There have been some alarming reports in the media this week about the biosecurity threat from illegal meat imports into the UK. The Telegraph ran a comprehensive article about how and why it’s happening and where it’s being sold.

But we need to correct something that former British diplomat and prominent Brexiteer Lord Frost said in the article. He claimed that “Starmer’s EU ‘reset’ will stop us exercising any kind of control over food from the EU coming into Britain,” he says. “It will be illegal for us to try to do so.”

Many who are familiar with our biosecurity border controls will know that there is nothing stopping the UK from doing as many checks as it wishes at the border. 

For illegal meat imports, entering into a new SPS agreement with the EU will change nothing. The UK as well as EU member states can now, and always could prior to Brexit, impose border checks based on risk assessments and intelligence. What’s happened is that the level of criminal activity has increased. It has become more lucrative and easier to smuggle cheap, illegal meat products into the UK which get distributed to small shops and individuals via an established criminal network. 

We must make the distinction between legal commercial shipments of meat which are all pre-notified with full certification, and the illegal meat being brought in to the UK in smaller vehicles that can only be detected via a system of intelligence and spot checks at the ports. It’s these spot checks that we are perfectly able to maintain and increase and which must be properly resourced.

The other angle to this is traceability. The reason Foot and Mouth Disease spread so widely and quickly in 2001 was that animal movements continued for several days after the first case was reported but there was no real-time digital system to track where they went. If you look at a visual ‘map’ of where all those animals went, it resembles a starburst fanning out from each livestock auction. 

We now have a system and the tools needed to be able to quickly shut down animal movements within the UK should FMD or other notifiable animal diseases reach our shores. It’s called the Livestock Information Service. However, its use isn’t mandatory and, furthermore, movements only get notified AFTER an animal movement has taken place. In other countries movement licenses must be applied for BEFORE animals are moved from one farm to another or through the livestock auctions, which makes it much easier for the authorities to control the spread of disease.

We need government to make the use of this existing traceability system mandatory for cattle and sheep and for licenses to be applied for in advance. Without that the UK has no ability to lock down animal movements the minute a notifiable disease is discovered.