Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what products imported from the EU requiring sanitary and phytosanitary inspections have had the fees for those inspections waived until 2022.

Plant health controls of goods imported into GB from the EU are being introduced in phases, aligned to the risks posed by different regulated commodities. Those goods which present the greatest potential biosecurity risk, ‘high-priority plants’, have been subject to sanitary and phytosanitary (SPS) controls since 1 January 2021. The selection of consignments for physical checks is risk-based, so that lower risk goods receive a lower frequency of checks. As such, fees need to be adapted to ensure there is no over-recovery of costs.

All other regulated goods are not subject to plant health controls until 2022, as such no fees are currently associated with these EU imports. Similarly, for other SPS goods, fees are only being charged at the point checks are being introduced, in line with the published timetable for the phased introduction of checks.