UK and EU agree draft deal to scrap Brexit red tape over food exports

While UK rules remain mostly aligned with EU ones, there are some areas where England has diverged from the EU rule book, for example on “precision breeding” of plants, previously known as gene editing. In recent weeks, agreement has been struck on transition arrangements while the EU’s new regulations come in to force.

The government has already announced a European Partnerships Bill which will provide a legal mechanism for the application of new EU rules and regulations. This will also allow for the necessary alignments for the linking of the UK emissions trading scheme with the EU’s, and save the need for UK exporters to pay the EU’s new carbon border tax.

The draft agreements will be discussed at a meeting of EU ambassadors called Coreper on Wednesday, with some key details on the planned numbers in a Youth Experience Scheme to be finalised at a political level in the coming days. A discount on full foreign student fees for EU students is likely to be pushed to next year alongside a plan to reconnect electricity markets.

The BBC understands the draft agreements will also include some references to UK involvement in defence co-operation schemes, access to law enforcement databases and some reassurances over the EU’s “Made in Europe” plans.

A food deal will have particular significance for Northern Ireland, radically reducing the impact of the post-Brexit Irish Sea border.

Northern Ireland’s Brexit deal kept it inside the EU’s single market for goods. That means food products from elsewhere in the UK require paperwork and some physical checks when arriving at NI’s ports. A deal will ultimately end those requirements.

While the food trade plans have been backed by supermarkets and farmers representatives, some pro-Brexit campaigners have criticised the reapplication of EU rules. The post-Brexit trade deal signed by Boris Johnson’s government prioritised regulatory freedoms for the UK over avoiding new regulatory red tape, checks and delays.

But William Bain, the British Chamber of Commerce’s (BCC) head of trade policy, told the BBC’s Today programme that business overall thought it was a “price is worth paying” to follow common rules, as companies would benefit from “lower costs, reduced delays [and] increased market access”.

At the moment, he said, the requirement for Export Health Certificates can add thousands of pounds of costs to each truck carrying goods, in addition “to the delays that people find at the ports or at the borders”.

“So we get lower exports because of the delays and the massive increases in costs that have come into the supply chain.”

The BCC has released a new analysis of its members’ views suggesting options for a closer relationship.

The business lobby group says the current trade relationship is “failing to deliver”, leaving firms “struggling with a thicket of Brexit red tape” nearly six years after the UK’s exit from the bloc.