Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what assessment he has made of the effect of leaving the EU Customs Union on (a) the dairy sector and (b) UK-EU trade in dairy products.

As part of our preparations to leave the EU, we are in the process of carrying out a rigorous programme of analytical work that will contribute to our understanding of how leaving the EU will affect the UK’s dairy sector.

Part of that programme has included modelling work co-funded between the four UK agricultural departments. In August 2017 FAPRI-UK published this analysis in the report “Impacts of Alternative post-brexit trade agreements on UK agriculture: sector analyses using the FAPRI-UK model”. It considers the impact of different trading scenarios on many commodity sectors, including the UK milk and dairy sector. The full report is available on agri-food and biosciences institute website.