Plant Health Services (Hansard, 25 February 1987)

§ Mr. Jopling

We have now reached decisions about the charges to be made for certain plant health work from 1 April. An order introducing these charges will be laid before Parliament shortly.

We are imposing charges for only part of our plant health work: export certification and import licensing. These are two areas where services are provided at the specific request of individual growers and traders. The majority of our plant health work, including particularly the normal checks on imported material and work on controlling outbreaks of plant pests and diseases, will continue to be carried out at public expense. The import licensing charges relate only to those cases where special arrangements are made to licence imports which would normally be prohibited but which are permitted under certain strict conditions.

The basic charge for calling out an inspector to a grower's or trader's premises for export certification purposes will be £28. This charge will cover a limited amount of inspection work. There will be additional, lower charges for inspection and other services not covered by the basic charge and special rates for services which do not involve a visit. Import licences for commercial and scientific purposes will cost £150 each, with further charges for extra inspections and other services not covered by the initial licence fee. Import licences for private individuals will cost £25.

In setting the new charges we have taken very careful account of the comments we received on the proposals which we circulated last September. We have made a number of changes in our proposals in order to meet the 257W points put to us. In particular, in the light of the representations we received, the charging arrangements will allow seven small consignments to be certified, at the pre-export inspection stage, for the price of one. This should significantly alleviate the situation of the many small exporters who wrote to us expressing their concern about the possible impact of the original proposals. In addition, half price services will be available (up to a full cost value of £500 per year) for firms not registered for VAT or with an export turnover of under £5,000 in the previous financial year. The arrangements will also allow two small fields to be soil sampled for the price of one.

In addition officials are urgently considering with the interests concerned the possibility of introducing alternative statutory controls in place of the existing import licensing arrangements for chrysanthemum cuttings from Malta and the Canaries and for certain ornamental nursery stock from New Zealand. This would mean that the importers concerned would not need import licences. Also we are discussing with the industry interests the possibility of developing a new approval scheme for nurseries. Such a scheme would enable growers whose premises were approved under the scheme to attach a MAFF plant health logo to material which had been passed for export at growing season inspections but which in the event was sold on the home market. It should also be possible to develop from such a scheme arrangements under which approved nurseries would not be subject to such intensive pre-export checks and could thus incur lower export charges.

I believe that the new charges represent a fair and reasonable approach to recouping the cost of these plant health export and import services.