Brexit: making the best of it
By Pete North - June 30, 2021
As the inadequacies of Boris Johnson’s trade agreement continue to mount, we are again subject to a round of speculation as to how we might remedy them. The debate is typically lacking ambition and riddled with misapprehension and error, and most can only imagine putting things back as they were, failing to recognise the opportunity. One of the issues we have to deal with is the EU’s legacy “veterinary system” as applied to slaughterhouses.
The problem with a veterinary system, as mooted by all and sundry, is that (as the name implies) it relies on veterinarians. As much as there’s a shortage of qualified vets, exacerbated by Brexit and Covid, it’s also a fairly useless and wasteful system. Vets have no place in a modern food safety system. Their main concern is keeping animals alive and well. When an animal has been slaughtered, the core skill set of vets is somewhat redundant. The ideal veterinary controls, therefore, would be no veterinary controls except for live animals.
As it stands, we’re employing expensive and overqualified people to do a job they aren’t good at. Being that they are a system cost, the commercial drive is to get them as cheaply as possible and that usually means newly qualified, with limited English language skills and no enforcement experience in British slaughterhouses. The system was, and is, a travesty. Not least, having been detached from the local authority enforcement infrastructure, it lost vital local intelligence on how the trade was functioning, where the cheats were and who was cutting corners.
This is why Britain should resist a comprehensive SPS agreement with the EU. Such a system is mooted as an answer to all our difficulties as though it were a quick and easy fix, failing to note that the oft cited Swiss system is bespoke, very specific to Switzerland’s economic and geographic circumstances, and one that essentially means adopting EU frameworks verbatim. That may be tolerable for a mid-sized economy with a small agriculture sector that doesn’t export much, but it’s not going to fly for Great Britain. For an island of 65m people, not having control over our food safety regime is unthinkable.
What makes Switzerland special is that, because of its landlocked character, goods coming from inside Swiss territory will always comply with EU law (there are special arrangements for air freight) and goods coming into Switzerland (air freight aside) have to pass through Union Border Control Posts. It is because of this, as much as anything else, that border checks can be reduced or, in most cases, eliminated. The situation for the UK – with its much wider access to third country products – is not analogous. Furthermore, Switzerland may only import products from third countries approved by the Commission.
It is wrongly assumed that a “Swiss style” SPS agreement is just a matter of copying the rules, ignoring the overall institutional architecture of the system. It would require the total integration of a very wide range of legislation, systems and administrative procedures, very much undermining the point of Brexit.
With Brexit we have afforded ourselves the opportunity to move away from corporate scale EU standard slaughterhouses, now regarded as Covid incubators, to a more sustainable model of smaller, local slaughter operations – reintegrated with local authority enforcement, removing routine veterinary supervision. Routine inspection of carcases by qualified meat inspectors can continue, if required. Veterinary supervision of their work is not necessary.
The fly in the ointment is Northern Ireland where it doesn’t matter how good a technical solution is if it doesn’t have political backing. This is a subject on which the parties involved are never going to agree. In classic EU fashion the technical is presently dictating the political, but Northern Ireland is doing what Northern Ireland does, and is (rightly) asserting the political over the technical. Thus, there is no technical resolution to be found until the politics is resolved.
Either way, the EU is wedded to the protocol, and though Brexiteer noisemakers are agitating for the British government to scrap it, that is highly unlikely to happen. Then, as undesirable as a Swiss-style veterinary agreement is, under Frost the chances of Britain agreeing to such a thing are zero. Thus it’s a matter of optimising the Protocol as best we can – and we’ll get there sooner of the government stops dragging its heels.
Recently an undefined system of “dynamic alignment” has been suggested by the EU, which could ease the friction, but the red line would have to take into account the British need to diverge for the domestic market. There is no reason why the industry cannot operate a localised system for domestic produce in tandem with an EU hybrid system for exports, thereby allowing us to revamp our meat industry and move away form the costly and bureaucratic veterinary system.
As much as it could result in better quality meat, it could also make us more competitive (highly necessary if we’re signing FTAs with Australia and New Zealand), and also reduce our dependency on HGVs – being that we have a driver shortage. Export slaughterhouses can stay aligned. In common with everywhere else in the world, only the export plants sending meat to the EU need to comply fully with EU law. This was the situation before we joined the EEC, and it is currently the case with New Zealand and with Canada. Therein lies the system patch for Northern Ireland.
Ultimately, if we were going to stay universally aligned with the EU then the EEA would have been the most sensible mode of Brexit, but that ship has long sailed, and trade lost since is not re-established by the wave of a magic wand. Since we have severed ties with the single market, it is up to policy makers to re-imagine not only our supply chains but also our food philosophy.
As far as Brexit opponents and the gang of self-appointed trade “experts” (who’ve never set foot in a slaughterhouse) are concerned, the only way to fix anything is to submit to the EU, ignoring the inherent dysfunction of the system and growing manpower problems.
In the wake of Covid, it won’t just be the UK that needs to rethink the system. The EU must also rethink slaughterhouse design standards and food safety systems. If the vet shortage continues, they will run into their own supply crunch. The shortage of vets is a worldwide problem and retention is difficult. It is not a job for which vets become vets. Very few become vets in order to inspect slaughterhouses. To do so requires a very different skill set, which very few vets acquire, or wish to acquire. The job is best left to the specialist food safety practitioners, who are specifically trained for the function.
If then, the UK is first to depart for this flawed model, it might well be that the UK is the “rule maker” and the EU replicates the British model. The meat won’t be the only thing that would be quite delicious.