate primarily within the UK internal market and cannot finance the prodigious requirements that are needed to gain the so-called benefits.

Most relevant to this debate, however, is the FSB’s assessment of “Operational disruptions and costs” from the Windsor Framework. It reports that

“One in three businesses … have already faced … disruptions”


as a result of the Windsor Framework, with an expectation of future disruptions from a similarly large segment. The unsatisfiable demands of the Windsor Framework impact not only businesses in Northern Ireland but those businesses based around the United Kingdom, many of which were former trading partners but have since been forced to withdraw from the region due to the impossibility of trading complexities. One business owner based in Scotland said that

“it’s no longer worth trading with NI which is awful and cuts out a lot of business and makes no sense as it's easier currently to trade with USA and Australia.”

The Government’s desire to appease the EU has gone so far that they are not content to cull the trade and business from GB to Northern Ireland, as they seek to enforce “Not for EU” labelling in Great Britain. Rather, this Government have accepted their new role as EU supplicants, content to impose upon the British people the demands and regulations of the EU empire.

Perhaps some noble Lords will have seen or heard last week’s BBC interview with the chief executive of Marks & Spencer. He described the phase 3 labelling as “bureaucratic madness”, stating that over 1,000 M&S products destined for Northern Ireland would require “Not for EU” labelling, and another 400 would need to go through additional checks in the red lane once they had arrived in Northern Ireland. This “Not for EU” legislation is concerning not simply because it was created by 27 EU member states but because it partitions the United Kingdom into two jurisdictions, Northern Ireland and Great Britain, and then claims governing authority over the former. That is a grotesque violation of our sovereignty as a nation and an insulting invalidation of British democracy.

Neither the Windsor Framework nor the “Not for EU” labelling regulation 2023/1231 remove the Irish Sea border; instead, they actively solidify and build upon it. Tonight’s debate is reviewing the final stage of that Windsor Framework “Not for EU” labelling, as the Government put before us the Marking of Retail Goods Regulations 2025. It is interesting that, in the case of these regulations, the Government have acknowledged the trading complexities that persist within Northern Ireland and, further to that, they appear to be fearful of how existing complexities may be engendered by the final stage of regulations on 1 July 2025—so much so that they insisted these regulations must be on the statue book by the end of this month, which is precisely why we are here this evening.

Yet it is not clear how these regulations will function properly. For these regulations to work in practice, the state would need to keep a constant watch over the flow of goods across countless product lines, stepping in to control and adjust those flows whenever it sees fit. This is the kind of top-down micromanagement that we might expect in some different economy but not here in the United Kingdom. We are a country that values free enterprise and trusts businesses to get on with the job. We do not need the Government to hover over every pallet and crate that is created within our own UK internal market. That notion is ludicrous.

Businesses rely on certainty. They need to be able to plan, invest and grow without constantly looking over their shoulders. Yet these regulations would embed economic uncertainty into our system. Empowering the Secretary of State to impose “Not for EU” labelling means that producers will be left wondering whether tomorrow they might wake up to find new labelling requirements suddenly forced upon them.

Even if the labels are applied, there is no guarantee that they will solve the problems that it is claimed they address. How exactly are businesses supposed to change packaging, reorganise supply chains and keep shelves stocked at the drop of a hat? In many cases, they simply will not be able to move fast enough, nor will they be able to finance such a radical transformation. In particular, the innumerable SMEs operated by small teams would struggle.

The Government know that the dire reality is that such an imposition would likely prompt the delisting of products and supply chain disruption. In fact, the proposals contained within these Marking of Retail Goods Regulations effectively accept that supply chain disruption in Northern Ireland will become a normal part of life. It is written in clear writing in the Government’s Explanatory Memorandum on the regulations, in which the condition for the Government helping to resolve supply chain breakdown is evidence that it has already happened.

I am convinced that the “Not for EU” labelling will be totally and wholly ineffective. In justifying this, noble Lords have said that they only have to look at the current arrangements with the Republic of Ireland. It is well known that consumers in the Republic of Ireland have historically travelled up to Northern Ireland and availed of the considerably cheaper prices and greater product diversity. While cheaper prices and product diversity may have declined under the Windsor Framework, it is still a fact that people living in the Republic of Ireland travel to Northern Ireland and purchase goods with “Not for EU” labelling on them, and return home to the Republic of Ireland without recourse or penalty. This, let alone the aforementioned arguments, should compound all other arguments for the inefficiency of the not-for-EU system.