EU Imports and Exports: Food and Agricultural Products

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Thursday 2nd May 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh, for securing this debate. I am going to focus my comments on the second part of her question on the border target operating model. In part, that is because on Tuesday morning, purely by chance, as the model was going into operation, I was joining an official from the Horticultural Trade Association on a visit to Rochford nursery in Hatfield, so I heard live, first-hand reports that were coming in from the environmental horticultural sector about what was happening as the controls came into place. I should declare that I was making that visit as part of my fellowship with the Industry and Parliament Trust.

One of the things I was hearing that morning was that many companies had pre-ordered to make sure they beat the deadline or had delayed orders for a couple of weeks. Is the Minister aware of just how much the Government are putting into operation now? Many companies in the horticultural sector, and I have no doubt in the broader sector as well, have ensured that there is a much slower flow now, but it is going to ramp up over coming weeks. Are the Government ready for that ramp up?

I also heard that, even before the model officially came into operation, there had been considerable confusion with the paperwork. If customs agents ticked the wrong box, they were being precharged for the inspections before the inspections had actually started. More than that, the cost of the inspection was being charged to the customs agents, when it should have been charged to the companies. They were then going to add 10% to those charges as a handling charge. That gets to the complexity that small and medium-sized enterprises in particular are facing when dealing with this.

I shall focus primarily on the environmental horticultural sector, which is vital to greening our urban areas, expanding our agroforestry and generally contributing to public health. More than 90% of our tree and plant growers, members of the HTA, import plant products. Many of those are plug plants, some of which I was shown during my visit. They are tiny and extremely prone to drying out, but I am told that the warehouse in Sevington, and the other warehouses, have no temperature controls. Sometimes the plants are moved in temperature-controlled trucks but, if they are held up at a border control post, they can quickly die and become worthless.

There are other issues in terms of handling. Members of the HTA have been told that there is only forklift handling in the warehouses, so the warehouses can handle only palletised loads. Some of the plants being imported, certainly the higher-value ones, are too large to go on pallets, which are carefully packed into lorries by expert packers at the European end, and to unpack and repack them is an extremely skilled job. There was a general feeling that the Government were just going to have to ignore those loads because they do not have the capacity to deal with them, but obviously that is a biosecurity risk.

I have a question for the Minister, although I understand if he needs to write on this matter. The information that I received was that, if a lorry is directed to go to Sevington for an inspection and it simply does not go, at the moment no one knows what the penalty is. No one knows what will happen if the driver confuses their instructions or does not follow them. What happens then? There seems to be a total blank on that in the industry—which is a bit of a hole, given that the whole process has started.

I shall pick up on points made by the noble Lords, Lord Trees and Lord de Clifford, about biosecurity, particularly in the animal area. We are in a situation where there is now significant concern in the US about H5N1, a highly pathogenic avian influenza that is now widespread in cattle herds and has been detected in one in five samples of US milk. Just this week, the US started testing beef to see what incidence it finds. My understanding—I am relying on a report in the Telegraph here—is that a special unit has been established in Defra to look into this issue, but there are no plans to test milk, beef or cattle in the UK. I have to ask the Minister, especially in the context of biosecurity that we are talking about, why we are not taking the obvious precautionary approach of doing that testing. I echo the remarks made by both noble Lords that any reduction in tests or inspections, particularly of animal products, is a grave concern.