UK farming groups unite to call for EU single market access

The roundtable, which is a collaboration of 15 farming groups, called on the four UK governments to “establish and maintain regular, formal and cooperative arrangements to manage policy, legislation and delivery of regulation across the UK”.

The signatories include: NFU, NFU Cymru, NFU Scotland, CLA, British Poultry Council, LEAF, National Sheep Association, Scottish Land and Estates, Soil Association, Tenant Farmers Association, Ulster Farmers Union, National Pig Association, British Egg Industry Council, RABDF, and the National Federation of Young Farmers Clubs.

The agreement came at a recent meeting of the UK Farming Roundtable in May 2018, chaired by NFU President Minette Batters, where it was proposed that a UK policy framework for farming should include the following principles:

• Respect and maintain the current devolution settlement of policy and regulation to the constituent parts of the United Kingdom should be respected and maintained.
• The UK’s various governments, parliaments and regulators should take every step to retain and protect a single market access for food, agricultural commodities, live animals and plant and plant products throughout the UK.
• In developing distinct agricultural policies to replace the Common Agricultural Policy, farming ministers across the UK should ensure that potential differences in application of agricultural policy should not adversely impact on trade within the UK.
• Farming ministers across the UK and agricultural departments must establish and maintain regular, formal and cooperative arrangements to manage policy, legislation and delivery of regulation across the UK economic area. A guiding principle should be that no single country determines or curtails UK policy in the rest of the UK.
• No part of the UK should be able to act, or avoid action, that threatens to curtail access for other parts of the UK to third country markets, or that question the UK’s adherence to its international agreements.
• We welcome the government’s commitment to provide the same cash total in funds for farm support as is currently paid out under the CAP.  In the longer term, with the development of a new domestic agricultural policy, at least the same level of public investment in agriculture should be retained.

A wider network of food and farming industry groups has also sent a Food Supply Chain Manifesto to the PM Theresa May, urging the government to publish a white paper setting out its immigration plans "as a matter of priority", to help the food and farming sectors gain access to workers from other countries.

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