There is a bit of a change of topic, there, Nigel. Understandable given the thread, but a change nevertheless.

"the plans for food and animal sanitary and phytosanitary (SPS) checks at the site had been scrapped" is about all food and animal checks. It should not be confused with the fact my daughter is having problems getting flowers for her wedding.

There are minimum standard of SPS required by WTO. These are substantially lower than the EUs standards, and the country concerned has great flexibility in what it chooses to implement. So I accept that when I said' obligatory' I chose a poor word - the obligatory checks are minimal.

So if, as in 2013, a a Romanian-based slaughterhouse chooses to pass off horse meat as beef in the UK, we are under no kind of obligation to have the checks in place to detect it. Even in 2013, it was Ireland that detected it, but that was a role shared across the EU in several places, Now of course, we have to do it on our own - or not bother, of course.