Dragging the UK back into EU SPS regulations
Just when we thought we were out, Labour drags the UK back in.
CATHERINE MCBRIDE
The Labour Party’s EU Reset agreement to follow EU SPS regulations, animal welfare, and food standards is potentially disastrous for British farmers and will add yet more packaging costs to UK food manufacturers.
Last May, the Labour Party’s EU Reset agreed that the UK would immediately apply all EU rules covering plant and animal health and food marketing standards, including provisions on certification, controls, and substantive requirements on trade to/from third countries. These controls include documentary, identity and physical checks to ensure that goods comply with EU health, safety and quality standards. Remember that point: ‘ensure goods comply with EU health standards’ as it is the point of this essay.
But note that this agreement applies not only to UK goods exported to the EU, but also to all food production in Great Britain and to all goods imported into the UK from non-EU countries. Effectively, the UK would be enacting laws to protect its EU suppliers at the expense of UK producers, UK consumers, and its non-EU suppliers.
ECJ in control, again.
Worse still, the ECJ will adjudicate any disputes arising from this one-sided agreement, as it is the sole arbiter of EU law, and all UK food and agriculture laws, now and in the future, will be EU laws. The UK won’t even be able to review the laws before they are adopted, as the agreement clearly obliges the UK to apply EU laws simultaneously.
An agreement made on false assumptions
Anyone reading this agreement, which you can read here, may imagine that the UK is a large exporter of agricultural goods to the EU, implying this is trade worth preserving, and that EU plant and animal health was exemplary, implying it is worth copying, but neither assumption is true.
UK SITC 0 Food and live animal exports to the EU made up just 1.3% of all UK exports in 2025. This is not due to Brexit; the UK is not a large exporter of food to any location. Almost all UK agricultural production is consumed domestically. In addition, 35% of the food consumed in the UK is imported, of which about 68% to 70% comes from the EU, as it did before Brexit. The rest of the UK’s imported food comes from non-EU countries.
As for the other assumption, that the EU has exemplary animal and plant health, nothing could be further from the truth. EU plant and animal health is some of the WORSE in the world. Yes, you read that correctly, worse, not better and certainly not exemplary. So why is the UK adopting EU regulations? Why does Labour want EU products to be able to enter the UK without certificates or controls, as specified by the EU agreement shown below?
‘A common sanitary and phytosanitary area between the Union and the United Kingdom would … result in the vast majority of movements of animals, animal products, plants, and plant products between Great Britain and the Union being undertaken without the certificates or controls that are currently required or expected.’[1]
Animal Diseases in the EU
1. Let’s start with foot-and-mouth disease (FMD).
Foot and Mouth disease decimated the UK dairy industry in 2001 when 2,026 cases of FMD were confirmed, and 6.45 million cattle, sheep and pigs were culled to eradicate it. FMD is a disease that spreads easily in the UK climate and in the type of farm animals kept in the UK. There was a smaller second outbreak in 2007; 1,578 animals were culled, but only 278 cattle tested positive for the virus, according to post-mortem analysis.
Foot and Mouth Disease outbreaks were incredibly expensive for UK farmers and its food production industry, which is why the UK has been so careful to avoid FMD. The UK has been very successful in this endeavour and has had no cases since 2007. None – in almost 20 years.
So how is the EU doing with Foot and Mouth Disease?
Not so good. In January 2025, a Foot and Mouth Disease outbreak started in Germany in a small herd of water buffalo. By February, it had reached Hungary, and by March, it was in Slovakia – despite EU regulations, this disease easily crossed EU (certificate and control-free) borders, affecting more animals as it spread. In 2026, cases of Foot and Mouth Disease have been reported in Cyprus and Greece.
The first FMD outbreak in 2025 was in Brandenburg, Germany, and involved 14 animals; the second outbreak in Kisbajcs, Hungary, involved 1,400 dairy cattle; the third outbreak, also in Hungary, involved 3,000 animals; then it spread to Gyor-Sopron, Hungary, where another 1,000 cattle were involved; then to a second farm in Gyor-Sopron, Hungary, infecting another 2,500 animals; then it crossed another (certificate-free) border to reach Slovakia, where multiple outbreaks in Bratislavsky, Trnavsky, and Nitriansky involved approximately 10,000 animals.[2] The disease has now spread to Cyprus in February 2026 and to Greece in March 2026.[3]
For the record: There have been no cases of Foot and Mouth Disease (FMD) in any CPTPP country over the last 5 years. CPTPP countries are Australia, New Zealand, Brunei, Singapore, Vietnam, Malaysia, Japan, Canada, Mexico, Peru, Chile and the UK. North America, Central America and the Caribbean are officially recognised as FMD-free by the World Organisation for Animal Health (WOAH). There have been no cases of FMD in the Mercosur countries since 2013, when Venezuela had an outbreak. As of 2020, 98.6% of South America’s cattle population was officially recognised as FMD-free due to a vaccination program. The region is working towards full eradication.
Unlike South America, the EU doesn’t use FMD vaccines because it apparently wants to maintain its status as an “FMD-free without vaccination” area; when an outbreak occurs, the EU’s primary control measure is culling infected animals. It also claims to use movement restrictions and containment zones, but the present spread of the disease into 5 EU countries shows that this policy isn’t working.
Apparently, the loss of the EU’s “FMD-free without vaccination” status would cause it to lose billions in meat and dairy exports. So culling tens of thousands of animals is apparently a price worth paying, provided, of course, that its trading partners don’t notice that the “FMD-free” part of the “FMD-free without vaccination” is no longer true. Which countries want imports from countries with “FMD-free without vaccination” status – the US, Australia, Canada, Mexico, Chile, Peru, Costa Rica, Japan, New Zealand, Norway, Iceland, and of course – the UK. But not for very much longer if the Government gets its way.
The Labour Government plans to let the EU set all UK food and agricultural regulations, which will give the UK certificate-free borders with the EU – the area where this devastating disease is spreading – but also allow the EU to restrict our meat and dairy imports from all non-EU countries that have eradicated this disease. Who thinks that’s a smart idea?
DEFRA placed restrictions on both commercial and personal imports from the EU of dairy products and beef, pork, sheep and goat meat in April 2025 and only lifted the ban for commercial imports from Germany, Austria, Hungary and Slovakia in April this year. The ban still applies to commercial imports from Greece and Cyprus, as well as the ban on all personal dairy and meat imports from all EU countries, EFTA countries, and the Danish autonomous territories of Greenland and the Faroe Islands.
The Government wants the UK to have the same SPS status as these countries, which would mean UK exports to non-EU countries would also be blocked whenever a disease occurs in any part of the EU. It is also worth noting that the UK banned dairy and meat imports from Austria in 2025 even though Austria had no FMD cases; it just has (control-free) borders with Germany, Hungary and Slovakia.
Why would anyone want to have a border with the EU that is free from ‘certificates and controls’? Is our government mad, or are they just trying to clear more farmland for solar panels?
2. African Swine Fever
But the EU doesn’t just have a problem with Foot and Mouth Disease; it also has African Swine Fever, which has been ongoing for several years. Here is the Defra report from 2024. And here is one from 2026. ASF has infected both domestic pig farms and wild boar populations in Central and Eastern Europe as well as getting into norther Spain and as far north as Sweden.
According to the 2024 report, as with FMD, the outbreak also started in Germany in a backyard premises with just 9 pigs, then spread to a finisher unit with 1,100 pigs and two smaller farms with 17 and 170 animals. In 2024, Poland reported its first outbreak in domestic pigs. By July 2024, it had 19 outbreaks in domestic pigs. Both Germany and Poland are major pork exporters. The outbreaks were in the German states of Hesse and Rhineland-Palatinate, which border North Rhine-Westphalia, which had 5.7 million pigs in 2024, the highest pig density in Germany. Much of the ‘Danish bacon’ the UK likes to consume is actually processed, cured, and packaged in Poland. These outbreaks could have been devastating to EU pork production.
The EU attempted to contain the outbreak with trade restrictions, movement controls, surveillance zones, and ‘Stamping out’ (mandatory culling), as well as a ban on wild boar hunting except for trained hunters killing infected animals. However, despite these measures, there were also 4 outbreaks in domestic pigs in Latvia near the border with Estonia, 5 in Lithuania, 2 in Greece, 34 in Romania, and 1 in Croatia, affecting 83 pigs. And these figures were published in July 2024 for domestic pig farms. There were also outbreaks in the wild boar populations of all of these countries, as well as in Italy, Sweden, Hungary, Estonia, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia.
But things got worse. The World Organisation for Animal Health (WOAH) figures show that there were almost 1000 outbreaks in Europe on domestic pig farms in July 2024, and over 900 in August 2024. Pig farms can contain anything from a dozen animals to thousands of animals. According to WOAH records, there were no months between Jan 2023 and Mar 2026 with no outbreaks of African Swine Fever in domestic pigs in Europe.
The chart below shows WOAH data for 2023 to March 2026.[4] I have highlighted the EU countries. It is worth noting that these are the number of outbreaks, not the number of animals. For some of the countries showing small numbers of outbreaks, such as Germany in 2024, we have already discussed how this includes small farms with just 9 animals and much larger commercial farms with over 1,000 animals. According to the UK’s national Pig Association, Estonia had 11 outbreaks in 2025, one of which occurred on the country’s largest pig farm, resulting in the culling of 28,500 pigs.[5]
It is also interesting that while the EU is opposed to vaccinating its cattle against FMD, it is interested in developing a vaccine for African Swine Fever and has funded this effort through Horizon’s VAX4ASF project, a collaboration among several institutions, including the UK’s Pirbright Institute. The Pirbright Institute is also working with another UK company, The Vaccine Group, to develop a safe and effective vaccine for ASF.[6]
It is great that the UK has the scientific freedom to develop this type of vaccine, scientific freedom that will also be curtailed if the UK lets the EU make its gene editing regulations – or not. The EU is not keen on gene editing, even to save thousands of pigs.
The UK has never had an outbreak of African Swine Fever.
The UK has strict biosecurity and import controls to keep ASF out; it is illegal to feed food waste to pigs; and it has banned personal imports of meat and dairy products, as discussed earlier.
UK Border Force, Port Health Authorities, and Customs regularly seize illegal meat that could carry diseases such as African Swine Fever and Foot-and-Mouth Disease. In 2024, Dover Port Health Authority seized almost 100 tonnes of illegal meat in 868 separate seizures. This was an increase from 56 tonnes in 2023 and less than 4 tonnes in 27 seizures in 2022.[7]
But all of this could change under the Labour Government’s Reset plans. But the Labour government wants the UK to follow EU plant and animal health rules (SPS) and to make its borders with the EU ‘certificate and control-free’.
I should add: North, South, and Central America are also free of African Swine Fever. Only the island of Hispaniola in the Caribbean experienced an outbreak in 2021, the first in the Americas in 40 years. CPTPP countries: Australia, Canada, Chile, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand and Peru are all ASF-free zones. Only 3 CPTPP countries have had ASF cases in the last 5 years. Singapore had an outbreak in 2023 but was declared ASF-free in 2024. Malaysia experienced an outbreak in 2021, which it controlled through quarantine, culling, and tighter biosecurity measures. Vietnam is the only CPTPP country to have had an ASF outbreak during the last 5 years that was anywhere close to those in the EU. The EU’s record on ASF control
Of all of the countries in all of the world, why would anyone let the EU make their SPS rules?
Next time, in part 2, I will deal with EU plant health. Spoiler alert: that isn’t very good either.
Part 3 will cover EU food packaging rules. Spoiler alert: incoming costs for UK food producers
[1] eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CELEX:52025PC0408, (a) Common Sanitary and Phytosanitary Area, paragraph 3.
[2] Foot-and-mouth (FMD) disease outbreaks in Europe – Update – FVE – Federation of Veterinarians of Europe
[3] Foot-and-mouth disease – Food Safety – European Commission
[4] African swine fever in Europe
[5] ASF in Europe Updated Outbreak Assessment #35
[6] ASF in Europe Updated Outbreak Assessment #35, conclusion.
[7] Dover: Almost 100 tonnes of illegal meat seized at port last year – BBC News
This article (Dragging the UK back into EU SPS regulations) was created and published by Catherine McBride and is republished here under “Fair Use”
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