// The British Retail Consortium (BRC) urges the government to provide clarity over labelling issues from the Windsor Framework
// Food and sustainability director Andrew Opie told a House of Lords committee he expects guidance to be published in the next 10 days
BRC has called on the government to provide “urgent clarity” for supermarkets over labelling issues from the Windsor Framework ahead of the October deadline.
The framework, agreed by the EU and UK in February, aims to limit the number of checks on goods passing through Great Britain to Northern Ireland with a red and green lane system at the ports.
However, businesses are still waiting for direction on labelling that will determine whether they can trade through the red lane, which requires checks, or the green lane, which does not.
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BRC food and sustainability director Andrew Opie told a House of Lords committee he expects guidance on labelling to be published in the next 10 days.
He said supermarkets need urgent clarity on the issue as labelling changes take months to implement.
“Labelling is one of the requirements of using the green lane, so if we don’t know how to label the products then we shouldn’t be using the green lane and would be subject to all the checks,” said Opie.
“You couldn’t run a commercial supermarket by running all of their trade through the red lane, it just wouldn’t work, the numbers wouldn’t stack up.”
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