Guarding the borders

Border health checks for EU food are back. Will a simplified digitised system with less human inspection make us safer? Or is it just hype?

Normally, it takes a health scare for port health to get into the news. The service, which is designed to protect us from infected, smuggled and misdescribed food, is well below the radar. It's essential – as the health threats of dioxins, eggs infected with salmonella and ‘horsegate’ in 2013, have recently shown us.

In most EU countries food safety controls for animal products are organised under veterinary services. In the UK, the job falls to officials known as EHOs or EHPs, who work for councils and port health authorities. We don't have a national system.  

In 1993, when the single market began, official controls of live animals and animal and plant products imported from the EU ended. This January, after long delays, they came back. The government has long promised us ‘frictionless trade’. It has taken Defra's civil servants five years to design a Single Trade Window in an attempt to match the hype, not just for the EU, but for the world.

Civil servants love acronyms. We now have a Border Target Operating Model, or Border TOM, border control posts, BCPs, including airports, some newly-created and some, controversially, inland. Common health entry documents, CHEDs, are now channelled through a national Import of Products, Animals, Food and Feed or IPAFF system.

Digitised health certificates are applied to both imports and exports, through a single gateway. Under a ‘trusted trader’ scheme, businesses offering evidence of meeting regulatory requirements, will be exempted from some official controls. The system is designed to be self-financing.

There was always going to be a giant clashing of gears in January, when the UK's border control system, locally funded and designed in the nineteenth-century, was reconnected to the EU. A huge problem is that we don't have enough European style vets to work at our ports, checking the riskiest animal and food imports. Perhaps, our EHPs could do the job?

It could be argued that our leaving the EU has facilitated, by default, a streamlined and digitally enabled biosecurity system that we should have had years ago. Or, at we at greater risk? 

Martin Walker, independent port heath consultant, says: “It’s difficult to argue against the rationale of having risk-based controls. My feeling is that it will all depend on the detail. My main reservation is about the reduction in physical controls and checks.  

“Generally speaking, they are going to be reduced from 20% to an expected level of 1%, as the default. There will be fewer consignments being looked at. A lot of the new system will be purely based on paperwork checks, rather than looking at products of animal origin, which is how you often pick up problems.” 

Will the new system work? It will only be tested by a threat or crisis. Experience tells us that these turn up fairly often. 

Will Hatchett has been a journalist since 1986. He was editor of Environmental Health News from 1998 until 2018. The views expressed here are purely his own.