ON November 20, the Prime Minister is going to Brussels to hopefully sign off on the SPS (veterinary) agreement with the EU.

We have been negotiating this deal, designed to better enable the export of food and drink to Europe, since the last EU summit. The agreement will also include other arrangements on energy and an Erasmus-style scheme for young people to be able to go to Europe for a short period of time to study and work.

During my time on the Environment Food and Rural Affairs Select committee, I travelled to Brussels. We discussed the progress of the SPS deal with elected representatives and officials from the EU Parliament, the European Council and the European Commission. They were all very positive about the deal and the UK’s improved relationship with the EU under the new Labour government and hoped it would be concluded by the end of this year and implemented by the end of 2027 - an incredibly fast timescale for an EU agreement.

In quick, practical terms, getting this agreement across the line means we can have better trading arrangements with our closest neighbours, with suitable carve outs for things like animal welfare and precision breeding.

We do not want our farmers and food producers to be disadvantaged for any longer. In my role as Defra Parliamentary Private Secretary, I have heard too many experiences of British producers trying to export food that is turned away at the French border for the most bureaucratic of reasons. Consignments of shellfish having to be destroyed due to the temperature not being measured as quite correct by border officials in France, for example.

Hasty Tory trade deals with Australia and New Zealand after Brexit did our farmers down. Even the Cornish Conservative DEFRA secretary admitted that afterwards.

My priority is what we can do now, in this Parliament, to make the relationship work better. The SPS veterinary agreement is an important step in improving that relationship and fixing the damage caused to our economy by Boris Johnson’s hard Brexit deal.

One of the motivating factors in choosing Brexit for many was concern over immigration. Ironic then how Boris Johnson panicked and opened the borders when all the European construction and care workers left, which led to a year where net immigration nearly hit a million; fourfold what it was when we were in the EU. It was down to 171,000 last year and Shabana Mahmood is now building a balanced and fairer immigration system.

It also became harder to protect our borders from illegal migration since we lost access to the EU returns agreements that would have supported us.

Andy Burnham sees this month’s EU summit as representing an opportunity to restart a conversation about our relationship with the EU. The years following the referendum contained some of the most divisive moments in British politics; nobody wishes to rerun those arguments, but a grown-up debate about the future has to be the next step.