Concerns are growing over the future of the environmental health officers responsible for carrying out post-Brexit controls amid a new deal between the UK and the EU.
With most checks on EU and British goods set to be scrapped as part of the recently agreed sanitary and phytosanitary (SPS) deal between London and Brussels, there are fears that the staff originally hired to handle the controls – from food safety checks to signing off export health certificates – will have to be let go.
“Many of the teams of professional EHOs, vets, and technical officers with a variety of expertise, formerly carrying out SPS import checks, will be reduced or cancelled”, according to a senior source in the Chartered Institute of Environmental Health (CIEH).
“Unfortunately, in many cases, these were also the teams supporting businesses to export and signing off paperwork” which is also “not required any longer” with the EU agreeing to ditch reciprocal controls on UK goods, they noted.
It comes as Defra confirmed last month that border controls were to be significantly reduced in light of the new vet agreement, and that some border facilities could be decommissioned as a result.
Read more: Million-pound Brexit border infrastructure ‘scaled back’ amid UK-EU deal, Defra admits
Only last year, the post-Brexit controls helped drive an unprecedented shortage of veterinary workers across the Channel, with many agrifood businesses struggling to find certified personnel to regularly sign off documents so their animal and plant origin products could be traded between markets in a speedy manner.
The need for roles to fulfil those requirements will largely decrease under the new deal.
Goods coming from the rest of the world still require thorough checks, but the forthcoming SPS agreement – the details of which are still being hashed out – has not yet brought clarity on whether the EU will be running some of the checks for goods that are transiting through the bloc but ultimately heading to Britain, as it happened when the UK was still part of the single market.
“For instance, Turkish fish (which is not EU) heading for GB could now be inspected in the EU instead and get a free pass into GB, as it used to be when we were in the EU, and it won’t be checked again at GB,” the environmental health source pointed out, which would further reduce the need for EHOs on the UK side.
This potential reduction in the presence of EHOs at Britain’s borders is also raising concerns among experts, who fear not having a full grip on biosecurity checks on goods entering the country – which could bring in highly contagious diseases – could pose a threat to the UK’s food safety and, ultimately, public health.
During an Efra sub-committee hearing last month, secretary of state Steve Reed and Defra director general Emily Miles hinted at scaling up enforcement of personal imports amid reports of growing levels of illegal meats entering the country.
The CIEH source said moving health environment personnel to those roles could be an avenue as the issue “has long needed a lot of attention because it’s largely left to Border Force”, who are not experts in handling risky plant and animal goods.
Dover Port Health Authority, which has long rung the alarm over lack of resources at Britain’s busiest entry point, said it welcomed the fact that “government is seeking to reset controls at the border, focussing on biosecurity, and the critical work of the Dover Port Health Authority in identifying and removing illegal meat and food imports at the point that they arrive into the country at its border, here in Dover and at Coquelles”.
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