AIC at 20: Encouraging Government to fix costly UK-EU border guidance error for grain exports
As AIC marks 20 years as the UK agri-supply industry’s leading trade association, we're looking back at some of its greatest achievements since it was founded in 2003.
Each week throughout 2023, we’ll explore a major achievement where AIC represented its Member businesses, promoted the benefits of modern commercial agriculture in the UK, and supported collaboration throughout the food chain.
This week we explain how AIC got the Government to rectify a confusing and potentially costly mistake in its guidance for how the UK border works with the European Union.
Cost and confusion
In July 2020, the Government released guidance on the Border Operating Model which set out how the UK border interacts with the European Union (EU) for goods imports and exports following Britain’s exit from the Union.
The first version of the guidance appeared to state that a phytosanitary certificate (PC) was needed for the export of grains into the EU and vice versa. This requirement was not only unnecessary under EU law, had it been allowed to remain in government guidance it would have resulted in significant costs, confusion, and delays for the agri-supply industry.
AIC successfully lobbied government to highlight this error and achieved both the removal of the point in the guidance, and provision of letters from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) to reassure the industry that PCs were in fact not needed for grain exports.
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Authors
Oli Hill
As Head of Communications, Oli creates and oversees the content published on AIC's website, emails, Member briefings, print publications, and social media. A qualified multimedia journalist, he previously spent six years working at Farmers Weekly magazine as a Senior Reporter on the arable team, and latterly as Community Editor. More recently he was Communications Manager at Red Tractor.
