While this deal, particularly for food and plants, will have a significant impact on removing barriers there remains a series of other areas where EU rules negatively impact trade between Great Britain and Northern Ireland. This agreement, or roadmap for further talks, still falls short of tackling the core issues imbedded through the Windsor Framework. We seek further meaningful progress on removing barriers between Great Britain and Northern Ireland, such as in customs, manufacturing, product standards and the looming threat to the supply of veterinary medicines into Northern Ireland.
We will again be urging the Government to halt the construction of border control posts at our ports and the associated wasteful and unnecessary spending on them. These are structures that only entrench division and give physical form to the very barriers within the United Kingdom internal market we want to see removed once and for all. It is becoming clear that if the Prime Minister pursues the direction of travel he has outlined then there can be no reason to have them.
