Transcript of evidence to EFRA committee on UK trade policy: food and agriculture

Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee 

Oral evidence: UK trade policy: food and agriculture, HC 162

Tuesday 27 February 2024

Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 27 February 2024.

Watch the meeting 

Members present: Sir Robert Goodwill (Chair); Steven Bonnar; Ian Byrne; Dr Neil Hudson; Selaine Saxby; Cat Smith; Julian Sturdy.

Questions 184 - 264

Witnesses

I: Jack Simpson, Senior Trade Policy Advisor, World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF); Orla Delargy, Head of Public Affairs, Sustain; Natasha Hurley, Director of Campaigns, Feedback; and Mark Williams, Chair, British Egg Industry Council.

Written evidence from witnesses:

– Sustain

- British Egg Industry Council

Examination of witnesses

Witnesses: Jack Simpson, Orla Delargy, Natasha Hurley and Mark Williams.

Q184       Chair: Welcome to this session of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Select Committee, our third session in our evidence gathering for our report on UK trade policy, particularly as it relates to food and agriculture. I am very pleased that we have four witnesses today. Could I ask you to introduce yourselves and say a little bit about your roles?

Jack Simpson: I am a Senior Trade Policy Adviser for the WWF-UK. We work on the impact of trade policy in the environment: how UK trade policy over the last few years has impacted what we buy and consume. We have developed a proposal called “Core Environmental Standards”, which I am sure we will come on to talk about. We are delighted to be here today. Thank you for having me.

Mark Williams: I am currently the Chairman of the British Egg Industry Council following a changeover in December last year. Previously, I had been the Chief Executive.

Chair: Forever, I seem to remember.

Mark Williams: Well, 24 years—it seems a long time—but in tandem as a sideline to my Chief Executive role in the British industry, I was also Secretary General of the European Egg Industry Trade Association, which gave me quite a bit of an insight into international trade.

For the members here, a little bit more about the British Egg Industry Council: we are the interprofessional association for the UK egg industry. We also own the Lion quality trade mark and administer the Lion code of practice. Currently, about 95% of all the eggs produced in the UK are produced to the Lion standards.

Natasha Hurley: I am the Director of Campaigns for an organisation called Feedback. We are a global campaigning organisation working to make the food system more sustainable and more equitable. As a general introduction to our philosophy on food systems, I paraphrase Professor Tim Lang of the City University, who says that the only secure food system is a sustainable food system. Indeed, I would add to that that the only secure food system is also a socially equitable food system. It is a great pleasure to be here. Thank you very much for the invitation.

Orla Delargy: I am from Sustain, the alliance for better food and farming. Like Feedback, we are interested in a sustainable and equitable food system. Our three main areas of interest for trade are standards, scrutiny and strategy.

Q185       Chair: Thank you all. Maybe I could start with you, Orla, with a question which I will ask all of you in turn: how coherent and effective is the UK’s strategy for agrifood trade?

Orla Delargy: We would argue that there isn’t one and that that is an area of weakness.

Q186       Chair: Is that because it is country-by-country and there is a different strategy for, say, the USA, India or Singapore?

Orla Delargy: Having any strategy at all would be great but there just isn't one and you can see that is leading to disagreements bubbling up within Government Departments. There was one very recently, which was apparently briefed to the press, about labelling being a possible solution to low-standard imports. There were reports that there were disagreements between DEFRA and the Department for Business and Trade, and it is not the first time that that has happened.

If the Government hammered out a strategy in the first place, these sorts of internecine wars would not end up bubbling up in the likes of the Financial Times.

Q187       Chair: Thank you. Natasha, have you come to the same conclusions?

Natasha Hurley: Yes, very much so, and I would add that the lack of coherence in the UK’s international trade policy is reflected in a lack of coherence with domestic policy priorities or what should be domestic policy priorities such as public health. For example, we see that in the fact that we have nearly three times more sugar on the UK market than we need to give everyone their daily recommended intake. Yet we are liberalising trade with Australia, for example, and we will be introducing more tariff-free sugar over the coming years at a time when we are already massively oversupplied. That is clearly at odds.

Q188       Chair: Do you mean that there are sheds full of sugar that nobody has eaten? Or do you mean that we are eating too much sugar?

Natasha Hurley: We are eating too much and that is having a catastrophic impact on infant, child and adult health. Three-quarters of the UK’s 45 to 75-year-olds are currently obese or overweight, which is a staggering figure. At the same time, we are liberalising our market and opening it up to more sugar imports. From our perspective, achieving coherence between the agreements but also with domestic policy is a priority that the country needs to look at.

Q189       Chair: Are you suggesting that if we could limit the amount of sugar that came into the country, the price would increase to such an extent that people would buy less of it?

Natasha Hurley: There would just be less sugar available for producers to put in their products. I would argue that we are in such a dire situation for people’s health and diets that we need to look at dramatic measures to reduce the supply of sugar.

Q190       Chair: We could build more sugar beet factories, presumably, and farmers would grow more sugar beet if imports were restricted.

Natasha Hurley: Well, sugar beet is an interesting case in point because currently we are importing three-quarters of our fruit and vegetables and we are using some of the UK’s highest quality agricultural land to grow sugar beet, which is oversupplying the UK market, among other things.

Feedback would like to see a situation where the UK could produce more fruit and vegetables domestically and reduce the amount of sugar that is available to UK consumers. Clearly, trade policy is an important lever to make that happen.

Q191       Chair: Mark, I have probably confined your comments to the egg situation, which I think is quite representative of quite a few other sectors, but some of the issues with eggs are more focused and more likely to be issues.

Mark Williams: Yes. Eggs are a basic commodity. Eggs would be found in something like 6,000 to 7,000 different food products and so are widely used by most of the populace. We are fortunate in that our self-sufficiency has been high and has continued to grow. However, the industry has experienced a torrid time in the last couple of years. I feel that when our 2023 data is published it will show that our self-sufficiency will have fallen back into the mid-80s.

Chair: Especially when the supermarkets would not pay the farmers any more money for their eggs, despite chicken feed having doubled in price.

Mark Williams: That is right. A number of factors came together: raging inflation post Covid as the world came out of lockdown, Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and the industry transitioning away from enriched cages towards non-cage systems of production because retailers have decided to go forward with a cage-free policy from 2025. Those things were compounded by avian influenza over the last couple of years. As you say, Sir Robert, the industry is more interested in aspects of animal welfare, and we certainly support what speakers have said.

Chair: We will come on to that in some detail later.

Jack Simpson: I agree that there has been no coherent UK trade strategy. Over the last three years, we have seen a very liberalised approach to UK trade policy. We have been lowering tariffs and improving market access without the safeguards for our environment. This means that improvements in UK market access open the door indiscriminately to the best and the worst producers. At a time when we are trying to improve sustainable farming and nature practices in the UK, we are importing goods that undermine the production standards that we are holding UK farmers to and wanting them to aspire to.

Currently, agriculture is a global driver of 60% of biodiversity loss and 30% of greenhouse gas production. We need a coherent trade strategy that incorporates environmental and food-system objectives in order to develop a sustainable food system.

Q192       Chair: Are you suggesting that food should also have an associated Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, as well as things such as steel, aluminium and the other goods that we know are high carbon?

Jack Simpson: We need to go beyond carbon emission. CBAM does its work in the carbon space, but we also need to think about biodiversity losses, the impact of trade on the environment, the impact of water and air pollution, and water stress and scarcity. When it comes to sustainable trade, CBAMs can be part of the solution but we need to think about these other objectives and the impacts that trade has on the agriculture sector.

Q193       Chair: Coming back to you all, I get the impression that there is no strategy across the board and that trade negotiations have been carried out in silos. Does that mean that we do not have a coherent policy on trade across the board?

Secondly, have we set a precedent? There was a suggestion that we did not drive as hard a bargain as we could have done with the Australian deal on animal welfare and some other standards. By setting precedents, are we undermining our negotiating position for future agreements where we might want, for example, to not have battery eggs coming in or the use of pesticides that the UK has banned?

Orla Delargy: We definitely did with the Australia deal. The Australians were astounded. They thought that we had bargained the house away. When you start from that position with your first post-Brexit trade deal, you can see how all the other negotiators will be just looking at us and thinking the UK doesn’t know what it is doing. It has put the UK on the back foot and that starts from not having a strategy in place.

Q194       Chair: In effect, we had a lot of free trade in our free trade deal. The Australian deal was very liberal. The Government were keen to liberalise trade and have more free trade. Was that not effective?

Orla Delargy: We did not ask for anything in return when it came to agrifoods. We said they could have access to our market and the deal set limits for tonnage but did not say that Australia had to meet our standards and that has left UK farmers competing with food that has been produced to lower standards than UK standards.

Australia is a vast country and is producing way more than the UK produces. You can see why UK farmers are disgruntled at being asked to do so much while at the same time competing with products that they would not be allowed to produce.

Q195       Chair: Is it not the case that the quantities of beef and lamb coming in from Australia are minute because Australia says their market is in the far east? And what about New Zealand? Is it not the case that New Zealand has never filled its tariff rate quota anyway, so we are not opening up the floodgates because the floodgates are already open, but the flood did not come in?

Orla Delargy: Not yet. The deals have only just been signed. It is hard to see why the Australians would be so happy about it if they had no intention of ever sending any food. They were cock-a-hoop. Australian cattle farmers were absolutely thrilled. Australia might not be sending products at the moment but the minute their existing market is disrupted, they have a ready one in the UK. You can see why farmers here are so fed up with it.

Natasha Hurley: Another point to note is that the EU and Australia were recently in free trade agreement negotiations and their deal, I understand, is founded on the basis that the EU does not want to liberalise or open its market to tariff-free Australian meat.

I am not sure if Committee members are aware of this, but Feedback has recently filed for a judicial review of the UK-Australia free trade agreement, or rather the regulations implementing the FTA. There will be a High Court hearing on this later this year, I hope within the coming months.

It is our view that the Government did not properly assess the risk of carbon leakage as a result of the UK-Australia FTA. It did not include that risk in the impact assessment on the grounds that the source data on emissions from livestock were too variable and this was despite clear evidence, including evidence presented in the National Food Strategy, showing that Australian beef produces higher emissions than UK-produced beef and that beef and cattle production in Australia is one of the leading drivers of deforestation in Australia.

Three-quarters of current deforestation in Queensland is the result of clearing land for cattle. Feedback is extremely concerned about that, and this is not just in the context of the UK-Australia FTA. We do not want to see any risk from any future free trade agreements the UK strikes that our carbon emissions will be increasing across the board either because we are importing higher-emission meat or indeed any other food product, or because cheaper food imports, cheaper meat imports, lead to increased consumption in the UK at a time when we should be decreasing meat consumption.

The Climate Change Committee has recommended that we decrease meat consumption by 20% by 2030 and the National Food Strategy said that the decrease should be 30% by 2030. To us, the idea that we would be opening our market to higher imports of high-emission beef, sheep and dairy from Australia flies in the face of common sense at this critical juncture.

Q196       Chair: In New Zealand, sheep flocks have virtually halved because farmers are planting trees and selling carbon credits around the world. Is that not likely to happen in Australia too, so we would end up not importing lamb and beef from Australia but paying them to offset our aviation emissions, for example?

Natasha Hurley: Offsetting is problematic, and a lot of people have concerns about it. The reality is that we are faced with a deal that means that over time we could be looking at a significant substantial increase in meat imports from Australia. Australian meat farmers are cock-a-hoop about the deal. Clearly, they see that there is a huge market opportunity for Australia in the UK.

The EU has said that it does not want to proceed with a trade deal with Australia if that would mean importing tariff-free meat and putting its own farmers at risk. This is a big concern for Feedback. We see that British farmers are being undercut at every turn and the Government have admitted as much.

The Government said in the contexts of both the UK-Australia deal and the CPTPP that UK farmers will lose out to the tune of millions of pounds. From our perspective, these deals are certainly not good for UK citizens, for the climate or for UK farmers. We have grave concerns on multiple fronts.

Q197       Chair: Are you saying that it is bad for British consumers if the price of Australian wine on the supermarket shelves falls? Wine is one of our main imports from Australia. Australian wine has very good penetration into our market and free trade means cheaper wine, doesn’t it?

Natasha Hurley: This is not just about cost. Wine is one thing, but we are in the middle of a climate crisis. I don’t know if even those of us who work on these issues every day are fully aware and can fully comprehend the extent to which our lives will be transformed within our lifetimes by climate change.

Climate change will impact people around the world at different rates, but the UK will face catastrophic change if we do not act fast to bring down our carbon emissions and give a good example to countries around the world that need to do the same thing.

From our perspective, meat imports are particularly relevant in the context of climate change. We are saying that we cannot liberalise free trade at any cost. We are saying that trade can be a force for good, and can potentially, be an incredible lever to drive positive change in the world, but the way we see the UK Government approach trading arrangements currently does not fill us with confidence for the future.

Orla Delargy: Could I come in on price here?

Chair: Please do.

Orla Delargy: Wine is one example. If I could set wine aside for a second, there have been quite a lot of arguments about cheap food, that cheap food is a desirable outcome and how consumers in the UK would be happy to see cheaper food on the shelves, but we would argue very strongly against that. We say that what consumers are after is not cheap food, the Ratner approach, but affordable food, which is a very different thing. When you ask consumers—which the consumer organisation Which? did—you get a disproportionate response from consumers on lower incomes saying that they do not want the cheap, poorly produced food because they know that they are in the firing line to have to eat it.

You will find that those consumers are the ones who are the most in support of having core standards. They do not want to have to go and shop around and try to figure out the low and the high; they just want to have a basic level that they can have confidence in. It is disproportionate for shoppers on limited budgets.

Q198       Chair: Jack, do you have anything to add?

Jack Simpson: This has already been alluded to but what WWF would like to see from trade agreements is essentially free trade but fair and free trade agreements that are not undermining producers at home and not bringing cheap imports in at the cost to the environment overseas.

At the moment we feel that, without a coherent trade strategy, we are at risk of engaging in a race to the bottom with every trade deal we make. That is why we are advocating for core environmental standards to be set in domestic legislation, standards that would essentially act as an import mechanism preventing produce made to standards lower than those of UK farmers from coming into the UK market.

We want those core environmental standards to sit alongside trade agreements and free trade agreements. They would not negatively impact current signed free trade agreements but sit alongside them and support them in the environmental space.

Chair: We are going to cover some of that.

Jack Simpson: We would be looking for these kinds of free and fair trade agreements.

Q199       Chair: When I first got involved in agricultural politics, I remember that the big argument was between Britain and Holland as to who could subsidise the gas to heat glasshouses to grow fruit and vegetables out of season. Then Spain joined the European Union and all of a sudden Spain could produce those goods outdoors, presumably with a much lower carbon footprint. Even though they were trucking the produce from Campo de Cartagena in the south of Spain, it was still more cost-effective.

In some ways, could free trade improve the carbon footprint? As energy becomes more expensive, goods produced using less energy could end up at a better price on the market and displace high-energy production in northern climates.

Jack Simpson: I would not take issue with that. We can sometimes get stuck thinking we need to import so much and produce so much but looking at where and how those goods are produced is where we will strike the balance in our food system with good production and good sourcing.

When we are talking about the international trade aspect of food sourcing, we must be aware that the climate crisis is already having an impact. About 20% of fresh fruit and vegetables comes from climate-vulnerable zones. Last year we saw the impact of droughts and severe weather on the availability of winter vegetables from North Africa and the Mediterranean basin. We need to think about how trade and our trading system impact our food system.

Q200       Chair: That is why we should eat things in season, sprouts and cabbage in the winter as Thérèse Coffey said recently. She was slammed for it, but it seemed very sensible to me.

Jack Simpson: Preferably. We would not have droughts or food scarcity in the first place but would still have environments that could produce nutritious food, and if trade agreements allowed us to have access to that nutritious food all year that would be fine. If production was sustainable—and hopefully it would be—that would be even better. I would not say what we need to eat and when, but we must make sure that we have sustainable food systems.

Q201       Chair: We have been told that we should not eat so much sugar. Is that the role of the Government, or is it the role of the market to determine what people eat and where it comes from?

Orla Delargy: The Government’s own research shows that voluntary measures in the market have not worked. The research is available, and I will not contest it. You cannot leave it to the market or to industry. Progressive industries have already been coming out saying, “Regulate us, please” because they know that there is no economic incentive for them to do it on their own. For instance, if one supermarket says it will stock fewer sugary products, the one next door will just stock more. The industry does need regulation to create a level playing field.

Chair: Understood.

Q202       Ian Byrne: I was just trying to look up something that you touched on. We know we cannot leave these things to the market. We saw from research last week that 68% of profits come from bad food. That is an acknowledgement of the complete failure of leaving it to the market and the impact on the health of the country is there for all to see at the moment.

Coming to my question, the assessment of the Australia deal and what you are saying is pretty damning, putting the cheap wine aside. How effective are parliamentary oversight mechanisms for scrutinising the Government’s approach to agrifood trade? I say that in light of changes made to the Department for International Trade in February 2023, creating the ITC.

We have already seen how poor the scrutiny of the Australia deal was and the ramifications of what we are going to get from that deal. Are you worried?

Orla Delargy: Are we worried about the lack of scrutiny?

Ian Byrne: Yes.

Orla Delargy: Yes, very much so. Scrutinising trade deals is a relatively new thing for Parliament to do because the EU had been doing that for the UK. It is almost like a new skill that the UK Parliament needs to develop, having started from scratch with the Australia deal; that was sub-par. The International Trade Select Committee had not produced its report before the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act was triggered for Australia. The scrutiny mechanism was just not there at all.

Also, if you get to the endpoint where Parliament is being asked—it is not given a guaranteed debate or vote—and then is given 21 days to consider the impact of the deal, it is too late. It is quite a dramatic thing for Parliament to do, to come in at the very last minute and say, “No, don’t sign this treaty”. That would be pure drama.

For us, the ideal mechanism would be to have Parliament and civil society involved right at the beginning, setting the negotiating strategy, and giving the negotiators their mandate. That happens in other countries. I think the USA does it on camera. Lobbyists put in papers, which are published, and then they can be called to give evidence. That is the gold standard of transparency that we just do not have.

The process from start to finish does not feel like Parliament has an adequate role. Consumers have been very clear about what they want, from our perspective, anyway, in food and farming; they have been absolutely crystal clear the whole way along. They have told Government Departments, they have told Which?, they have told us. We polled them. Consumers have been polled by various agencies. Food and product standards and environmental concerns come out top all the time. Consumers have been absolutely crystal clear, but their concerns are not being picked up

Q203       Ian Byrne: It is worrying that we now have the BTC replacing the ITC—acronyms everywhere—and the BTC is talking about a lighter-touch approach than the ITC’s. It does not seem as if any lessons are being learned; we are going backwards.

Orla Delargy: It is hard to see how it could be lighter.

Q204       Ian Byrne: Natasha, would you like to add anything?

Natasha Hurley: Orla has mentioned that scrutiny—such as currently exists—is all very post-hoc, too late in the day. We need scrutiny much earlier in the process, including on the UK’s own negotiating objectives when it is going in to start negotiations for a trade deal.

Feedback is very concerned about the lack of proper impact assessment, assessing all the different risks to UK citizens—and not just ordinary citizens but farmers and so on—that could arise from striking these trade agreements. We want to see impact assessments taking into account environmental and health impacts, and also looking at equity and the impact of our trade policy on the food that is available to people in the UK and on the workers in the supply chains in third countries that we are sourcing our food from. We are not seeing that currently.

There is certainly a lot of demand, including from public health academics and professionals on the public health front, for us to pay attention to public health ahead of negotiating any trade deal to make sure that standards are baked in from the outset.

Q205       Ian Byrne: I am struggling to understand why the Government are trying to roll back scrutiny by Parliament. Do you have a perspective on that?

Natasha Hurley: I do not know, but we see the Government are rushing to strike free trade agreements for the sake of striking them, not taking a strategic approach to trade and not thinking from the outset about what, as a country, we need and want out of a trade deal or from trade overall in the coming decades.

Q206       Ian Byrne: Mark, Jack, would you like to add anything?

Mark Williams: Leaving aside the negatives that have happened over history, by and large trade has made countries and citizens richer—you only have to look at the UK and the Netherlands for example—but the world has changed as my colleagues have already said. The environment is much more important. People are aware of animal welfare standards now and that puts a totally different perspective on things.

We do not fear fair trade, but we do fear free trade. Thinking about what scrutiny could be put in place in future—Orla has already mentioned it—a negotiating mandate agreed at the beginning of the negotiations and Parliament kept up to date throughout.

Ian Byrne: Right from the start.

Mark Williams: Absolutely, and keeping the devolved Administrations involved, because they are also very interested in getting a UK negotiating strategy and informing and involving stakeholders. My colleagues and I have something to offer. Sometimes I feel that we are not listened to if it perhaps does not suit the political narrative. I do agree with your assessment that some free trade deals are done for the sake of it, and then you can have that political newsworthy item that night without looking at the substance.

Ian Byrne: Not a long-term strategy though, is it?

Mark Williams: I think the biggest problem we face—and again it has been touched on—the EU has been our negotiator for 40-odd years. While UK civil servants and Ministers have fed into the process, when you are in the hot seat negotiating it is a totally different kettle of fish.

Perhaps I am being a bit unfair here, but I think our lack of experience of being in the hot seat in those early trade deals has been to our detriment. People will learn going forward and we will become much stronger in that respect.

We can help there, but I also feel that comprehensive economic impact assessments need to be done at the beginning and at the end before the deal is signed. Finish the negotiations, do the economic impact assessment before the deal is signed, and then you can see what the other side wanted in the negotiations and how much our side is prepared to give, because the trade negotiation is always give and take.

Q207       Ian Byrne: That goes back to having a coherent strategy to anchor yourself to. Jack, would you like to add anything?

Jack Simpson: The Committee might not be aware that we have a legal complaint in against the Government about how the Australia negotiations were consulted upon in the preliminary stages. This is through something called the Aarhus Convention that the UK Government signed up to. It states that the UK public must be consulted when significant bits of legislation that impact the environment are brought forward.

WWF, alongside a whole range of NGOs, farming unions and businesses put forward this complaint to the Aarhus Convention. It has been deemed admissible. We are waiting to see if there needs to be a hearing at this stage or whether a decision on that can be made. We do not think scrutiny has been anywhere near what we want to see., and that is of course at the prior stage on things like public consultation.

Also at that final stage CRAG does not guarantee a debate when it comes to passing free trade agreements. It does not guarantee a substantive vote, whereas when we look at our partners on this like America, the European Union and even Japan, they have guaranteed debates and votes. One thing I would like to ask of the Committee is to make sure that a debate of CPTPP is asked for and requested, because that has just ended its CRAG period and we do not have any assurance of a debate at this moment.

Q208       Ian Byrne: That is an excellent point and that can be raised later on. To pull it all together, what has been said is grim and damning. Are there any changes that we could do through scrutiny, because I am thinking about recommendations for the report? You have all made a couple of recommendations, but can we pull it together? I need to be clear about what you feel is needed from a scrutiny perspective.

Jack Simpson: One thing definitely has to be that improved engagement on the consultation side, bringing in parliamentarians throughout the process so that they are more engaged and understanding of the trade agreements. It strengthens the negotiator’s hands because they will see that certain objectives have been voted on and that it is harder to go back to the table, so you cannot compromise on certain issues. Also, to engage with experts, not just for the environmental sector but also business groups that call for improved trade scrutiny and trade consultation.

Last year we had the thematic working groups who were perennially under review at a key time when the Australia free trade agreements were coming through, India free trade agreement was happening, and a CPTPP session was happening. But the thematic working groups that were meant to input and share some insight into this were under review and not happening, particularly from the environmental side that we had signed up to.

There are some very easy wins for us to get there in consultation without asking for a grand change in complex issues; it is these very simple building blocks to increasing consultation and expertise.

Mark Williams: Four points, if I may: Parliament to be involved in the negotiating mandate, beginning and during; devolved Administrations also involved, including seeing the negotiating text, because that was not always the case; stakeholder engagement; and comprehensive economic impact assessments, both at the beginning and before agreed.

Natasha Hurley: My colleagues have said a lot already, but to go back to the initial point I made about impact assessments. Without proper impact assessment and cross-cutting across the different priorities—public health, climate impact, environmental impact, and social impact—without those elements being fully investigated, we cannot have proper scrutiny because we will not have the evidence base.

Orla Delargy: All of the above; tick, tick, tick. If I could add some, I suppose from our perspective getting civil society involved earlier on would be helpful. We ended up getting a lot of our information from websites like the Australian Government website, which would put information out on it and that is how we got up to speed on the deal, which is a bit ridiculous. It was as if the UK Government did not realise how the internet worked. Hopefully they do now.

The last thing I would say is that we are quite a small charity. When the deals get going the Committees spring into action and put out calls for evidence. That is great but when you are quite a small organisation it is quite a thing to try to cover off all of the different Committees, everything that is being asked for in all of the different formats. That is a personal plea from me: if we could produce one set of information and give it to you all that would help enormously too.

Q209       Steven Bonnar: We are onto a devolved question. This will have a Scottish theme running right through it, but it is in relation to the consultation processes, or indeed lack of. How successful—and it is a broad question—is the UK Government in consulting the relevant stakeholders on its trade policy agreements and objectives?

Jack Simpson: As mentioned before, Government consultation has been haphazard. From a personal perspective, I have been invited into briefing meetings online and then you do not hear about the follow-ups, and you do not go back to them, and then randomly a few months later you go back to them.

Consultations have been very haphazard and sometimes they have been under review for the last year at key times when it comes to the negotiations that have been happening. There is now something called the Trade Insight Forum that will seek to regularly consult with external stakeholders from DBT. I will not say anything about that but that is at least a promising way forward.

On the devolved aspect of that it is unclear—at least from my perspective—how the Scottish and Welsh devolved Administrations feed into the trade process.

Q210       Steven Bonnar: Anything to add to that, Mark?

Mark Williams: When we saw the result of the EU referendum vote back in 2016 the warning bells were going as to what would happen. Having worked in the EU as well, DG AGRI was very supportive of agriculture and it tended to protect what it deemed to be sensitive sectors, and eggs and egg products were classed as a sensitive sector.

Bearing in mind what I said before that the UK and successive Governments have always been free traders, I could see what would happen here. We had various economic reports commissioned from Wageningen University, which is probably the European leader for independent economic reports. We had done about four or five with my EU hat on. I immediately commissioned one based on UK data only, which has been widely shared, and we updated it again last year.

In terms of what the engagement is like, we do have a good relationship with the DEFRA and DBT officials there. They have engaged with us. We have shared all we have—warts and all—and raised our fears, and we have done various lobbying events in this House as well.

However, as I mentioned a few minutes ago, I do not think we are always listened to. I am not naïve enough to realise that in a free trade negotiation that there is give and take, and I think we have been given or sacrificed in terms of getting that trade agreement across the line.

When you start talking about things like animal welfare, the UK—and the EU for that matter—lead the world when it comes to laying hen welfare, there is no doubt about that. I always remember a senior EU official saying to me, “Mark, if you want me to press the animal welfare button I will, but remember the negotiator on the other side will want something back”—in other words, greater quota.

I think we are missing a trick here in this country at the moment—bearing in mind negotiators’ experience will improve—when I had my EU hat on, the chief EU negotiator rang me up one Sunday morning and he said, “We are about to push this trade deal across the line, can you live with this?” I said, “I will come back to you in a couple of hours’ time” because they were breaking for lunch, consulted with the commercial people and went back and said, “Yes, we could” or, “No, we could not”. I do not get that here and that should happen here. It is my members’ livelihoods.

Q211       Steven Bonnar: Anything to add there, Natasha, or Orla?

Orla Delargy: More broadly, trade policy is obviously reserved by the UK Government and then agrifood policy is devolved, so you can see that there is a tension there. I think that is probably more for you to ask the question; I do not have the answer. I did ask colleagues in Scotland who made the point that colleagues from devolved nations are supposed to be in the room whenever negotiations are happening on agrifood because obviously that is devolved, and I am not sure whether that is happening.

I do not know whether you know but it might be worth asking the question about whether that is being facilitated. The trade and advisory groups have been dismantled and replaced by stakeholder groups. I do not know what that means or who is in them or who is in the room.

Q212       Steven Bonnar: They are not but there are obviously representations from the Scottish Government and representations from the Scottish Affairs Committee. The condemnation from the Scottish Government has been clear in the room tonight, in terms of the FDAs that have been struck, obviously phasing out the tariffs on lamb and beef; not using geographical indicators has had a big impact and we now see less secure products, like our exports of salmon and whisky and others being vulnerable to cheap imports as well, has been mentioned earlier.

Of course the GIs are a source of great pride and importance to the people of Scotland, and indeed I think the Welsh lamb farmers and things like that as well. The objectives are consistent in the devolved Administrations, but it is clear that they are not being taken into account by the UK Government, so I wonder if you would think about public consultation. Is the engagement that we are seeing with the general public on food and agrifood strategy sufficient, and how could we improve in that area as well?

Orla Delargy: We made the point earlier that the public have not been consulted, not by the Government anyway but they have by other people. The consumer organisation Which? was consulted and we have done polling ourselves, so I think the strength of feeling has definitely come through from the public. I do not know whether it is being reflected back from Government.

The other tension between trade policy being reserved by the UK Government and agrifood policy being devolved out to the nations is you also have the internal market regulations, which essentially means that the UK Government can make decisions in the free trade agreements that might be counter, for example, to consumers in Scotland. But then those products would circulate within the internal markets in the UK and then Scottish consumers would be in the position where they are vulnerable to it and having to buy it, even though they had objected to it. I think that does definitely leave a gap in the policymaking.

Natasha Hurley: I would like to add that, as I understand it, the Scottish Government are committed to track EU policy. That is quite relevant in that context as well because we could potentially see divergences between—

Q213       Steven Bonnar: We want to protect the very highest of standards, whether it is the exquisite products that we have in Scotland or indeed the animal welfare standards. They are at the highest but that is not a given. We need to keep working at that and making sure that we maintain the highest standards. That is where the concerns of the Scottish Government are not being addressed as well.

Orla Delargy: Divergence is a good point, which comes up in antibiotic policy that I can talk a bit about later. If the EU is ramping up its policies on antibiotic usage as it is and the UK is not following in step, essentially what the UK is doing is making itself a market for lower standard produce. It is becoming a beacon and a magnet for produce that is of a lower standard.

Steven Bonnar: To finish off, Chair, what I have picked up today is such has been the desperation of the UK Government to strike a deal—any sort of trade deal—we are having our standards compromised and the concerns that the devolved Administrations have raised have not been taken on board. If anybody would disagree with that point I would like to hear it.

I think that speaks volumes.

Q214       Dr Hudson: Thank you to our witnesses for being before us today. Over a long period of time our EFRA Select Committee, along with stakeholders, charities, the NFU, have been calling on the Government to have core agrifood, environmental, and animal welfare standards as core standards as you go into the trade negotiation process. That gives you clarity going into the FTA negotiations.

We have continued to call for that. Is that still an objective that as witnesses you would concur with? That setting up a framework of core standards is something that will help us when we are negotiating future deals moving forward?

Mark Williams: Absolutely. OIE standards work to move forward animal welfare; it is called World Office of Animal Health of course now. We fully support that. I would like to put on the record that we are among the leaders in the world in terms of animal welfare, particularly when it comes to laying hens and our particular sector, and we have no wish for our standards to be diluted in terms of free trade agreements.

The problem we face of course is that we have successive Ministers who would like us to ever raise our standards, and by and large if you improve animal welfare standards you do add to the cost of production. This at the same time as a free trade agreement would traditionally provide cheaper imports coming in. I call it in basic language: we cannot keep jacking up our standards at home and leave our back door open. The perfect example is the ban on conventional battery cages that came about in 2012. Most of the world still uses conventional battery cages, and I am sure we will come on to talk about CPD.

Q215       Dr Hudson: Yes, we will come on to specific egg standards in a subsequent question.

Mark Williams: Food safety is a given to consumers, animal welfare is a given to consumers in this country, and it is given to them by retailers expecting us as an industry to deliver those high standards of animal welfare. Now, increasingly, environmental concerns are coming to the fore.

Q216       Dr Hudson: Do any of the rest of the panel have anything to add to that? You are all nodding vigorously with the question.

Orla Delargy: I absolutely agree with everything that has been said there. The other thing is from the perspective of farmers. They do not want to lose the high standards that they have built up. A good case in point is hormone beef, which is taken as a red line now, but we had to fight for hormone beef regulations to be recognised.

Recently at one of the party conferences a parliamentarian said how pleased he would have been to eat hormone beef. He had been to America, been to Canada, eaten hormone beef, and it was fine. Then he got back to his constituency only to discover there was a letter in his inbox from 14 farmers saying that not only did they not want to eat it, but they did not want to produce it either and that was an old standard that they did not want to slide back to.

Q217       Dr Hudson: In terms of upholding our standards, I can defend the Government here. As you said, that has been a red line. The pausing of the negotiations with Canada came down to that red line about the UK not wanting to import hormone-treated beef. I asked the Secretary of State that very point in the Chamber a couple of weeks ago, hormone-treated beef, ractopamine-treated pork, and chlorine-washed poultry. These are red line issues that the UK has said, “No, we will not dilute our standards or drop our standards by accepting that”.

It is encouraging that they are doing that, but these are probably standards that we could have had in a framework to say, “Anyone negotiating with us should know that these are our red lines”, but I guess you are all in agreement that we want to have these standards.

The question is: how do we achieve consensus among stakeholders, farming groups, animal welfare charities, and environmental campaigners, as to what these core standards are? That is probably why the Government shied away from it because perhaps there was not a consensus. Moving forward, how can we get a brief set of frameworks that work for everyone? I will come back to you all. I have interrupted Orla.

Orla Delargy: It was going to say, are they red lines? Yes, hormone beef is but we had to kick up a lot of fuss about chlorinated chicken and that was at risk at the beginning. It is not laid out anywhere at the moment. You say they are red lines but it is not written down.

Dr Hudson: They are. I have asked that many times to Ministers and it has been at the Dispatch box—

Orla Delargy: They say that, but it is not written down anywhere, is it? Therefore, every time we have to put in evidence saying, “No, we do not want these things”. It is not policy at the moment. It is not in our strategy. It is not in our negotiating objectives. It is not written down; and you say—

Dr Hudson: I think suspending negotiations with Canada—

Orla Delargy: You say the Canada deal broke down over it. Did it? I do not know as I was not in the room. They may say that is what it was. There may well have been other factors. We do not know because we were not party to the conversation.

Natasha Hurley: I think the Canadians said it was because they were protecting their cheese producers.

Orla Delargy: There are different perspectives, and it is hard to know when you are not there.

Q218       Dr Hudson: I have pushed Ministers very hard on this at many points and the UK was very clear that this was about the hormone-treated beef and that is a clear red line. Mark, you wanted to come in, and then Jack.

Mark Williams: To be fair to the PM, in his letter to UK farmers in May of last year following the farming summit at Downing Street, his words, “There will be no chlorine-washed chicken and no hormone-treated beef on the UK market. Not now, not ever”. So he did state that in his letter to UK farmers.

Orla Delargy: It would be great if he could put it into a trade strategy—that would be fantastic—and give that as a written instruction to the negotiators.

Q219          Dr Hudson: How do we achieve consensus on these standards then in terms of going forward to get that framework?

Jack Simpson: I would say that there is generally already a consensus. Like you say, we talk about some core environmental standards, but this is something also that the RSPCA has been alongside, the NUF has been alongside. As Orla has mentioned, there are consumer surveys that say we should not be compromising environmental standards within trade agreements and by what we import, so I think there is consensus there.

What we now need to see is some form of Government action to establish a working group to understand what the standards are that we can apply in a trade strategy sense. That is where we—

Q220       Dr Hudson: Back to that word “apply”. One of the issues that the Government have pushed back on is how would they monitor what standards are being upheld in the countries that they are dealing with. We are all in agreement that we want those standards, but how does the UK Government monitor that countries they are dealing with are applying those standards? As a Committee, it would be helpful for us to have suggestions along those lines as to how can we constructively recommend to Government, “Look, this is what you can do but this is how you can do it”?

Jack Simpson: There are things already happening in national trade mechanisms that you can take learnings from. There are examples from different industries, say, like the cattle, which has quite a long traceability in making sure you know how it has been raised or where it has come from as part of some of the EU directives that we have inherited. But there have been growing levels of things like traceability and transparency, especially when it comes to deforestation.

On that point that is somewhere obviously where the UK has decided we need to bring in a strong domestic policy to sit alongside trade agreements to ensure we are not importing deforested products. That is where we move into, “Well, we should be doing this for the wider environmental concerns as well”.

The commission that we are calling for should bring in trade experts that work in other ways of thinking and, where there are existing practices for these trade system approaches, to come in and give that kind of evidence and say, “Here is somewhere where it is not exactly like for like but somewhere we can take a lot of learnings from and apply that”. It is not that you have one thing that works for eggs, and it works for everything, but you take a series of different approaches to how you can apply these kinds of standards.

Natasha Hurley: A point on that. Maybe I am being obtuse but surely the basis of these core standards should be our own domestic rules and laws, because from where I am standing if you do not make that the benchmark then you are ultimately undercutting your domestic producers. For me it seems quite straightforward. In terms of how you then enforce or run checks, we have food safety legislation that is very important; we do have controls there that potentially could have some kind of overlap in terms of auditing. I do not buy that it is too difficult to do, basically.

Certainly when it comes to things like chlorinated chicken the whole reason why chlorine is used in chicken production is because there are insane amounts of antibiotics being used in chicken production, which then leave those chickens open to all sorts of diseases and risk of antimicrobial resistance, and so on.

Dr Hudson: Also upstream of that is stocking densities. It allows them to have too high stocking densities as well.

Natasha Hurley: Exactly, yes.

Jack Simpson: We agree that there should be a comparable standard to UK farmers, and we are not trying to set—

Mark Williams: There are a number of factors to apply. First of all, the EU used to send food and veterinary office visit audits when we were a member state. Those could be done on a global basis.

Q221       Dr Hudson: We will come on to this. My colleague will be talking about what we can do to address concerns of lower welfare, so I think probably hold that thought for my colleague’s question.

Mark Williams: For what Natasha has said, I think the difference between us and say the Americans for example, on chlorinated chicken, we operate still a farm to fork policy and that means that all our standards have to be good at each part of the chain. Other countries around the world produce to perhaps lower standards and then clean everything up at the end. That is a subtle but important difference between us and other countries.

Q222       Dr Hudson: In our Committee’s scrutiny of the Australia and New Zealand negotiations we were pretty robust with them, and I have been very robust as a veterinary surgeon on this with them, and one of the good things that came out is that they did insert animal welfare chapters into those negotiations.

We will come onto the CPTPP in a subsequent question. That does not have anything like that in there, but we are coming in as a new member, so this was already set up before we joined. We took evidence a few weeks ago that if there is a five-yearly review this is where the UK can be a beacon to the rest of the world and say, “Look, can we now be talking about animal welfare chapters and environmental chapters within these negotiations moving forward?” When the UK becomes a member of this new club, do you think it can exert some of its soft global power by doing that?

Mark Williams: The egg industry was hugely disappointed when the result of the CPTPP negotiations were announced, particularly as we provided the economic evidence that showed how disadvantaged—

Dr Hudson: We will come on to your specific poultry concerns.

Mark Williams: Okay. I think previous witnesses have said in evidence to this Committee that for agricultural in general it is not so bad. I disagree with that but if we are coming on to it I will wait.

Q223       Dr Hudson: We will be going into that but, broadly, is that something you think we should do as the UK to exert some of our soft global power?

Mark Williams: Absolutely. I think it goes without saying that our consumers expect high standards; they do not expect to be eating products produced to lower standards. It will not happen at retail level, straight in your face on the shelf. Retailers will not do it because of public pressure. It will happen in what I call the invisible products, for example, when an egg is taken out of its shell it loses quite a lot of its identity then.

Because of the cost pressure that are put on food manufacturers and others within the supply chain, as long as they have that piece of paper confirming that product is safe, then animal welfare and—dare I say it—environmental protection will come a very low second or third.

Dr Hudson: I am very much aware I am straying into environmental and animal welfare standards that are coming up in the subsequent questions so I will hand back to the Chair to allow that dialogue to keep going.

Q224       Selaine Saxby: Good afternoon. We have already touched on some of this, so it is to clarify, but do you agree with the Trade and Agriculture Commission that the CPTPP agreement maintains and in some cases reinforces existing UK levels of statutory protection for the environment?

Jack Simpson: The TAC is broadly correct about how CPTPP and these trade agreements do not affect our domestic legislation and standards when it comes to these kinds of questions.

However, because the TAC is quite narrow in its remit when it comes to this, it is not about changing our domestic legislation, it is about the imports that we are bringing in that are produced to a lower standard that is then impacting our market. Those are the kinds of issues that we have and want to see be talked about, and that is something that is brought out through the TAC report itself as well. That is something that we would want to flag through that.

Again I think this is comes to the trade strategy point where we are looking at these things in a deal by deal basis but not the cumulative impact of these trade agreements through these trade lens. I do agree that the Trade Agreement Commission can say there are no changes to our domestic standards and our ability to do that, but I would like to emphasise that the TAC also does say we can import lower standard produce and that comprises our market and our farmers at home as well.

Q225       Selaine Saxby: Thank you. Is there anything anyone else would like to add?

Natasha Hurley: A big concern for us is the issue of the investor state dispute settlement mechanism that is present in CPTPP. I know that carve-outs have been negotiated in the case of the UK-Australia and UK-New Zealand free trade agreements, but there are currently 11 members of that CPTPP free trade agreement and potentially in the future many more besides.

The fact that a sovereign Government as in the UK could potentially be sued by a private corporation on the grounds that something in a trade agreement was detrimental to its ability to make profit is a big concern from our perspective. As a sovereign Government the UK should be very concerned about that, certainly parliamentarians in any case. From our perspective, there is an issue of democracy and transparency related to ISDS.

Q226       Selaine Saxby: Thank you. Orla, I have a slightly extended question for you if you wanted to add the two together. The Trade and Agriculture Commission concluded that there is a risk that the CPTPP could result in products treated with banned pesticides entering the UK market. Do you agree with this concern and what steps do you think the Government can take to counter the risks?

Orla Delargy: I am glad you asked that because I was about to make that point. They also conceded that point on pesticides in the free trade agreement with Australia and made the point that UK farmers would be at a competitive disadvantage because they were competing with produce that had been made with the use of pesticides that are not legal in the UK, and then followed up with, “But that is all right. We will be checking it at the borders”.

The usual border procedures will apply, which I think completely misses the mark on a lot of fronts and does show the weakness of the Government relying on the Trade and Agriculture Commission for basically saying whether deals are good or not essentially, or whether or not they will impact on the UK. That is not just the point. We are concerned and our members are concerned with how things are being produced in other countries and we do not want to export harms in our food production to other countries.

The TAC is essentially arguing if Australia wants to use highly toxic pesticides and poison its own rivers in doing so, it is fine to do that. They are more concerned with, “Does the UK have to change its law?” We live in a globally connected world and Australia using toxic pesticides will eventually have an impact on us too in terms of climate change.

My central point is that the TAC’s remit is so narrow that it does not give a full suite of advice to the UK Government. Also, with particular regard to pesticides, we are very concerned about the impact on workers in producer nations; using high levels of very toxic pesticides can impact on the workers there. In places like India, for example, and I think Mexico and Vietnam.

If we say we want to eat good food and workers on the other side of the world are being poisoned; is it 30,000 workers in India a year die from pesticide poisoning? I might have that wrong; I will fact check it and send it in to you. But what we are eating should not be killing people on the other side of the world.

Q227       Selaine Saxby: Jack, we have heard concerns that deforestation-linked palm oil is to enter the UK market in high volumes because of the UK joining the CPTPP. Do you share those concerns and what further steps do you think the Government should be taking to address them?

Jack Simpson: There is a risk with deforestation because we are lowering our import tariff on palm oil related products from 12%, which is currently the biggest one, down to 0%. Through the CPTPP as well Malaysia is the one country member state that we do not have that preferential trade agreement with at the minute, so they stand the most to benefit and Malaysia is one of the top deforestation fronts identified by WWF on this out of about 11. So, yes, there is obviously that concern that this trade agreement will result in more deforestation.

The UK Government announced its due diligence regime in December, but we do not feel that goes far enough. We are still awaiting the full guidance and we do want the Government to publish that sooner rather than later. We do need to see a stronger, more robust mechanism on this. The UK has put four commodities under its due diligence regime whereas the EU has put on seven, US has put on six.

But what we do have we have to work with, so we need to make sure that this is robustly enforced by using the best available techniques that businesses have available to them to enforce the due diligence regimes and make sure that they are not importing deforestation-linked palm oil. We need to make sure that this covers the legal basis and try to go for the zero deforestation approach that the EU is pursuing.

We then need to make sure that we are going beyond certification on this as well, so at the minute we are looking at things like MSPO 2.0, which is a building block towards RSPO. It is not equivalent in some of the principles that it does have, but we also need to make sure that we go beyond this certification, getting to the traceability level. A lot of businesses are already planning for that kind of level of traceability because their supply chains are relying on cross-EU border so will have to comply with the two regimes at the UK level and the European Union level, so they may as well get ready for the European Union level. So there is that risk there, and we need to make sure what due diligence mechanisms we have are implemented robustly and communicated effectively.

Q228       Chair: Going back to you all on that point, it seems fairly straightforward to say we should not import products that are produced using pesticides that are banned here in the UK. We banned neonicotinoids as a seed dressing to control cabbage stem flea beetle in oilseed rape, and the oilseed rape crop in this country has reduced by about 60%.

Looking at the state of my crop at home, I probably will not be growing it and rape will disappear. The only places in Europe where rape can be grown successfully is where they have not banned this pesticide: although it has an effect on bees, the jury is still out as to whether when the crop flowers six months after sowing there is still an effect.

Would you suggest that we should look at residues given that it has not been a human health issue, it has been a bee issue; or should we say we should not import any product produced using a product that has been banned here in the UK?

Orla Delargy: We produced a series of reports called Toxic Trade and worked with Pesticides Action Network on that. We looked at some of the countries that we would potentially be striking deals with and found that countries were setting maximum residue levels that were way in excess. They were licensing for use way more pesticides than the UK does, and they were permitting residue levels that were way in excess of what the UK does.

I have a few examples—and forgive me if I get the name of the products wrong—grapes from New Zealand, Chile and Peru are permitted with 1,000 times the level of fungicide iprodione, and Australia is 6,000 times in excess of the UK limits. Wheat from Canada is 100 times the herbicide of diuron, Australia’s is 10 times, and asparagus from Chile and Peru is 1,500 times the permitted levels of insecticide carbaryl. These have all been identified as potential carcinogens.

Q229       Chair: Are we talking about residue levels in crops that are traded or the amounts that can be used in production?

Orla Delargy: That is the amount of the maximum residue levels permitted in the produce. I can send you the reports afterwards. But essentially there are countries that are using pesticides that are illegal to use in the UK and we are striking trade deals with them, and we have not put any—

Q230       Chair: That is the point I was making about oilseed rape. That we import rape from Ukraine, for example, which is produced using neonics. There is no issue; it is a bee toxicity issue, not a human toxicity issue. If we cannot import rape from countries such as those in Europe where they may have derogations, or Ukraine, we will have to import palm oil from the Far East. Are we not in danger of getting into a lot of unintended consequences if we are not careful?

Orla Delargy: I will bow out and say that I do not know anything about the rape issue. You know more than I do on that one. Jack, do you want to come in on that point?

Chair: I do not know if anyone else wants to come in on the issue of rape, because it is pertinent to British farmers at the moment because there will be no rape oil in the UK if we ban imports from countries that are still using neonics, because it appears you cannot produce oilseed rape successfully without using neonics, and sadly the level of cabbage stem flea beetle is increasing year on year. Anyway, I think we will move on to Cat.

Q231       Cat Smith: Mark, you wanted to talk about eggs, here is the opportunity. My colleague Neil has already kind of covered some of it, but my opening question is how valid do you think the concerns are that CPTPP will result in more poultry and egg products coming into the UK market with lower standards? What is the impact of that on the egg sector here in the UK?

Mark Williams: When the CPTPP negotiations commenced we provided officials with as much evidence as we can, and likewise at events here in this House, being able to talk to parliamentarians and peers as well. I feel our concerns are genuine. British consumers expect high standards of animal welfare, or bird welfare in this case, and we are proud of the standards we have here.

As a few background statistics: we have the largest number of commercial free range hens anywhere in the world. It is a huge success story and free range now is almost accepted by consumers as their go-to product on the supermarket shelf. Clearly labelled: we label all types of egg production very clearly and consumers make that informed choice.

With higher animal welfare standards does come a higher cost of production, without a doubt, and as I mentioned a few minutes ago, the reports we commissioned from Wageningen University in the Netherlands clearly showed how vulnerable we then become to countries, particularly those outside the European Union.

I should qualify that the EU standards are basically the same as ours. We have still retained EU legislation in most areas. In this economic report we took four non-EU countries. We obviously took the States obviously. We took Ukraine, the breadbasket of Europe. We took India—we are negotiating a free trade agreement with them at the moment—and we took Argentina. The reason those four countries were used is traditionally those four had been the greatest exporters into the European Union, so when we were a member prior to January 2021 we were part and parcel of that.

In terms of our cost of production, on shell eggs, let us say I am using an enriched cage system on my farm, so the United States can produce eggs 24% cheaper than I can. I have no chance in a marketplace at being able to compete with that. If the percentage points were much smaller I would clearly go to my customer and say, “Listen, I am local, I can provide you that technical expertise, and you know you are getting from me what I am guaranteeing you are going to get”, but when that gap opens up to so huge a differential, I am afraid commercial matters very much come into play.

I use whole egg powder as an example. I am not so worried about getting shell eggs from the United States, India or Argentina, because with liquid in an egg it costs an awful lot of money to move around the world. When you dry an egg it becomes a very cheap commodity to move around the world. If you look at the likes of Argentina, India, the States and Ukraine, again, they are often 20% cheaper than what we can produce at home.

It is quite simple. We have argued and lobbied Government to treat us as a sensitive product here. Import tariffs are a legitimate tool to respect countries’ high standards of food safety, animal welfare and environmental protection in particular, and that is why they have been used traditionally in different countries around the world.

Sir Robert, I have two lovely graphs in the report I mentioned, which we submitted to the Committee. In the executive summary on pages six and seven of that report it clearly shows two bar charts: the UK cost of production and then those four countries. With the current import tariffs they cannot compete with us even on whole egg powder, or there or thereabouts. As soon as you remove the import tariff, we are massively uncompetitive.

That is where we have struggled to get the message across to Ministers. You want us to have ever higher standards here. Please do not leave our back door open on this. British consumers do not want this, but they will never know because it becomes an invisible product. You have taken all the water out of an egg. You have dried it. Who knows?

Q232       Cat Smith: Other than import tariffs, what else could the UK Government be doing to help protect and uphold animal welfare standards when it comes to trade deals?

Mark Williams: As we discussed earlier, as part of the negotiating mandate right at the beginning, if you parliamentarians are given this negotiating mandate, you can insist on it. You will be getting lobbied in your constituencies all the time by consumers or citizens who are concerned about animal welfare and other core standards. Being able to get those in the negotiating mandate from the start would be wonderful. A message then goes out to our trading partners, “If you want to send egg powder to the UK, this is what is expected of you”. It is not, “How can I get under the wire and around this?” Once that message is there, it is very clear.

When the announcement on CPTPP was going to be made, there was a stakeholder meeting held just after it was all coming together. Another reason why I was so desperately disappointed to be told what was going to happen was that I was given the first question to ask: I said how disappointed we are, and the Minister came back to me and said, “Yes, we have looked at this, but by the way, Mark, since 2015 there have not been any imports from Mexico”. Mexico is the country I am most concerned about. They have an Atlantic seaboard and can move stuff across the Atlantic.

The negotiators were depending on the fact that there had been nothing coming since 2015. Well, sorry, that is obvious. It is because our current import tariffs are stopping it coming. As soon as you strip that away in 10 years’ time, ‘Bob’s your uncle’. If I was a Mexican looking towards the high-value UK market, I would be very interested. For over a decade Mexico have had big bird flu problems and of course have not been exporting anyway, and they tend to look via NAFTA or whatever it is called now, the US–Canadian–Mexico agreement, and tend to export to the States rather than across the water.

However, I am not interested in now. I am looking to the future for our members’ businesses and how we can produce food for British consumers in the future.

Q233       Cat Smith: Jack, obviously this is an area that you might want to offer your thoughts on, in terms of what the UK can do when it comes to trade deals to ensure that animal welfare standards are upheld.

Jack Simpson: Sure. Just to go back in time a little bit on a similar point, there was an issue some 20 years ago or so where the UK took the decision to ban sow stall pork but did not ban the import of sow stall pork from European suppliers when we were part of the European Union. That meant there was about a 50% decline in domestic producers of pork in the UK.

Q234       Chair: Our stall ban, was it not?

Jack Simpson: Yes. Thank you. We can see that by having differing standards, with preferential trade still allowing you to import lower-quality produce and produce produced to lower standards, you are creating an unlevel playing field. We are saying that we should have these domestic standards not just in trade objectives but as part of the trade strategy, as part of domestic policy.

As I mentioned before, we have recognised the need for strong domestic policy not just in deforestation but in CBAMs as well, to tackle some of the wider environmental and sustainability issues when it comes to trade and our trading system. We need to think about how that then applies to things like animal welfare standards but also myriad different issues like biodiversity loss, water scarcity and air and water pollution.

Otherwise, we will have a business-as-usual approach to our food system and our trade system, which then starts breaking down, as we have already seen with the winter veg crisis, as I said before, as well as when export controls come in from countries from which we rely on the import of, say, wheat, for example. We need to be making sure that core environmental standards are put into the domestic realm rather than the negotiation stage.

Q235       Cat Smith: Mark, in terms of public awareness, you have outlined in a lot of detail for us—and thank you for that—the risks of egg powder coming in. How do you see the public awareness on that, or do you think that there is work to be done?

Mark Williams: Yes, of course, there is always work to be done. The problem we face is that shell eggs will always be produced fairly close to the market. When I say, “the market”, the French like French eggs, the British like British Lion, Germans like German eggs and so on. When it comes to egg products—you take the egg out of a shell and you have a liquid product, which can be either whole egg, liquid albumen or liquid yolk—the biggest users across the European Union are currently bakeries and the market probably would be called “Europe”.

Once you start talking about dried egg powder, the market becomes global. For example, 20 or 25 years ago or so—gosh, time goes quick—a number of egg powder plants were built in India, designed specifically to export to different countries. Perhaps we will come on to India.

Chair: Yes.

Mark Williams: The point is that you then depend on people like the food manufacturers who would be using the liquid egg or, potentially, in the future, more dried egg, which they could then rehydrate on site so that they are not carrying that transport cost as well. It is making that more visible and stressing to the food manufacturers, “Look, in that cake mix you are making, which is going to appear in a final food product such as a cake on a supermarket shelf, do the right thing and make sure you are using British eggs”.

Jack Simpson: At the risk of making this a double act between me and Mark, I do not know if there is going to be a question on the WTO compliance level and if I can just briefly lean into that.

There is precedent for these kinds of standards being upheld at an international level, because obviously these measures have to coincide with international commitments and law that we have signed up to as members of the World Trade Organisation. The US has developed marine protection laws that have been deemed admissible by the WTO, to protect against environmental harms from the US market exporting or encouraging fishing fleets around the world to damage populations of migratory animals and so on, which exist in the ocean.

The things that we are talking about are not things that we have just come up with; there is precedent for them existing. Again, I would encourage, hopefully, a commission to explore how—

Q236       Chair: When we signed our salmon deal with the United States, they insisted that we include seals in the protections that we have for marine mammals. They made us tighten up our standards so we could trade with them.

Jack Simpson: Yes, exactly, and that is the kind of thing. One of the benefits of free trade agreements is that you can share your values, norms and whatnot across the world.

Q237       Dr Hudson: I think the European Union did that as well in negotiations with South American countries, in terms of abattoir standards. They managed to get a precedent through on that.

Jack Simpson: I will hold my hands up and say I am not fully aware of that one, but I know there is one from European Commission on seals and there is one in the US on dolphin, shrimp and turtle bycatch. Like you say, Sir Robert, this did result in a change of standards and better environmental protection and stewardship overseas. These things have precedent and they do benefit us.

One thing we are quite keen on is that we have something called the Codex Alimentarius, which gives us health standards and food safety standards, but we do not have those standards for planetary health. We are starting to see a bit of a pioneering breakthrough in that, but we would encourage further exploration and development in that space. We have a report, which I have in front of me, which sets out the legal and scientific framework for this, and I am happy to share that with the Committee.

Mark Williams: Sorry, could I come back quickly on a point I forgot to mention? As I mentioned before, most of the world still uses conventional battery cages. If you take away the UK and the EU, apart from a very small number of examples, no country in the world has legislation governing laying hen welfare, certainly not down in Mexico. Some states within the States do now. I do not underestimate at all the difficulty of trying to persuade our future trading partners that they should have our standards. Mexico just is not interested in moving to enriched cages at this moment in time.

Q238       Chair: Could we do that through product labelling, so that quiche, for example, must label what type of egg it is, whether it is free range or battery?

Mark Williams: The problem, Sir Robert, is that an egg may only be a very small percentage within a food product.

Chair: It is listed as an ingredient, is it not?

Mark Williams: An egg sandwich clearly is going to be mostly egg in between the two pieces of bread, but there are certain food products where egg is a smaller percentage. Where do you stop labelling, if you see what I mean, before you overload consumers with information that probably, to be frank, most do not have the time to read anyway when they are doing their food shop?

Jack Simpson: Could I jump in on labelling quickly as well? We eat a lot of our food outside of labelling environments, in restaurants, for example. Where has that product come from?

Chair: That is true. I sometimes wonder where the egg in the scrambled egg in the tea room comes from but let us not go there.

Q239       Julian Sturdy: I will move on to future free trade agreements and the first one I am going to ask questions on is the UK–Canada proposal. To what extent does the UK Government’s decision to walk away from the UK–Canada negotiations demonstrate their commitment to protect domestic agrifood standards? I suppose that question goes to all four of you, if you could.

Orla Delargy: We touched on it earlier. Is hormone beef a red line? If hormone beef was truly a red line, it would never have come up. That is where we want to get to, where everything is written down, it is in the negotiating mandate, and it is very clear what the UK will and will not negotiate on. At the moment, because those things are not written down, are not in the strategy and are not in the negotiating objectives, our food standards, to all intents and purposes, remain on the table.

Natasha Hurley: Yes. As I said earlier, I heard in the Canadian press that Canada had walked away because Canada was defending its cheese makers. It depends on which side of the story you listen to.

Q240       Julian Sturdy: They have their red lines, is what you would argue.

Natasha Hurley: Yes. I do not know which among those is right.

Mark Williams: I am not too worried about the egg industry in Canada.

Q241       Julian Sturdy: There are other deals that you would be more worried about?

Mark Williams: Yes, there are other deals. The Canadians operate a supply management system on eggs and poultry, and they are more concerned about the Americans.

Jack Simpson: Over the last 12 months or so, we have probably given Canada cause for hope. When we came to the CPTPP accession discussions there were rumours that there might be movement on hormone beef and hormone standards, and it has given us a 12-month process of where these negotiations are going to land. I would agree with what Orla said. We need more clearly defined red lines in our trade strategy.

Q242       Julian Sturdy: Given hormone-treated beef and saying it is a potential red line, and I would completely agree with you, is there a potential path forward for a UK-Canada FTA?

Orla Delargy: I have no idea, I am afraid. I am not party to the negotiations. We have other concerns about Canada in terms of food production standards. We come back to pesticides but also antibiotics as well.

The phytosanitary arrangements in CPTPP do not even mention antibiotic usage. I was at an event this morning run by the Alliance to Save Our Antibiotics and they pointed out that UK farmers are voluntarily reducing their usage of antibiotics, which is great. There are more UK regulations coming in on antibiotic on-farm usage, which again is great.

We would argue that the UK’s regulations are diverging from the EU’s and the EU’s are stronger, which, as I said earlier, does make the UK a beacon for lower-standard produce, and CPTPP is a clear risk. Of the member countries—I do not have an exhaustive list, but I have some—Japan has high farm antibiotic usage and uses non-medically-important antibiotics for growth promotion. The EU is going to rule that out. I think it has already said it, but they need to implement it. The EU is going to ban imports that have used antibiotics as growth promoters, and I think the UK has not done that.

Q243       Julian Sturdy: Would you class antibiotics as a red line as well, or something that should be a red line?

Orla Delargy: Yes, we would definitely have antibiotics in there for sure, not least because we were founding members of the Alliance to Save Our Antibiotics. We would definitely have it in there. Again, there is a global imperative to reduce on-farm antibiotics. Globally, there are shameful amounts of humanly critical antibiotics that are used to mask poor farm welfare standards, which is shocking. We should be holding antibiotics back for human usage, for when we really need them.

Natasha Hurley: A couple of things from Feedback’s perspective. A question that I have on a personal level is to what extent bilateral trade deals that the UK is striking, for example, with Canada, conflict or not with multilateral trade deals like CPTPP. That is one question and to date I do not know that anybody has an answer on that.

To Orla’s point earlier, we are very concerned at Feedback that what we will see as a result of various trade deals is potentially the UK becoming a dumping ground for lower-welfare, higher-carbon products produced in less socially responsible conditions. We want to see a situation where the UK grapples with that, decides that it does not want to become a dumping ground and takes assertive action to prevent that from happening. That has to mean that the UK focuses on standards and puts in place a framework that does not sell our own farmers and producers down the river, basically.

Q244       Julian Sturdy: How would you class South American beef coming in?

Natasha Hurley: Very high risk. I think Paraguay is top of the list when it comes to high-emissions beef and Brazil is not far behind.

Q245       Julian Sturdy: There are reports that more Brazilian beef is coming in as well. Frozen Brazilian beef, I think.

Natasha Hurley: I can believe it, yes. We need to understand that this is a supply problem. The more we are supplying into the market, the more people are going to be buying it. I can also see a scenario where we end up exporting our own domestically produced beef, which is produced to higher standards, to premium markets around the world, and we end up providing UK consumers with lower animal welfare, less environmentally sound beef, for example.

Julian Sturdy: You are hitting an important point there. In all of our agricultural sectors we have very high-end products.

Chair: America does that. Americans eat all the mince and export a lot of the prime cuts. They live on burgers and chilli.

Q246       Julian Sturdy: We have high-value produce that is wanted, yet we are still going to need some cheap end produce coming in. That cheap end produce is not going to be produced in the UK because it cannot meet the standards, and then we are importing it. That is a potential concern. We are seeing the good stuff going out and some of the cheaper, poorer stuff coming in.

Orla Delargy: You can see the weakness in terms of the checks and balances that the UK has available to it. The Agriculture Act allowed for the formation of the Trade and Agriculture Commission, which is supposed to opine on imports, but its remit is so narrow that all it is giving advice on is whether we will have to change our laws in order to permit something to come in. That is its only remit, really. That does not stop something that has been produced to a lower standard in another country. That is not what it is looking for.

Then you go, the Trade and Agriculture Commission argued that we will pick up high pesticides at the border because we are checking on borders, but if you ask the Food Standards Agency, they are not checking in that way. There is a question—I do not know whether you are going to come to it later—about whether the UK, first, has the infrastructure—

Q247       Chair: They certainly are at Felixstowe because when I was Shipping Minister I went to Felixstowe, where containers of nuts and spices were all being checked for residues.

Orla Delargy: It might be interesting for you to ask a question then to the Food Standards Agency, because it has told us that the approach it is predominantly taking is intelligence-led. The public might have this image of people at borders levering open big crates and checking everything, but that is not how they set out to operate. That would be very costly, apart from anything else.

There is a question of what they are checking for and to what extent, and there have definitely been reports that the infrastructure just has not been in place. They have had to push back checks on imports coming in from the EU because the infrastructure has not been there. There is a big question mark over—

Q248       Chair: The EU is definitely an issue because we never did have checks before. In fact, we are on that case already.

Orla Delargy: Yes, exactly. You need a lot more infrastructure. There are big questions over what exactly the assurances are, what is being checked for and how. If we are concerned about product standards, and we certainly are, in terms of the impact both on domestic producers but also on producers in producer nations, then it feels like the way we are going about it is not going to get the desired result.

Q249       Ian Byrne: Just to touch on the Gulf Cooperation Council potential agreements, does an FTA with the GCC raise concerns that the UK might undercut its commitment to standards in areas such as climate action, labour standards or animal welfare, or is there an opportunity for what we have spoken about before, indeed not a race to the bottom but a race to the top and using the FTA for good in that respect?

Natasha Hurley: I must admit I have not spent too much time thinking about the GCC agreement, per se, but I think it goes back to the general point that has already been made.

If the UK has a piecemeal approach to striking FTAs, which it currently does, and core standards are not enshrined anywhere, there is a danger that things get negotiated away at the last minute. We saw that with the UK-Australia FTA, which, as I understand it, was the fruit of a conversation that Boris Johnson had with his counterpart. It is all very ad hoc, and we do not have any guarantees. As Orla was saying earlier, we have no guarantee that red lines today are going to be red lines tomorrow. I think there is a big concern there.

Obviously, there is a big concern as well in that the GCC is currently contributing quite significantly to climate change through oil production, but that might be a point for a different committee at a different time.

Q250       Ian Byrne: I will go to you, Jack. Is the FCA a potential opportunity to help?

Jack Simpson: It is more of a potential opportunity for trade strategy in the whole. By not having a trade strategy we are missing a real opportunity for us to say, “This is what the UK stands for” in the international arena. There is a real leadership opportunity and a champion opportunity for the UK to stand up and say, “We believe that sustainability should be at the heart of the trade system. These are our core principles. These are our core standards when it comes to international trade”.

We do not focus on the GCC but when you talk to your partners across the world and you have this written down, that is a powerful document you have, which has been voted on, consulted on and whatnot. We do not have that at the minute. I would say, more widely, that is the missed opportunity we have and that has been exposed.

Q251       Ian Byrne: If you are a negotiator who has been involved in the negotiations, you are probably feeling a bit downbeat at the moment. What a difficult position to be in, when you have no core standards or strategy to go to. Your heart does go out to the people who are trying to negotiate the deals because they do not have that vision and strategy in place. That is hardwired through every question that has been asked today and the answers that you have given. Orla, would you like to come in on that question?

Orla Delargy: I do not have anything to add on the GCC, I have to say. I just reiterate the point that trade is an opportunity, but if we do end up with UK farmers, who have very high standards, exporting all of their produce, we reduce our own national nutritional security. We could end up sending the good food away and importing food that has been produced to much lower standards, which is damaging the environment, animal welfare and people in other countries.

Q252       Ian Byrne: And health, yes, absolutely. Mark, anything to add?

Mark Williams: I am not aware of any imports from those countries. There may be a little bit, which I am not aware of. I should imagine they must be reasonably high cost because you cannot keep hens without air conditioning, especially in the height of summer and things like that.

Interestingly, some of my members have had the odd export inquiry coming from Gulf States, particularly for a Lion egg, but we have not been able to authorise the continuing use of the Lion mark because we have no control over what happens at the other end. We can control things here in the UK under the scheme.

Q253       Chair: Thanks so much. We have already mentioned India and I therefore will not trouble you, Mark. I suppose everything you said about Mexico could equally apply to India, particularly with powdered egg. Could I ask the other three? What concerns does the FTA negotiation with India raise about agrifood and environmental standards?

Orla Delargy: One of our Toxic Trade reports looked at pesticide standards in India. I do not have the figures to hand, I am afraid, but I am happy to send them in. Broadly speaking, pesticide usage in India is higher and they do, I think, license more highly toxic pesticides than the UK does. We also worked on our report with PAN in India and they were at pains to stress the point that workers in India are left exposed to the toxic chemicals and pesticides that are being used in agriculture. If we create a market for produce that is produced using toxic materials, workers in India end up being disadvantaged and in some cases dead.

Q254       Chair: Many of these products, particularly spices, we are already importing from India, and we should have correct security in place to make sure that these are tested when they enter the country and that those who were retailing them also understand their obligations in terms of residue. I can understand those working in the field using knapsack sprayers to put on quite toxic—well, the whole point of pesticides is they are toxic. They are going to kill an insect or a weed or something else.

Orla Delargy: I think it is worth asking the question of the authorities. What exactly are the procedures in place at borders and what will happen when there are increased amounts of trade from other countries around the world? It begs that question. The Sustain Alliance would definitely want us to stand up for, essentially, not creating markets for low-standard produce that is damaging to the environment and to people.

Q255       Chair: One of the big issues with India is rice, because we have quite high tariffs on milled rice, but brown rice comes in. On the banks of the Thames down there we have rice milling, which is economic purely because white rice has a very high tariff. It would not be good news down at the river for the guys working there, but would it not be good for a developing country to export more rice that has been processed in the country of origin?

Orla Delargy: I am going to sit this one out, Chair. I do not know anything about rice on that level.

Q256       Chair: Natasha, would your concerns about India be similar?

Natasha Hurley: India is an interesting case in point. One of the big things to know about India from Feedback’s perspective is that it is a big producer of sugar cane. The same concerns apply as I expressed at the beginning of the session. Also, in relation to sugar production, there is the use of pesticides and so on, and worker protections.

Another interesting thing to know about India is that is one of the biggest producers of medicines currently and produces a lot of antibiotics. A lot of those antibiotics are used in animal farming in India. It also exports a huge amount of medicines around the world.

In a previous job, I worked on the issue of emissions from drug factories in India and the extent to which they are fuelling antimicrobial resistance in India, which is a very interesting thing to look into. There is a huge amount of overlap, obviously, with animal farming and increasing use of antimicrobials in various countries. That is something to think about as well from an environmental perspective, but with a clear overlap with the food system.

Jack Simpson: Again, this point comes down to trade strategy. Last year, there were rumours that there was not going to be an environmental chapter. I am loth to comment on the speculation at the minute—we do not have the final text or future idea of where the India trade agreement is going to go—but rumours suggested last year that the trade agreement might not cover agriculture and might not have an environmental chapter within it.

We are already losing the argument you sometimes hear that FTAs are the way we can shape and move standards in environmental best practice, because we do not have that avenue even through the India free trade agreement or would not have it if it was agreed in that form. However, if you were able to do it in a way where you cement your own core standards, you are addressing any environmental concerns you might have about the Indian market.

Again, we need that trade strategy, I think, to understand: do we want to make sure that environmental chapters are a steadfast thing that we have in every agreement? Do we want to make it look at things like animal welfare, as the point was made before?

Just as you mentioned before, Sir Robert, we also need to make sure that we are working with developing nations when it comes to free trade and sustainable food systems. There may be an avenue to do that through an FTA but there is also the DCTS. We need to start thinking, again on this trade strategy point, about how this all comes together and feeds together, particularly that international element of it.

Q257       Chair: What about opportunities for UK food and drink exports to India?

Jack Simpson: It is an interesting one. Whisky is the oft cited one in every trade agreement announcement.

Q258       Chair: There is 150% tariff on whisky going into India. Currently, we export 219 million bottles worth £282 million, but that is only 2% of the Indian market. Whisky is a good, high-value product produced from malting barley produced in Scotland and Yorkshire. Surely the advantages of that to the British economy should not be disregarded.

Jack Simpson: No, absolutely. We have said that preferential free trade agreements do deliver benefits. What we are saying is that they should not come at the cost of the environment overseas and we should not be using that as a bargaining chip to trade away our environmental best practice and safeguarding.

Chair: In fact, India has just overtaken France as the biggest whisky market, would you believe. It is amazing.

Q259       Dr Hudson: I just wanted to come on to biosecurity. Biosecurity is an important part of national security in terms of safeguarding animal health, plant health and, very importantly, human public health. Now that we have departed from the EU, there is the chance and the scope for us to try to tighten up our biosecurity of products, animals and so on, coming into the country. Part of that is the Government’s Border Target Operating Model, which our Committee is taking a close watching brief on. We have been down to Dover, and we are liaising closely with DEFRA on this.

To all of you, what is your opinion of the Border Target Operating Model? Are there any issues that you want us as a Committee to potentially flag to Government? It is something where we have an opportunity, but we need to get it right. I just wanted your thoughts on the Border Target Operating Model, please.

Mark Williams: Clearly, we cannot do anything about things like avian influenza coming in via migratory birds, but we should be leveraging our status as an island more than we do, without a doubt. When we finally left the EU, the fact that the EU required full import controls and we did not up until January of this year has put British businesses at a huge disadvantage.

Just before I come back to the biosecurity, Dr Hudson, my view is that now that EU exporters to the UK are going to have to comply more with things like export health certification and so on, they are going to find there is a cost associated with this. My hope is that they will then go to their own Governments and moan at them for adding cost, those member Governments will go to the Commission, which will finally bring the Commission to the table with our Government, and we will get some sensible SPS veterinary deal. That is my hope.

In terms of biosecurity, obviously there is a lot being made of the new inspection facility at Sevington. We still have a number of concerns at the moment. I am talking on behalf of my poultry meat colleagues as well, who briefed me before this Committee session today. Likewise, they have been engaging closely with DEFRA officials on this, practical things like ensuring biosecurity.

Day-old chicks for the poultry meat market coming into the country are going to be checked at Sevington. As you probably know, different wagons have different heights of the trailer. Therefore, if trolleys are going to need to be wheeled off the backs of those wagons, you are going to need some form of moving lift within the inspection facility. Is it the same vet who is going to go on to a wagon from Poland who is then going to check, a couple of hours later, a wagon from France, for example? What about the biosecurity between the two?

Practical things like making sure that there is power. I understand that one company are using a three-phase power supply on their heavy wagons, on the lighter wagons it is only 13-amp plugs. You have to maintain the air conditioning units as well, avoiding drafts, for example. These are very precious day-old chicks. The officials have taken all these things away.

What happens if a consignment is rejected? Those chicks would have to be euthanised onsite because they cannot go anywhere else. Is there facility to do this?

Questions have been raised about the fact that it is 22 miles from Dover, or whatever.

Q260       Dr Hudson: We have raised those questions, and we continue to raise those questions, yes.

Mark Williams: With the amount of cameras along motorways these days, you would hope that everything can be seen going on and a wagon cannot just shift off down a country lane, for example, or something like that. Ideally, of course, from our industry’s point of view, it would be nice to have everything done at point of destination, especially when you are handling live chicks.

We are where we are at the moment. Sevington has been set up. It is only a matter of weeks now, is not it, until it comes online? Like everything, we raise the concerns, which I am raising now. The proof in the pudding will be day one, two, three and four, how it operates and how the teething troubles that will inevitably come are dealt with, without compromising our biosecurity.

I come back to what I said right at the beginning. We should be leveraging our status as an island much more than we do.

Q261       Dr Hudson: That is a very strong point. Thank you. Does anyone else want to comment on the border target model?

Jack Simpson: It is not a comment on biosecurity or the border model itself, but I think trade generally is coming into quite an interesting space. There are new thoughts and processes going in towards sustainability. At COP we saw an agriculture and trade day, which was a breakthrough. There are thoughts on things like product and process methods and how we can see that more, and the advent of new trade technologies.

With the Border Trade Operating Model and the Government’s thinking going into a more digitised process, we should start thinking about what more trade can do, beyond customs processes and beyond the traditional role of trade. How can it address things? When we are talking about a veterinary agreement or SPS agreement with the European Union, how can the Border Target Operating Model or the single trader window that sits within that facilitate trade and smooth the flows of trade?

If we can guarantee standards of what at least the UK is doing, that could be benchmarked across different regimes and different partners. Is there an opportunity for us to further smooth trade using these new trade flows and trade processes, through the overarching umbrella of the Border Target Operating Model?

Q262       Dr Hudson: As you have said, it is coming in. At the end of January the paperwork aspects have started, then by the end of April the physical checks, and then moving to a smoother window. There will be teething problems, and a role of this Committee is to try to facilitate dialogue and to try to make recommendations to Government.

We are where we are, it is happening, and I guess the question is: is this the most suitable model or are there tweaks or amendments that you can anticipate, so that we are able to say to the Government in the next few months, “Look, if this happens, you need to be doing X, Y, Z”? Are there any final comments or take-home messages on this? We as a Committee are very concerned and we are liaising closely with Government on this. As I say, we have been down to Dover, and we are thinking about going again. What can we say to make this work?

Mark, the point you made is that we are an island nation, effectively. We should not underestimate the importance of that in terms of a bio-secure border, so that we do not, heaven forbid, get diseases like foot and mouth coming in again. African swine fever is advancing up through the continent. We have to be very, very careful that we do not allow these diseases in, which could devastate our animal and plant sectors. Some potentially unknown diseases coming in could have indirect implications for human health as well.

Mark Williams: The egg sector does not import live day-old chicks. For the poultry meat sector, some of the specialist poultry meat breeds—slower-growing, for example—are not just coming willy-nilly from whoever on the Continent. It is a very integrated industry, the poultry meat industry. For example, the parent company are perhaps one of the worldwide breeders, who are based in Germany anyway. They will have breeding farms, for example, on the Continent there. They are then liaising with their British sister, if you like—it is not a totally new trade—to make sure everything works seamlessly.

As you know as a vet, when you are dealing with livestock, you have to get it right all of the time because otherwise there are not only biosecurity issues; there are also welfare issues and so on. I think we are in for a period of teething troubles, like we are all expecting to happen.

One thing that is unclear at the moment, to us, is what degree of inspection is going to take place. I understand Sevington is going to operate 8.00am until 6.00pm. It should be operating 24 hours a day. Ferries are coming in late at night and you have livestock coming off those ferries—well, chicks, I should say, rather than perhaps livestock.

Chair: We have had this with dogs, have we not, Neil, coming in at night?

Mark Williams: That then lends itself to another question as to the resource that is going to be needed. Your veterinary colleague is going to be absolutely key in making sure this can work properly, and it has to be properly resourced.

Q263       Dr Hudson: We are talking about this in terms of food products coming in, but the legislation coming in to stop puppy smuggling and pet smuggling needs to have checks of animals in cars and vans as well. What we are trying to say as a Committee is that if things are going to happen at Sevington, we still need to have some random checks at the ports themselves. I know that there is a worry about slowing down flow through there, but if the people coming in who are trying to circumvent and divert things know that they are going to be checked out of hours and potentially on the site of the port, that will help us to keep our guard up as well. It is “watch this space”, isn’t it?

Natasha Hurley: Just a comment. This is a bit outside my remit, but I understand that there is a dearth of trained vets in the UK and the pipeline is looking pretty grim.

Q264       Dr Hudson: We have a session in two weeks’ time that will be discussing that issue as well, biosecurity and veterinary workforce issues. This Committee is looking at that in a couple of weeks’ time.

Orla Delargy: It is probably worth asking questions about environmental health funding as well, because we know that that had been greatly reduced up until very recently. I do not recall any big announcements about huge injections of cash into environmental health system.

Natasha Hurley: It is making me think, because in food production a big issue that we have is the Government’s current hostile immigration environment. We are not getting the workers in to pick the produce. I guess it is a similar scenario here, where arguably we need vets, and we need people coming in and helping us with their expertise. That is something else to bear in mind.

Chair: Thank you very much indeed, Neil, and thank you very much to our panel for coming in and giving such useful evidence. Thank you.