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UK government plans to introduce labels to promote homegrown food products, including the high animal welfare standards used to produce them, have sparked a ministerial row across Whitehall.
Business and trade secretary Kemi Badenoch has warned Steve Barclay, her counterpart at the Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs, that his plans will drive up food costs and risk upsetting Britain’s trade partners.
“I am very concerned about the costs of such an approach on domestic producers and exporters to the UK,” she wrote in a letter to Barclay seen by the Financial Times.
Defra is poised to launch an industry-wide consultation on the proposals that were announced in early January. Barclay said at the time that the labels would be designed to address the lack of clear labelling on imported meat products, which are often produced to lower standards than those in the UK.
“Too often products produced to lower welfare standards overseas aren’t clearly labelled to differentiate them,” he said, promising to “tackle the unfairness created by misleading labelling and protect farmers and consumers”.
The move was widely seen as an attempt to curry favour with the UK farming lobby, which has been highly critical of a post-Brexit trade policy, including a 2021 trade deal with Australia that the National Farmers’ Union described as “one-sided”.
Badenoch also raised concerns in her letter that the labelling proposal might put the UK in breach of its obligations to the World Trade Organization by appearing to discriminate against imported products.
The business secretary set out a series of conditions before her department would agree to a public consultation on the labels, including a “quantitative analysis of the impact of this policy on food prices”.
Defra’s proposals had only received a tepid welcome from farming and food retail lobby groups, arguing that much of the imported poorer-quality meat was not sold in supermarkets but used in catering settings, such as cafés, restaurants or schools and hospitals, where it was not labelled anyway.
Andrea Martinez-Inchausti, the assistant director of food at the British Retail Consortium, said the vast majority of food sold in supermarkets was sourced from the UK, while retailers ensured most own-brand products were clearly labelled with country of origin.
“If the government really wants to make a difference to sourcing, it needs to look at where product origin is not generally labelled, such as in restaurants and cafés,” she added.
Nick von Westenholz, director of strategy for the National Farmers’ Union, said that while food labelling could be improved, it was not the answer to public concerns over the standards of some UK food imports.
“The best way to achieve this is at source — by ensuring imports are legally required to meet the same high standards that British farmers produce to.”
The ministerial row comes as concern is growing in the ruling Conservative party that it is losing support in its traditional rural strongholds. Rishi Sunak became the first prime minister to attend the NFU’s annual conference in 15 years on Tuesday after a recent poll suggested support for the Tories had collapsed in the countryside since the last election.
Sunak lavished praise on the farmers, saying they embodied “British values of strength, resilience, warmth and independence” but conceded that improving post-Brexit trading relations with the EU remained a “work in progress”.
Defra said: “Increased transparency in labelling will help shoppers make informed choices around imported products, while backing British farmers to produce food to world-leading standards of taste, quality and animal welfare.”
The business and trade department did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
