Discover Top Posts Tagged with #brexit chickens

Food and Drink Federation say businesses are struggling to deal with added ‘complexity and bureaucracy’

British food and drink exports to the EU have tumbled by more than a third since Brexit, according to new trade body figures highlighting how bureaucratic barriers have changed the relationship between the UK and its most important trading partner. Products including whisky, chocolate and cheese remain popular with EU customers but overall food export volumes to the bloc fell to 6.37bn kg in 2024, representing a 34% decline compared with 2019 levels, the Food and Drink Federation (FDF) found. While some of the fall in exports since the UK left the union in January 2020 can be attributed to global events including the Covid pandemic and the war in Ukraine, the FDF’s latest trade snapshot reveals other European countries including the Netherlands, Germany and Italy have increased their export volumes since 2020. The trade body has blamed post-Brexit trading arrangements for the slump in UK exports. The total volume of food and drink imports to the UK rose to their highest ever level last year, at a time when British farmers are warning that a “cashflow crisis” and series of pressures including planned tax changes, bad weather and rising costs are squeezing domestic food production. Imports of food and drink were worth £63.1bn in 2024, as imports from the EU rose by 3.3% compared with a year earlier, and increased by 7.4% from non-EU countries. The EU remains the UK’s most important trading partner in the food and drink sector, accounting for almost two-thirds (61.8%) of exports and three-quarters (75.6%) of imports, worth nearly £45bn in 2024.

#uk #eu #uk imports up #uk exports down #brexit chickens #trade

Our exit from the EU won’t be a focus of the spring statement, but it should be. Most now accept the need for closer ties, writes Guardian c

As the chancellor ekes out every last billion this week, it’s worth stepping back and remembering one key reason why Britain fares worse than its neighbours: Brexit. On Monday, MPs debated whether to rejoin the EU following the success of a public petition that gained 134,000 signatures. Don’t hold your breath. The government replied by quoting its not-until-hell-freezes-over manifesto pledge: “there will be no return to EU membership”. But the global Trumpquake has shaken all certainties, upended all that seemed solid. The European defence emergency has made talk of Brexit and its future less taboo on both sides of the Channel. Close observers note the ice breaking. “Things are moving in the right direction,” says Charles Grant of the Centre for European Reform (CER). Nonetheless, Labour is so paralysed by Brexit that despite its hunt for growth, it has said nothing about the monumental sums that leaving the EU have cost the economy. Estimates vary, but the CER sets our losses at 5% of GDP. That’s a vast sum: 1% of Britain’s GDP is worth £25.6bn. Goldman Sachs’s calculations are similar. Researchers at the London School of Economics found that the UK lost £27bn in exports to the EU in the first two years; the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) reckons Britain has seen a 15% reduction in trade. Last week Policy Exchange, a pro-Brexit thinktank, tried to salvage some shred of Brexit’s reputation, but to no avail. Sifting through the statistics, even it couldn’t find any Brexit advantages. Try as it might to produce a positive narrative, its report Less Than Meets the Eye could only attempt to limit the damage. It concluded that the OBR’s 15% trade reduction was “greatly exaggerated – and that the real impact is only a small fraction of what has been assumed”.

#uk #uk politics #brexit chickens #economic growth #lack thereof #labour #public opinion

Home-grown food may become a niche product for the wealthy in our supermarkets as British farmers’ incomes plummet

For Liz Webster, who farms 647 hectares (1600 acres) in Wiltshire, south west England, the latest impact of Brexit has been particularly brutal. About £400 per animal has been wiped off the price she can get for her beef cattle, a hefty blow at a time when all the inputs – feed, energy, fertiliser – are going through the roof. The fall in price, on livestock that typically fetch £2,000 to £3,000 per animal, is the result of a flood of cheaper meat arriving from Australia, the result of one of the new trade deals the government has signed since the UK left the European Union. Prices for beef in the supermarkets have remained broadly the same, but farmers have seen their income plummet. “It’s just inevitable that if it continues, British food will disappear, unless it’s niche, appealing to a particular wealthy market, because in the mainstream supermarkets British food won’t be able to complete,” she says. For farmers, it seems Brexit is the gift that keeps on taking away. A study published last year found the quantity of farmed exports to the EU, the biggest market for farm produce, had fallen by nearly half (47%) and the value by 35%, while the variety of exports also reduced by a third. Separate analysis by the National Farmers’ Union published earlier this year found exports from the poultry sector fell by 38%, beef exports 24%, lamb 14% and dairy 16%. Brexit has also cost the UK consumer – a study in 2023 found it had already added £7bn to food prices for consumers. Nor has Brexit been the only disaster to strike farmers in the last decade: Covid, energy shocks from the Ukraine and Iran wars, and extreme weather events have all compounded the damage. “There’s been so many global challenges, to try and decipher how much is down to leaving the EU and how much down to global turmoil is difficult,” says Tom Bradshaw, president of the NFU. “But we always warned that [the issue with Brexit] wasn’t going to be the immediate impact, it was sort of a death by a thousand cuts, a slow burn, and that’s exactly what we’re now seeing.” Brexit wreaked three massive changes to British farming: the withdrawal of the UK from the EU’s common agricultural policy (Cap), the subsidy system that held sway since the mid-1970s; changes to trade policy, which let in floods of imports, many of which farmers say are produced to lower standards than UK equivalents; and the introduction of trade friction with the EU, previously the biggest food export market.

#uk #brexit #brexit chickens #agriculture #trade deals #farmers income decline #rising consumer prices #food security

NEW border regulations for visitors to the UK are having a “damaging impact” on tourism in Northe...

NEW border regulations for visitors to the UK are having a “damaging impact” on tourism in Northern Ireland. Since January a new Home Office travel scheme requiring all non-European visitors to obtain electronic travel authorisation (ETA) prior to their arrival has been in effect. It means all non-European travellers must now present the ETA, which currently costs £10, to be allowed to pass through the UK border. From April 2 the scheme will extend to European visitors too, and on April 9 the cost of obtaining the required ETA will increase to £16 per person. The new restrictions are already having a negative impact on tourism in the North, which traditionally welcomes 67 per cent of its overseas holidaymakers from outside of Britain and Ireland via southern Ireland. Now, tourists who wish to pay a visit to the North of Ireland while spending time in the south will have to get the paperwork done first and also pay for the privilege.

#northern ireland #brexit chickens #uk eta #drop off in tourists

Nuffield Trust says supply chains have shifted, with medicines for epilepsy and cystic fibrosis among those now scarce

Drug shortages in the UK have risen to their worst level for four years, official figures show, with Brexit considered a key reason so many medications are scarce. Drug companies notified the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) about disruptions to supply 1,938 times during last year – the highest number since the 1,967 seen in 2021. Medications to treat epilepsy and cystic fibrosis are among those that pharmacists are finding it hard or impossible to get hold of, creating risks for patients’ health. The figures have emerged in a new report by the Nuffield Trust health thinktank, which obtained them under freedom of information laws from the DHSC, which oversees the availability of drugs UK-wide. The number of supply disruptions fell after 2021, to 1,608 in 2022 and 1,634 in 2023. But it suddenly shot up again last year to 1,938, the data shows. Mark Dayan, a policy analyst at the Nuffield Trust and its Brexit programme lead, said: “This wave of medicine shortages has already meant people struggle to find the drugs their doctors told them were needed for conditions like epilepsy and cystic fibrosis. It’s very worrying that it appears to be rolling on at full force into a third year.” The report says that while drug shortages have become a problem globally in recent years, the UK is facing “a worsening situation” compared with the rest of Europe because of Brexit. “Elevated and troubling levels of medicine shortages are continuing, with no consistent sign of improvement. The UK has had the lowest import growth in medicines of any G7 country, driven by a reduction in EU imports,” the thinktank adds.

#uk #brexit chickens #medicines shortages

New EU trade regulations will cause further pain for the UK. Starmer’s talk of breaking down barriers must be more than warm words, says Gua

“It’s done! Get over it! It’s eight years ago! We’re independent and we’re free!” claimed Nigel Farage on Question Time last week. But the louder he asserted it, the less convinced he sounded. Watch the Brexit that made him becoming an albatross, as it is for the Tories. This week’s new set of EU trade regulations hammering Britain’s smaller exporters is proof that it isn’t over, but forever adding to our economic woes. From Thursday, general product safety regulations (GPSR) will apply to a huge new range of products. The Federation of Small Businesses (FSB) warns: “The GPSR will be a real barrier to trade.” Exporters will need an agent within the EU or Northern Ireland, costing at least €150 an item a year. “I only found out when eBay said they’d only take GPSR products from this week,” says Noel Humphrey. His company, Electron Electronics, manufactures, sells and trades in small electrical parts. “It will cost me an extra £25 for each soldering iron I sell. If we were still in the EU, this would be no problem,” he says. “And we’d be at the table that makes these rules.” Electron may give up exporting. On Monday, Rachel Reeves went to Brussels, the first UK chancellor to visit the Eurogroup of EU finance ministers since Brexit, proclaiming she wants an “economic reset” to break down barriers to trade. In pursuit of growth, this aim becomes more pressing every month. British food exports to the EU have fallen by £3bn a year according to the Centre for Inclusive Trade Policy, and Brexit trading barriers cost each household £210 extra for food in the two years up to 2021. The Office for National Statistics says Brexit cost the UK £1m an hour in 2022. The Office for Budget Responsibility estimates Brexit will cause UK trade to fall by 15%. Replicating EU regulators, as for medicines and chemicals, is expensive. Aggravations abound: unsafe tap water is the latest risk because the UK can no longer access EU labs for testing. All this percolates through to voters. Europhobes now sound like voices from a vanishing planet. Here’s a good example: useful new EU regulations mandate one phone charger for all makes. The UK will embrace this commonsense change, but Mark Francois of the (does it still exist?) European Research Group protests “Labour clearly believe we should become a rule-taker from Brussels again.” Iain Duncan Smith adds “This is the example of how, through the backdoor, the EU controls us.”

Yeah, they may have got brexit done, but brexit's not done with the UK yet.

#uk #brexit chickens #eu general product safety regulations (GPSR)

Exclusive: EU countries will share laboratory capacity but UK rules mean products cannot be tested abroad

The safety of tap water in the UK could be at risk because water companies are unable to use products to clean it, industry insiders have said, as all the laboratories that test and certify the chemicals have shut down. People in the industry have called it a “Brexit problem” because EU countries will share laboratory capacity from 2026, meaning that if the UK was still in the EU, water companies would be able to use products that passed tests on the continent. But UK rules mean products cannot be tested abroad; they have to be tested in the country in a certified lab, of which there are now none. If companies are unable to keep contaminants out of the water supply, it can cause a danger to health. This year, thousands of people in Devon became unwell after the cryptosporidium parasite was detected in the supply. Schools and businesses had to temporarily close and it negatively affected the local economy. Some households had to boil their tap water for a month to remove the contaminant. Under Drinking Water Inspectorate (DWI) rules, every item or chemical that comes into contact with drinking water has to be tested in stringent conditions, under an EU-derived law known as regulation 31. This ensures these products are safe to use, do not leach dangerous chemicals into the drinking water supply and do not encourage the growth of dangerous microbes. Laboratories have to be regulation 31 certified, meaning they carry out all the tests on chemicals, pipes or other items to a certain standard. There used to be three such laboratories in the UK, but since 2021 there have been none as they all shut down because they are expensive to run. This means new products cannot be tested or used to clean water, and that products that have to be retested every five years also cannot be approved. Whistleblowers at water companies have said this “limits the availability of products in the market which both risks safety and reduces competition, which will drive up prices and reduce service quality”. There is a backlog of dozens of products awaiting testing.

Always focusing on the negative of Brexit, never the positive. Look at it this way; before, if you wanted to drink shit in the UK, you had to go down to the nearest river or the sea. Now, it will be tapped directly to your house.

#uk #brexit chickens #uk tap water #purification chemicals #testing regulations #no testing labs

Centre for Inclusive Trade Policy report finds trade flows have shown no signs of returning to previous levels

Exports of British food to the EU have dropped by nearly £3bn a year since Brexit, a trade thinktank has said, with new physical and documentary checks at the border complicating trade. A report by the Centre of Inclusive Trade Policy (CITP) has found that the export of UK food and agricultural products to the EU has fallen by more than 16% on average across the three years since Britain left the single market, when compared with the three years before the exit. The drop equates to £2.8bn fewer exports a year travelling to the bloc from Britain. The report said that, while the fall coincided with events such as the fallout from the Covid pandemic and Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, trade flows between the UK and EU, particularly the export of British goods, had shown no signs of returning to previous levels. Campaigners and industry groups have urged Keir Starmer to push ahead with Labour’s manifesto promise of securing a veterinary deal , known as an SPS agreement, with the EU to remove barriers to trade. The UK officially left the single market on 1 January 2021, and became regarded as a “third country” The bloc immediately brought in new border checks for agri-food products travelling from Britain including health certificates, as well as physical checks at the border. After three years of delays, the UK government brought in reciprocal measures for plant and animal goods imports in January and physical checks were introduced in April. The move was largely to limit importing plant and animal diseases into the UK. However, the CITP report said many industry organisations found the new certification and associated regulatory measures for imports and exports were proving to be a “major obstacle” for growth and a source of significant extra costs.

Who could possibly have foreseen this apart from the thousands who warned this would happen? It has very little to do with the pandemic or the Russian invasion, the excuses Tories used to explain why brexit wasn't doing as well as they had predicted.

#uk #brexit chickens #food exports to eu #16% fall