The UK and EU have finalised a sanitary and phytosanitary (SPS) agreement that strips away the most punishing paperwork Brexit imposed on food trade. Exporters of fresh meat, fish, shellfish, and seed potatoes will no longer need the £200 veterinary certificate or the £25 plant health certificate. Physical checks and the green/red lane system for Northern Ireland goods disappear. The deal forms the centrepiece of a broader summit package on 20 November covering youth mobility, electricity trading, defence cooperation, and joint Ukraine support. The numbers tell the real story about how much damage needs undoing. Food exports — particularly poultry and eggs — have collapsed by a third since Brexit, according to NFU trade data analysis. As NFU president Tom Bradshaw put it bluntly: "There are no empty shelves in the EU with signs saying waiting for British products to return." Continental suppliers filled the gap. Winning back market share will require substantial financial and marketing support beyond mere regulatory alignment. For British consumers, the agreement should eventually restore the variety of fresh continental produce — French cheese, artisan wine, olive oil — that supermarkets quietly trimmed from shelves because the compliance costs made small-batch imports uneconomical. Small artisan producers had simply stopped selling into the UK. The pet passport system, broken since April when EU pet passports became invalid for UK residents, should be restored for families travelling with animals. Scottish seafood producers stand to benefit significantly. Salmon exporters had already devised centralised export systems to manage the red tape, but the risk of an entire truckload of fresh shellfish being detained at Boulogne — where fish checks occurred — drove many langoustine and mollusc producers out of the export business entirely. The new deal reopens the possibility of fish-to-plate delivery within 24 hours. The Northern Ireland dimension is politically charged but practically significant. The DUP says the deal doesn't go far enough because it doesn't eliminate all checks — excise-duty items like wine and cigarettes will still be checked to prevent smuggling into the Republic. But the agreement removes physical inspections, veterinary certificates, and the "not for EU" labelling requirement that plagued wholesalers. For most goods crossing the Irish Sea, the border effectively dissolves. The youth mobility scheme will allow 18-to-30-year-olds to work, study, or travel with a special visa, possibly launching next year. A live dispute remains over whether EU students should pay home fees at British universities; the draft statement decouples this from the summit deal with a six-month negotiation window. The broader joint statement covers migration cooperation, hybrid threat response including Russian-linked drone incidents at European airports, and continued defence alignment. The critical gap is time. Implementation requires UK-side legislation and isn't expected until early 2028. Three more years of friction before the paperwork actually disappears. The deal is real, the direction is right, but British food exporters face a market that moved on without them and a rebuild that regulatory relief alone cannot deliver.
