Summary
This Briefing Paper from the UK Trade Policy Observatory and Chatham House examines an array of post-Brexit food safety legislation, covering pesticides, Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs), food additives and microbiological food safety.
The UK Government has committed itself to incorporating EU law unchanged as the starting point for the post-Brexit regulatory regime. However, EU institutions underpin UK food safety legislation to the extent that detaching UK law and policy making unavoidably constitutes major legislative reform. More concerningly, our analysis suggests that the UK’s post-Brexit food safety rules fall short of the level of protection currently provided by the EU: in some cases, they give ministers broad discretion to make future changes without equivalent scrutiny.