LONDON — British businesses trading with Europe face “more red tape, mountains of paperwork, and a bureaucratic burden” if the U.K.’s opposition parties tear up Keir Starmer’s new Brexit reset deal, a government minister will warn Wednesday.

In a speech in Westminster, Nick Thomas-Symonds, who has been leading talks with Brussels for improved trade terms, will accuse Nigel Farage’s Euroskeptic Reform UK party of wanting “to take Britain backwards” by tearing up the deal. 

Farage and Tory opposition leader Kemi Badenoch have both pledged to junk Starmer’s changes to Boris Johnson’s Brexit settlement if they make it into government at the next election. Reform UK is currently leading Labour in the polls and on course for a majority in the House of Commons. 

In extracts of the speech pre-briefed to journalists, Cabinet Office Minister Thomas-Symonds says Reform UK’s pledge means “cutting at least £9 billion from the economy, bringing with it a risk to jobs and a risk of food prices going up.” Reform UK in turn accused Labour of “cosying up” to the EU.

Thomas-Symonds will claim that reversing the reset will risk investment in the food and drink sector, make exporting more difficult for farmers and fishers, as well as other small business owners, and see food once again rot in the back of lorries stuck in 16-hour queues. 

Senior figures in the Labour government see fast delivery on EU trade as key to their pitch at the next general election. They want the British public to start seeing the benefits of the new agreements through lower supermarket prices before the run-up to the contest. 

Key to this is the sanitary and phytosanitary deal, talks on which are set to start in the fall. The agreement has been broadly welcomed across the food and drink and agriculture sectors. But Euroskeptics are angry that it’ll tie the U.K. to Brussels. 

Thomas-Symonds is expected to say he wants the SPS agreement to be operational by 2027. He’ll also recommit the government to Labour’s red lines of no return to the EU’s Customs Union or Single Market.

On Tuesday the British government published new data which it says illustrates the scale of bureaucracy businesses face and the potential benefits of an SPS agreement: The Animal Health and Plant Agency issued 328,727 export health certificates in 2024. The certificates cost as much as £200 each. 

A Reform UK spokesman shot back in a statement: “Cosying up to the EU and leaving us entangled in reams of retained EU law which Kemi Badenoch failed to scrap will not resuscitate Britain’s struggling economy.”