EU Imports and Exports: Food and Agricultural Products

Lord Redesdale Excerpts

Thursday 2nd May 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Redesdale (LD)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh of Pickering, for initiating this debate today; it is incredibly topical. The only problem with being quite so topical is that it is so close to the start date that it is quite difficult to see what exactly will happen in the next few days. It is only a couple of weeks since we had the debate on the report from the House of Lords Horticultural Sector Committee, which I had the pleasure of chairing. The major concern raised with that committee by people in the industry, and going on certain information from Defra, was that the whole system was going to crash from the first day, and that does not seem to be happening so far.

At this point, I take the unusual step of not being highly critical of the Government but welcoming the hard work of the Minister and the Defra team, who are often criticised even though they undertake a great deal of hard work on this. I congratulate them on bringing about a scheme that so far seems to work, although, from my discussions, the administrative burden is hard and snagging is still going across. I make myself a hostage to fortune by making that statement if it crashes tomorrow.

However, I will now get back to normal and start criticising the Government again. There are a lot of concerns about the new controls and their implications, especially for those in the horticultural community, given the financial and administrative burden of the new checks and considering that so many of those companies are small. They will have a really adverse effect on their ability to conduct business.

I start by regretting the need for these controls in the first place, as raised by the noble Lord, Lord Howarth. As a strong remainer—indeed, I personally would advocate for rejoining the EU as soon as possible—it is hard not to see the real damage being done to the UK economy by these trade barriers, especially to individual sectors, with horticulture being particularly hard hit at the moment. I believe that there is a majority in the country today who would happily re-enter the EU—the Minister might not agree with that but I think a referendum would be really interesting, and perhaps we should have another one. The real issue is that our leaving the EU has led to enormously high costs for business, by the creation of those barriers. I do not think this Government will do it, because of the ideology of the Conservative Party, but I hope that the next Government will start a new chapter with the European Union, by introducing an SPS regime that would help the entire sector. I am sure that Europe itself would welcome such a move. However, that is perhaps a debate for another day.

I should move on to another four points. The first is the issue raised by Logistics UK and others around the potential for considerable delays for trucks, especially those not first off the boat. A real problem is not just the issue of our produce spending long periods of time waiting to be processed but the hours spent by the truck drivers themselves waiting to get the produce processed. There was an example given that some truck drivers might have to wait 10 hours. Of course, if you are a haulage company, that is a really difficult issue to deal with, considering that that truck driver then might be working 10 to 20 hours in the day. There is a shortage of truck drivers, and haulage companies are working on razor-thin margins. This could have a real implication, not too far in the distance, of a shortage of truck drivers, and therefore a shortage of trucks.

My second point is around costs. We now finally have the charges coming in at £29 per commodity and £10 for low-risk produce, but there is a real issue here. Although the Government have said that this is an acceptable cost, 81% of businesses, especially SMEs, have said that this will really hit them. One issue that must be raised is this: the projections that the Government put forward of 0.2% do not match up to the recent work done by Allianz, which suggested a cost of £2 billion, and a survey by ITV, which put the cost at £2.9 billion.

I have run out of time, but I am really looking forward to seeing how this goes forward. Will the Minister come forward with a Statement about the scheme, on a set date within the next three or four weeks, because not much has been talked about the scheme as it is so late coming forward?