On 31 January this year, four years after the UK went over the edge of the cliff, the UK government finally got around to putting in place some border checks on imports of food to the UK from the EU. The checks were supposed to start back in 2021. But the government had failed (anyone surprised?) to prepare properly. Systems to log checks and certificates to show compliance were not ready. And there weren’t enough staff to carry out the checks.
Why was our ‘government’ so badly prepared?
The government claims that it is implementing these checks to “help guard against incoming diseases and pests while minimising burdens and costs for traders and consumers”. But, if the government really wanted to protect its citizens from pests and diseases, surely preparations would have begun back in 2016 to get these checks set up in time for the UK’s actual exit from the European Union.
It is unfortunate that, as a result of the vote for national self-destruction, the UK no longer has access to the European Union’s Rapid Alert System for Food and Feed (RASFF) which coordinates food crime alerts across all EU member states. Instead, for the last four years, the UK has effectively had an open border which let absolutely anything in with no safeguards in place to protect consumers. And, partially as a consequence of the lack of UK border checks, the risk (and incidence) of food crime in the UK has increased.
Food crime takes many different forms and can have a wide impact across the food chain: on farmers, retailers, and the health of consumers. Some food crime can relate to imports, very often around meat claiming to be something it isn’t (most recently foreign pork being labelled as British). There are also a number of foods which have historically been adulterated in their country of origin, for example, olive oil, which is often stretched by the addition of cheaper vegetable oils, not all of which are classed as fit for human consumption.
The need for these new systems and suggestions of what exactly would be needed was raised by the food industry as far back as 2016 – and then repeatedly raised in 2017, 2018, and 2019. Each time, government ministers and officials from the Department for Exiting the European Union and the Department for Food, Environment and Rural Affairs swore blind that they were preparing for it and that everything would be in place by 2020.
Yet here we are in 2024 and the necessary systems are still not fully ready. So, the checks currently being undertaken only relate to some of the paperwork which will need to be completed by EU exporters. Supposedly, more layers of checking, including physical checks of incoming ‘high risk’ products of animal origin, are coming down the track later this year.
Pile on the paperwork
Those border checks will mean increased paperwork for any EU businesses exporting any kind of food to the UK, regardless of whether they have been shipping food to the UK for years or have only just started. Increased paperwork means increased hassle. Many UK businesses stopped exporting to the EU after the UK left the European Union because of the increased burden of paperwork. Exports of meat and fish fell by around 44% between December 2020 and March 2023 and, of course, that means less revenue coming into the country. It is likely that some EU businesses will now decide that the UK market simply isn’t worth that extra hassle.
Increased border checks are likely to increase the risk of disrupted supply chains and reduced food coming into the UK. It is highly likely that shoppers will be seeing even more empty shelves in supermarkets over the course of the next year. 43% of the vegetables and around 30% of the fruit consumed in the UK are imported from the EU, although those percentages vary depending on the season – we import more during the winter and less in the summer. However, those numbers are likely to rise in coming years, as the UK government has effectively dumped the idea of food self-sufficiency.
It’s not ‘just’ fruit and veg that we import from the EU. A significant proportion of the products of animal origin that we eat (particularly bacon and ham, as well as some chicken, beef and eggs) are imported from the EU. If EU exporters are prepared to go through the inconvenience of slogging through paperwork, then they will be faced with an extra tier of trouble. Time: physical checks on products take time. But products of animal origin are time-limited – if they spend too long in transit, waiting for checks to be done they go off. So, they can’t be sold – but the supplier still needs to be paid.
Time is going to become an increasing issue as more checks are put in place – because, like all the other systems that are supposed to already be up and running, the main border control posts that are supposed to undertake those checks are still not fully operational or fully staffed.
And push up the price
Increased paperwork also costs industry time – and time is money. Of course, the food industry isn’t interested in absorbing costs to make life easier for consumers. If it did that, its profits would go down (and wouldn’t that be awful!). Instead, it just passes those costs on to us.
According to the Office of National Statistics, inflation (including for food) is falling. Of course, that doesn’t mean that prices are falling, it just means they are going up more slowly. But the reality is food inflation is still scarily high. And the items of food where inflation is supposedly slowing down are things like milk and tea. Which is hardly going to help feed a family.
The additional burdens of paperwork and time involved in border checks mean that the price of food imported from the EU is likely to rise again. Although the cost of living is increasing everywhere, the UK seems to be particularly hard hit, possibly because the UK is such a large net importer of goods (including energy).
Food security is national security
UK families, already overstretched by the pressure of the high cost of rent or mortgage and bills, are struggling to feed themselves and their children. Food bank use is up, again. In 2023, the Department for Work and Pensions actually recorded food bank use in the UK for the first time. In the financial year ending in 2022 (the most recent figures) the DWP reported that 3% of households in the UK were using food banks. But those figures are now far out of date.
The Trussell Trust estimates an increase of 16% in the last year. And some independent food banks have seen a rise of 189% compared to before the pandemic. But, thanks to the cost of living crisis, donations are going down, because shoppers can’t afford to buy that extra tin or packet to put into the food bank bins.
According to data gathered by The Food Foundation, overall 17% of households in the UK experienced food insecurity in June 2023; and that rose to 23.4% of households with children.
Industry and academics have been raising the issue of the lack of UK food security ever since 24 June 2016. It seems the UK government still has not read the memo. If you cannot feed your country, you do not have a country.
