Eagle says UK-EU deal will remove most plant checks, easing £60m in annual horticulture costs

Eagle told the Guardian during a visit to a plant nursery in Kent that she hoped the sanitary and phytosanitary (SPS) deal, largely agreed in May and due to be signed at the UK-EU summit on 20 November, would make “the paperwork and the potential problems if things get stuck at borders would all disappear”. The UK's departure from the EU triggered border checks on imports and exports of plants, food and animal products.

The SPS deal will permit the removal of the vast majority of physical checks and most accompanying certificates and paperwork. According to calculations by the industry body the Horticultural Trades Association (HTA), these currently cost horticulture businesses £60m a year, covering plant health inspection fees, phytosanitary certificates, document and ID checks, port fees, agents' fees, additional labour costs and extra haulage costs. The figure does not include late delivery penalties or sales lost because of port delays or damage to goods.

Eagle argued the savings should put "downward pressure on food prices", though she would not confirm the deal would lower the cost of food in the UK.

Provender Nurseries, one of the UK's largest wholesale nurseries, based at Swanley in Kent, welcomed the promise of the deal. Managing director Richard McKenna said the business had already spent at least £500,000 building a "sealed building and bought four electric forklifts to operate in it" for inspections of lorry loads of trees and shrubs imported from the continent, because it had experienced "delays and damage" when smaller loads were inspected at government-run border control posts such as Sevington. The post will become obsolete once the deal is implemented. Despite that cost, McKenna hopes the deal will convince some of Provender's European suppliers, previously deterred by post-Brexit paperwork, to restart exports. "We need to see the small print on the agreement," he said. "It could have been sooner, but we are pleased that it is happening."

The deal is not expected to be implemented until the first quarter of 2028, meaning businesses such as Provender will still be subject to current border arrangements for more than a year. Fran Barnes, chief executive of the HTA, called for "some easements as a transition arrangement that are pragmatic" to help businesses, such as fewer or no checks on imports of lower-risk products. Eagle conceded the implementation date was later than the mid-2027 target set when former prime minister Keir Starmer announced his EU "reset" deal in May 2025, which she said had always been "a very, very ambitious timescale".

British exporters of produce including seed potatoes also hope the SPS deal will allow trade halted by Brexit to restart. Adam Taylor, a director of Taylors Bulbs in Lincolnshire, which supplies bulbs to garden centres across the UK and Ireland, said "we have been waiting for this moment, but it all depends on the timing of the deal". A Brexit certification disagreement halted exports of British seed potatoes, particularly from Scotland, to the EU. Taylors set up an Irish business to keep supplying the Republic of Ireland. "When things go back closer to how they were before Brexit, I hope our Irish customer base will reflect on the loyalty given to them," he said.