Plant Health (Amendment etc.) (EU Exit) Regulations 2020

Lord Teverson Excerpts

Monday 7th December 2020 Grand Committee

[Lord Teverson (LD)]

My Lords, I declare my interest as chair of the Cornwall and Isles of Scilly Local Nature Partnership, which is obviously very concerned about biosecurity. I commend the Minister for his work on biosecurity. I know he champions it in government, which is very much to be recognised. I was also going to congratulate the officials who put all this together, as did the noble Baroness, Lady Fookes. If I suffer from insomnia later this week I shall reach for it next to my bed, I assure you.

This is a really serious subject because we know that lapses in biosecurity can cost us a huge amount of money. On the animal side, we still think back to foot and mouth, which cost some £8 billion or £9 billion. In the case of plants, lapses can have a major impact on biodiversity. This is a really important area.

I will bring up a few points with the Minister. First, “passport” sounds impressive, but is nothing at all like the passport we have at the moment while we are part of the single market, which allows us to transfer products within 28 nation states with security. This will allow plant materials to go between the devolved nations, but that is about it.

I will follow up on the important point that the noble Baroness, Lady Fookes, raised about IT systems. I would like to understand whether those systems are ready, whether they have been trialled and whether we are certain that they will work. I am not sure whether this is supposed to happen on 1 January or in July, but perhaps the Minister could reassure us on that.

Within the European Union we have the TRACES system, which I expect the Prime Minister might describe as world beating. It is a very serious system. I wonder whether there are plans to have some connection with TRACES in future—as long as negotiations are successful in the coming weeks, as we all hope they will be. There is real information and data in that system that would be of use to us, and I am sure that our data would still be of use to the EU for the point of increasing both sides’ biosecurity.

One of the most important areas is preventing these diseases getting to the border in the first place. Under the present system, the Commission has a number of officials worldwide who check out producers and growers before products are shipped or processed. We will no longer have access to those individuals and their recommendations, checking and audit. I would be interested to understand from the Minister where we are on replacing that capability. In some ways, preventing these risks at source is even more fundamental than stopping them at the border.

I understand the concept of risk-based enforcement and I welcome it in all sorts of ways. It is a most efficient way to do it, but I warn the Minister that I have too often seen “risk-based” being a euphemism for “budget cut”. I would like reassurance on where we are on personnel at the border, let alone out there in the rest of the world, to make sure that this system works.

Lastly, I ask the Minister to reassure us that we will not have an open gate for six months, where one gets the impression that anything goes. Although I understand entirely that most products come through the European Union, so it will be no riskier on 1 January then it will be on 31 December, I am aware that there tends to be a regulatory arbitrage among people who want to move on substandard product. I wonder whether less scrupulous people in this trade outside our national frontiers might try to use this open door policy to find a way to sell substandard product. That would be a risk.