The food and drink sector “has not appreciated the scale and breadth of changes” posed by the EU reset, the British Retail Consortium has warned.
And as a result, it could “struggle to implement what’s needed to meet the deadline of mid-2027” for the rollout of the new Sanitary and Phytosanitary deal with the bloc, said BRC director of food and sustainability Andrew Opie.
Speaking a week after Defra urged agrifood businesses to “start getting ready now” for the post-Brexit SPS deal – and in the wake of growing concern over a lack of engagement by government over the detail of the deal – Opie stressed the industry body was “concerned” the food sector was underprepared for the upheaval coming its way.
“Partly that’s because of a lack of visibility of which regulation is changing as negotiations are ongoing, and it’s partly because industry is busy and stretched, dealing with what is in front of them now, rather than planning for these changes,” he told The Grocer this week.
Opie cited the difficulties with the rollout of the post-Brexit Windsor Framework in Northern Ireland and the adoption of ‘Not for EU’ labelling on food destined for the country from Great Britain, as an example of potential disruption for the sector.
“Despite loads of publicity and lots of outreach from businesses and their supply chains, we still had reasonably sized companies not knowing what to do – and that was quite a simple change,” he pointed out.
Efra Committee slams government engagement on EU SPS deal
The SPS deal would be “far more complex for supply chains”, he added, with requirements for new labelling coming alongside a slew of additional changes around official controls for food and farming, hygiene, food additives, food and feed contaminants, marketing standards, animal and plant health and genetically modified organisms.
“It’s a bit of a wake-up call for industry. Everybody wants to get this done because we want to remove border controls, we want to make it as easy as possible [to do business with the EU,” Opie said. “But obviously the EU isn’t going to relax all that until it’s happy with the UK’s alignment with its rules.”
SPS deal timetable
The government has suggested the SPS deal – currently in the midst of negotiations – could be agreed by the early summer, or even earlier, according to some food sector sources. Full implementation and ‘dynamic alignment’ with EU regulations is expected by mid-2027, with the expectation some rules could be phased in over a longer period via so-called ‘carve-outs’.
“So that is going to require a huge investment in resources by industry, and that’s going to have to be done alongside the ‘day job’ of businesses – because the same technical people will also be working on other initiatives such as the transition to nutrient profiling models and deposit return schemes, or whatever else is going on in the background at the same time,” Opie pointed out.
“This is probably a bigger challenge than people have appreciated.”
Opie also reiterated the need for sector-specific ‘carve outs’ from the SPS rules, to give industry time to adapt, citing how many products that may not meet EU regulations will potentially still be on the market.
“You could have some that have used pesticides and other chemicals being used in supply chains now – so what’s going to happen to those products in terms of the transitions?”
And then the “big question”, which “we won’t know until negotiations are complete” is whether the EU would accept transition periods for such issues, Opie suggested.
Questions also remained over when border controls would be phased out, while Opie also pointed to issues around compliance and interpretation of EU rules, again citing the experience of businesses sending their produce to Northern Ireland under the Windsor Framework.
Defra urges businesses to ‘prepare now’ for EU SPS deal
“The UK’s approach to compliance isn’t always the same as the EU. We’ve had occasions in Northern Ireland where we have been briefed about what to do and everybody has moved towards compliance, and then EU vets will turn around and say, no I’m sorry, that isn’t what we meant about compliance – and then businesses have to go and try again.”
As a result, the BRC had lobbied the UK government to make sure the terms of compliance was “agreed with the EU, and be really clear, so that we satisfy their standards”, Opie said, while also calling on government to offer more clarity on which controls between Great Britain and Northern Ireland would continue post-SPS deal.
“We know there will still be some controls in areas such as wines and spirits, which won’t be covered by the deal,” he added.
“There is a hell of a lot still to resolve in terms of what the final picture is going to look like.”
It comes as Europe minister Nick Thomas-Symonds this week revealed the total cost of red tape, including export health certificates, to UK exporters stood at £210m since 2023. FDF analysis of HMRC data shows food and drink exports with the EU were down 23.4% between 2021 and 2025, when compared with the period between 2016 and 2020.
Writing in The Times on Tuesday, Thomas-Symonds said a “paperwork tax” had imposed a “cost of living penalty” on everyone in Britain because it had damaged growth.
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