Mr Gregory Campbell

I beg to move, That this House has considered horticulture trade between Great Britain and Northern Ireland. It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Dowd. May I say at the outset that I am glad to see the Minister in her place? On a separate issue, I thank her publicly for her endeavours with a constituency query of mine a week ago, on which she went above and beyond the call of duty. Both I and my constituent are extremely grateful to her for doing so. The horticultural sector encompasses mostly small and medium-sized enterprises, and it supports over 700,000 jobs across the United Kingdom. Unfortunately, the original protocol agreement presented substantial difficulties for horticultural businesses based in GB in supplying Northern Ireland. It has to be said, and I am more than happy to say so, that in the time since then there have been some improvements, but unfortunately those improvements do not get us where we need to be. They simply get us a few steps along what seems as if it will be an exceptionally long road, and we have to try to make it much shorter than it looks like being at the moment. The problems with which we were originally faced emanated from what I call the fantasy of the so-called hard border—the whole concept of a hard border on the island of Ireland—which just was not going to come about, but was used by the EU, and we ended up with the protocol as a result.