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

To ask Her Majesty's Government what assessment they have made of the impact of the UK–EU Trade and Cooperation Agreement on the conditions governing the importation of trees and shrubs, in particular those relating to disease control.

The agreement has secured the UK’s full autonomy over our plant health regime. This means we can continue to take a risk based approach, in line with WTO-SPS Agreement principles, to setting our plant health import requirements but these can now be tailored to the specific biosecurity needs of GB.

In practice this means that we can introduce stronger import controls than those set by the EU when this is justified by a pest risk assessment undertaken in-line with relevant international standards.

The agreement also means we can now apply controls to imports from the EU, something which was generally not possible whilst the UK was an EU member state or during the transition period. This means there will now be stronger regulation of plants and plant products imported from EU member states. For example, our current import requirements (which are now stronger than the EU’s) for the pest canker stain of plane will now be applied to imports from the EU in addition to imports from non-EU third countries.