NPA to bang the drum for members during election campaign

The NPA will call for all parties to deliver a fair deal for pig farmers from the Brexit negotiations ahead of the June General Election.

Prime Minister Theresa May sprung a surprise on Tuesday when she announced the Government’s intention to hold a snap election on June 8.

There will be a vote in the House of Commons on Wednesday to approve the election plan but this is likely to be a formality, with Labour saying it will vote in favour.

Explaining her decision, Mrs May said she had concluded this course of action was ‘the only way to guarantee certainty and security for years ahead’.

She accused the other political parties of ‘game playing’ and said this risked ‘our ability to make a success of Brexit and it will cause damaging uncertainty and instability to the country’.

Mrs May said: "The country is coming together but Westminster is not."

NPA chief executive Zoe Davies said the association would use the weeks in the run up to the poll to reinforce the pig sector’s priorities in the Brexit negotiations.

Zoe said: “We will call for all parties to ensure their manifestoes deliver a fair deal for the pig industry from the Brexit negotiations.

“Our top three priorities are free access to the Single Market, measures to protect UK producers and consumers from cheaper, lower standard imports, including insisting on equivalence of standards, and measures to ensure continued access to EU labour.

“We also want to see a fair and balanced regulatory regime that protects our standards on the global market but removes the unnecessary Brussels-imposed burdens, and policies that ensure we protect our borders from animal disease wherever it originates from.”

“Across the range of policies that affect pig farmers, Brexit- and non-Brexit-related, we will bang the drum for our members.”  

To see the NPA's position on Brexit, see our Brexit briefing