Official Controls (Plant Health) and Phytosanitary Conditions (Amendment) Regulations 2025

Lord Lilley Excerpts

Monday 9th June 2025 Lords Chamber

I trust these matters will be taken seriously and will not get the cursory brush-off that this is a matter that has already been agreed. These matters are extremely contentious and will lead to greater political instability in Northern Ireland unless they are properly addressed. I trust the Government will start to do that as soon as possible.

[Lord Lilley (Con)]

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lord Frost on bringing this regret Motion against these regulations. It is extraordinary that this House is only now considering them months after they came into effect, but that makes it all the more important that we consider their implications, both in practice and in principle.

I want first to respond to the remarks made by the noble Lord, Lord Hannay. He wants an SPS agreement. I have good news for him: we have an SPS agreement. It is called the WTO Agreement on the Application of Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures. It follows on from an agreement that I helped negotiate—the Uruguay round—which created the WTO, which then led to this. It says that SPS measures

“shall not be applied in a manner which would constitute a disguised restriction on international trade”.

In particular:

“Members shall accept the sanitary or phytosanitary measures of other Members”,


of the WTO,

“as equivalent, even if these measures differ from their own”.

Our measures, of course, are very largely identical. None the less, they have not been accepted by the EU because the EU likes to use phytosanitary measures—in direct conflict with the agreement it has signed—as a protectionist measure to impose what one EU negotiator referred to me as their desire to be a regulatory hegemon. “We are a regulatory hegemon”, he said, “and we intend to remain so in our area”. They try to impose it on Switzerland and they would like to impose it on us.

I know that the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, is a fanatical enthusiast for international law and hates any breach of it, except when the EU is in breach, as it is on multiple occasions on this very issue of sanitary and phytosanitary measures, and has been found to be so by the WTO. I am sure he will welcome the fact that we have this agreement and will do his best to persuade the EU to live up to the agreement it has already entered into, rather than request we make further concessions for it to agree to something it has already agreed to.

I do not fully understand the Government’s position on these specific measures. I look to the Minister to illuminate them and explain them to me; I may well have not understood them. They seem to relate to two bugs or diseases. The first is Heterobasidion irregulare; I am sure noble Lords are thoroughly familiar with it. The impact of the controls will be that:

“Host material imported into Great Britain from EU Member States, other than any EU Member State where Heterobasidion irregulare is known not to occur … will need to be free from this pest and compliant with the additional import requirements. This pest will also be subject to increased awareness raising, surveillance and action on detection within Great Britain to protect biosecurity”.


Is Ireland free from this bug? If it is, why do we need any checks?

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[Lord Lilley (Con)]

I am very grateful to the noble Lord for bringing this up. I am sure he will be able to remind me of the clause in the Northern Ireland protocol—to which the EU signed up—that says the EU will use its best endeavours to ensure that there is no need for checks and border posts at the ports and airports of Northern Ireland. Now it is insisting that they exist, rather than trying to find ways of doing without them.

[Lord Empey (UUP)]

I suspect that the answer will be, “We need them there just in case there’s an outbreak of disease and we have to inspect animals and get back to crawling under tractors to see if there is any Scottish soil underneath”, and so on. There will be an answer. As the noble Lord is aware, there is always an answer.

Can the Minister tell us what the implications of the new customs rules that are coming down the track—which our committee is aware of and looking at—will be for the situations we are facing tonight? I think they mean that intrusive interference will be coming down to a very low level—to the level of an individual. Maybe Members do not realise that the Select Committee to which the noble Lord, Lord Dodds, referred—and of which he and I are members—is the only committee in this Parliament that is looking at EU regulations and laws that apply to Northern Ireland. Nobody else is looking at them. There is nothing down at the other end. I think that is an outrage; the House of Commons should be looking at these things. Ours is the only committee in Parliament that is looking at these matters; maybe that says a lot about what people’s priorities are.

I ask the Minister to refer to the customs issue, because I think that is going to come very much to the fore. Can she also tell us what preparations are being made for the 2026 renegotiation of the trade and co-operation agreement? Are the Government preparing and working with other interested parties to decide the best way forward and to see whether, while we cannot solve these problems in their entirety—and certainly not constitutionally—we can perhaps mitigate them further to at least alleviate some of the obstacles that are in the way of business?

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[Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)]

To be honest, I am not going to take any interventions; it has gone 11 pm.

On plant health threats, the UK Plant Health Service, as I mentioned earlier, has Defra, the Scottish Government, the Welsh Government, the Northern Ireland Executive, DAERA and the Forestry Commission as part of it. So it is properly considered and looked at. The noble Lords, Lord Dodds and Lord Roborough, talked about the removal of border checks putting biosecurity at risk, looking in particular at the rising pest risk in the EU. The agreement will explicitly allow for the UK to take action to protect biosecurity. This will mean that the UK has access to EU databases and other systems to help us do this. This is a big benefit. The common understanding is that the UK should be able to take targeted action to protect its biosecurity in public health, in the same way as member states can in the EU.

The noble Lord, Lord Dodds, mentioned FMD protection for Northern Ireland. As he said, Northern Ireland is protected under the biosecurity regime of the EU. Northern Ireland implements official controls and additional protections in response to risk, such as measures related to pest-free areas, traceability and additional notification requirements for the highest- risk goods in order to maintain the island of Ireland’s biosecurity.

The noble Lord, Lord Lilley, and the noble Baroness, Lady Grender, asked about Popillia japonica. The noble Baroness rightly said that the reason these pests are mentioned in this SI is that the new requirements are already in place in Northern Ireland, so this is bringing the rest of GB into alignment with Northern Ireland; that is what the SI does.

[Lord Lilley (Con)]

Will the Minister give way?

[Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)]

I have said I am not taking any interventions.

[Lord Lilley (Con)]

The Minister has not replied to a single point I made. If the bug does not exist in Ireland, why are we inspecting goods coming from Ireland?

[Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)]

There are plenty of bugs that do not exist in our other countries and are far away that still have the propensity to come here or could possibly arrive here. Therefore, we need to be absolutely vigilant regarding any new potential pests and diseases. The noble Lord, Lord Roborough, talked about the devastating consequences if we do not do that, so we absolutely need to be doing this.

I just have a couple of points and then I am going to wind up, because it is getting late. I will go to Hansard and write on any outstanding points. The noble Lord, Lord Empey, mentioned the trade and co-operation agreement and that its review is due next year. I will take that back to the department and speak about the noble Lord’s concerns on this, because he made a very sensible and relevant point. I completely agreed with the noble Lord, Lord Bew, regarding compromise. It is an extremely important point to make and, if we are to move forward, compromise is going to be critical.

In conclusion, I emphasise that this instrument is a routine update that ensures that risk-based and proportionate biosecurity controls are in operation in Great Britain. Northern Ireland continues to be able to respond to pest risks specifically for Northern Ireland where needed, and will continue to play a full and comprehensive role in technical and policy decisions affecting the UK as a whole.

I remind noble Lords that I meet regularly with DAERA and the Northern Ireland Ministers and their team. Also, I understand that we have a regular meeting of our Northern Ireland Peers this Wednesday, so I am sure that we can pick up many of these issues and continue further at that meeting.

Finally, it is very late. It has gone 11 pm, so I thank all the staff who have stayed and supported us in the House at this late hour.