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During 43 years in journalism, our Editor, Welshman Phil Parry would often write stories about people who were angered by red tape (particularly in building regulations, or abiding by farming laws), and now this is put centre stage by some Welsh farmers broadly welcoming the agreement to align UK and EU Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) legislation, but that the additional requirements imposed by UK-EU Trade and Cooperation Agreement are partly to blame for a huge decline in exports.
I am usually deeply suspicious of those who complain about ‘red tape’.
If you delve into it a little more deeply this supposed ‘needless bureaucracy’, usually means things like important legislation designed to keep people safe.
Your heart would sink whenever anybody came into reception with carrier bags stuffed full of papers, complaining about planning laws, and that a mistake had been made.
Invariably it hadn’t.
Nevertheless these people have a point.
Anyone wanting to make changes to their home, or Welsh farmers wishing to export to the European Union (EU) (an important market), must go through endless hoops to do so.
Let’s look at farming first.
In 2023 Welsh food and drink exports stood at £813 million, with 75 per cent going to the EU , accounting for a third of all Welsh lamb, 90 per cent of Welsh beef exports and 95 per cent of Welsh dairy exports.
The agricultural sector in Wales also relies on the EU for imports, including fertilisers and animal feed ingredients. But farmers are completely bemused by the forms they must fill out.
They say that requirements imposed by UK-EU Trade and Cooperation Agreement are at least partly responsible for a 21 per cent decline in UK agri-food exports between 2018 and 2024, (when we still had to conform in order to trade).
The announcement this week of alignment with EU Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) legislation could impose an added burden.
Jock Stirrup chair of the Lords’ European Affairs Committee, which is looking at this whole area, declared: “As the UK aligns with more EU law, parliament will face growing pressure to scrutinise significant volumes of EU legislation”.
The Farmers’ Union of Wales (FUW) proclaimed:“It is crucial to consider how an SPS agreement may place the UK in a challenging position in future as it no longer has the power, as a formal Member State, to influence European rules and will have to accept the EU’s jurisdiction on the way they are applied… The Union will continue to press the UK Government on these issues and to protect the interest of Welsh farmers as preparations get underway to implement this new agreement”.
This comes after the Welsh Government (WG) proudly announces a review of red tape affecting farmers.
It said in July: “John Davies, a beef and sheep farmer from near Brecon and former President of NFU Cymru, will lead the nine-month review. He will speak directly to those filling out forms – farmers and agents with lived experience of on-farm requirements.
“The review will assess the cumulative impact of requirements on farm businesses and examine where there is scope and a need for change. The Welsh Government made this review one of its top 100-day commitments”.
Then there are heating and boiler regulations.
The heating systems section of the WG website appears to give up, offering people another site advising: “Guidance on what is reasonable provision for compliance with the energy efficiency requirements is given in the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) publication Domestic Building Services Compliance Guide 2013 Edition”.
The ‘replacing boilers’ part runs to more than TWELVE PARAGRAPHS!
But it’s the EU that seems to be the real problem.
There are multiple tiers of government which invent rules, that are often enacted by another level.
If there is such a thing as a European way of life, it involves filling out forms in triplicate.
Every European has a horror story to recount, and in one the Belgian tax authorities recently informed a resident that he was not, in fact, the father of his three children.
Even when the bureaucracy goes smoothly, it is difficult to run a business in the EU, because its 27 countries between them regulate entry into more than 5,700 professions – over 200 per country – from the commonplace to the obscure. Woe betide an aspiring tiler, mushroom expert or well-sinker who would like to set up shop in Hungary without negotiating an obstacle course of certificates, (nearly a quarter of EU workers toil under a regime that requires a recognised qualification), because the regulations vary from one country to the next, a Polish electrical engineer is unlikely to be allowed to fix a fault in neighbouring Lithuania, say – so much for the EU’s much vaunted single market. Each country has its own labour code, and Luxembourg’s alone runs to 2,160 pages.
Try stuffing all of those into plastic bags.
Perhaps I should not have been so dismissive of those people – maybe they had a point about red tape…
The memories of Phil’s incredible decades long award-winning career in journalism (when those carrying carrier bags of papers, offering a ‘story’, were usually avoided), as he was gripped by the rare disabling condition Hereditary Spastic Paraplegia (HSP), have been released in a major book ‘A GOOD STORY’. Order the book now!
