Draft Plant Health, Seeds, Seed Potatoes and Plant Propagating Material (Amendment) (Northern Ireland) Regulations 2026

Carla Lockhart Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd September 2026 General Committees

[Carla Lockhart (Upper Bann) (DUP)]

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

I concur with my right hon. Friend the Member for East Antrim and the hon. and learned Member for North Antrim. This instrument has been presented as a technical one, but there is nothing insignificant about creating new criminal liability under laws imposed on Northern Ireland by the European Union. The regulations amend six separate areas of Northern Ireland law, covering vegetable plants, ornamental plants, forestry material, seed potatoes, fruit plants and official plant health controls.

As the Committee has heard, the constitutional language is extraordinary. The instrument states that Northern Ireland is to be read as if it were a member state of the European Union. It replaces references to UK standards with references to European Union standards. In relation to forest reproductive material, Great Britain is classified as an “EU-approved third country”. That is certainly not a tidying up of legislation; it writes Northern Ireland out of its own country and into the regulatory territory of the European Union.

Most seriously, regulation 7 inserts a new list of EU instruments into Northern Ireland law and makes non-compliance with them an offence. The instrument expressly states that references to those EU laws include those laws

“as amended from time to time.”

In other words, future changes made in Brussels can alter the rules with which Northern Ireland businesses must comply, without any vote in this House or the Northern Ireland Assembly. Those rules cover matters including pet passports, the movement of seed potatoes, the destruction of infected plants and even the cleaning or destruction of machinery, vehicles, stores and packaging, yet there was no public consultation, and not one Northern Ireland farmer, grower, nursery seed producer or forestry business was formally asked for their view. That is outrageous, given that it impacts them the most.

Nor has a full impact assessment been produced, because the Government claim that there will be no significant financial impact. That is simply not good enough when Parliament is being asked to approve new offences. DAERA already has powers to detain, reject, re-export or destroy consignments, and those powers were used 43 times in 2025. DEFRA has confirmed that the enforcement gap caused no negative effect on compliance or biosecurity. The Minister must therefore explain what failure requires these new offences, who could be prosecuted and why Northern Ireland businesses were denied a consultation.

This instrument exposes the reality of the Windsor framework: EU law, EU standards and EU enforcement imposed on one part of the United Kingdom without any democratic consent. I simply ask Committee members to search their hearts. If this was happening to their constituency, their constituents and businesses in their part of this great United Kingdom, they would not like it and they would vote against it. I ask the Committee to do the right thing by Northern Ireland and our place in this United Kingdom.