Official Controls (Animals, Feed and Food, Plant Health etc.) (Amendment) (EU Exit) (No. 2) Regulations 2020 Draft Plant Health (Amendment) Regulations 2020

Victoria Prentis Excerpts

Wednesday 20th January 2021 General Committees

[The Chair]

Colleagues, will you make sure that you let Hansard have a copy of your speech at the end of proceedings?

I will now call the Minister to move the motion and to speak to both statutory instruments. At the end of the debate, I will put the Question on the first motion and then ask the Minister to move the second motion.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Victoria Prentis)]

I beg to move,

That the Committee has considered the Official Controls (Animals, Feed and Food, Plant Health etc.) (Amendment) (EU Exit) (No. 2) Regulations 2020 (S.I., 2020, No. 1631).

[The Chair]

With this it will be convenient to consider the draft Plant Health (Amendment) (EU Exit) Regulations 2020.

[Victoria Prentis]

It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir David.

The regulations and the draft regulations were laid before this House on 22 December and 9 December last year, respectively.

The regulations complete the suite of European Union exit amendments set out in the Official Controls (Animals, Feed and Food, Plant Health etc.) (Amendment) (EU Exit) Regulations 2020, which were debated unopposed in the House on 30 November 2020, and came into force shortly before midnight on 31 December. As with the first SI, the second one—the regulations before us —amends EU retained regulations governing official controls on imports to Great Britain of animals and animal products, and plants and plant products, including food and other imports relevant to the agrifood chain, collectively known as sanitary and phytosanitary or SPS checks.

The EU regulatory structure being retained and made operable by the amendments is extensive and complex. Owing to the intricacy of the amendments required, we took the decision to divide the necessary legislation into two instruments. That is why we are debating this second one today. The first focused on operability amendments to the main body of EU official controls regulations. This one makes similar operability amendments to more than 30 separate tertiary regulations, covering procedural aspects of the official controls regime, including regulation of model certificates, transits and transhipments, operation of border control posts and specific requirements for certain categories of animal and plant import control. The SI ensures that we can continue to deliver robust, effective controls and checks on all food, animal and plant imports.

We have now started to phase in border controls on imports from the European economic area. That prioritises flow at the border and gives business and industry longer to prepare for the full controls regime. It is a temporary, pragmatic step to support international trade and mitigate disruption, made necessary partly by the impact of the pandemic. From July this year, we will have controls in place for all imports of EU SPS goods.

Moving on, the draft plant health regulations will help us to achieve unfettered market access for Northern Irish businesses moving goods into Great Britain, which is a key commitment of the Northern Ireland protocol and of the UK internal market. The draft regulations specify the mechanism to allow regulated plants and plant materials to move from Northern Ireland into Great Britain. The instrument will not introduce any policy changes, and the devolved Administrations have given their consent.

The draft regulations will protect biosecurity and support trade by amending retained EU law to allow movements of qualifying goods into Great Britain under an EU plant passport. For Northern Irish businesses trading with Great Britain, nothing will change compared with the situation at the end of last year. It makes amendments to the format of UK plant passports, to allow identification of qualifying goods on the GB market, which should ensure traceability in the event of a biosecurity issues arising.

Once in Great Britain, an EU plant passport can continue to accompany the qualifying goods—it will look simply like a label. Authorised operators will also have the option to replace the EU plant passport with a UK plant passport, should they, for example, want to split a consignment where each trade unit is not already covered by an individual plant passport.

The draft regulations also provide for goods to be assessed against GB plant health standards where those differ from those of the EU, and there is an option for the authorised operator to issue a UK plant passport where goods are assessed as meeting GB plant health requirements. Under the terms of the protocol, Northern Ireland will maintain alignment with the EU plant health regime rather than that of Great Britain. Finally, the regulations make consequential amendments to domestic legislation.

The regulations and draft regulations will ensure that legislation to maintain UK biosecurity will continue to function in Great Britain and that we shall continue to deliver an effective imports system that guarantees our high standards of food and animal safety, while ensuring frictionless trading and movements.

--- Later in debate ---

[Victoria Prentis]

I will, as ever, try to answer all of the hon. Gentleman’s questions. If I miss one, it is inadvertent. I know that the Lords Minister will be writing a substantial letter, so I will ensure that reaches the hon. Gentleman. I am sure that my noble Friend Lord Gardiner of Kimble will pick up on some of the points that have been made in both Houses in the last two days.

On the general point, I will not get involved in the discussion about whether we should be here, but I heard what the hon. Gentleman said to you, Sir David. Negative SIs are published and are fully available for parliamentary scrutiny and debate, so I will not get involved in that debate either.

On why this SI was not debated at the time of the first official controls instrument, we laid that at the start of November and debated and published it by mid-December, because that was a condition of the Commission for us to be listed as a third country, which was critical for the movement of some goods that are imported into the UK. Given the complexity of the legislative amendments made to the whole body of retained EU legislation, we decided to deliver the amendments through two separate statutory instruments. There was no secrecy or peculiarity about that; it was merely a practical step and it is why we are here today. Both SIs were laid before the House in December—one on 9 December, and the other on 22 December—so they have been available to be scrutinised openly. That was what they were there for and the explanatory note makes that clear, so I do not think there has been any secrecy about the position.

I have read the Friends of the Earth queries, which are technical. The Minister in the other place made it clear that they required a detailed response, so I will leave those for the substantive letter from the Department. On border control posts and infrastructure, I have not read the Lords debate, but I suspect the other place was told that DEFRA had approved expressions of interests for 29 new BCPs from providers in England and Wales. The Animal and Plant Health Agency tells us that the building is progressing and it is confident that they can be ready by July. Two further applications are under consideration and further expressions of interest are expected in Scotland. That work is under way, and the teams working on it are hopeful—indeed, they expect—that it will be completed in time.

DEFRA is working with port health authorities, APHA and the Food Standards Agency to recruit and train the additional staff required for each stage of the import regime. We have recruited 176 plant health and seed inspectors who are in post now, and we expect their number to increase to up to 300 by July. For animals and animal products, we expect to employ 200 inspectors by April and a further 80 by July, together with 360 administrative staff. Recruitment has been ongoing since at least November and training is happening. A great deal of work is being done to get ready for our sensible, pragmatic and phased approach to bringing in the border checks. The EU reference laboratories are not covered in the official controls regulations, but I will write separately to the hon. Gentleman on that matter.

Continuing to try answer the questions in order, we are confident that we have enough trained vets. We made surge capacity of vets available over this period but not much has been used, so there is still spare surge capacity. I would never say that the situation is not challenging for exporters; I know it is, but we are confident that there is enough capacity at the moment and surge capacity is there if individuals need it.

I ask the hon. Gentleman to refer specific cases to me and my officials, who are working hand in hand to support companies that are trying to export. We will willingly take them up. I also encourage anybody trying to export to make full use of our training programmes, webinars and individual support. There is a great deal of support to get businesses ready for the new checks.

[Daniel Zeichner]

That was not quite the question I was asking, although we are all concerned about the availability of vets. The suggestion from Friends of the Earth is that within these changes Minsters may have given themselves the ability to reduce veterinary oversight, which is another way of dealing with the problem but not one that many would be happy with.

[Victoria Prentis]

Certainly, the intention behind the statutory instruments is to have a robust system in place for protecting our biosecurity. I remember debating last year with the hon. Gentleman how to tailor our approach so that biosecurity in this country could be done better than over an entire continent. I will make sure that the my noble Friend Lord Gardiner answers the point made by Friends of the Earth, because I am not absolutely certain what point it is worried about, but I will look into it and make sure that the hon. Gentleman is copied into that letter.

Even though the second SI is clearly about NI to GB, a question was posed about what progress has been made on equivalence, and although that issue is not specifically in scope, I think it is only fair that I answer it briefly. If I may summarise, the question is what progress has been made in UK-EU equivalence negotiations. DEFRA submitted applications for third-country equivalence on a number of occasions, as I outlined many times last year. In late December, the EU formally confirmed that it would grant equivalence for seed and other propagating material and would lift prohibitions on ware potatoes, for example. The EU has published an equivalence decision for fruit and vegetable propagating material, which also included lifting the prohibition on ware potatoes, and we are currently waiting for it to reach a Council decision on forest reproductive material and agricultural seed. We are pushing the EU very hard for a timeline for that decision. We continue to push on a regular basis for the lifting of the prohibition, and we are pursuing an application under article 44 of the plant health regulation on the equivalence of plant health measures generally.

I hope that that deals with the substance of the questions, and I commend these two instruments to the Committee.

Question put and agreed to.

DRAFT PLANT HEALTH (AMENDMENT) (EU EXIT) REGULATIONS 2020

Resolved,

That the Committee has considered the draft Plant Health (Amendment) (EU Exit) Regulations 2020.—(Victoria Prentis.)