A meaningful growth plan for the horticulture sector must start from a simple but often overlooked principle – growers must be able to compete effectively within both UK and EU markets. Without this foundation, ambitions around expansion or innovation risk becoming aspirational rather than deliverable.
Too often, policy discussions begin with identifying “high-growth” products, whether that is soft fruit, protected crops, or ornamentals. While these segments undoubtedly offer opportunities, focusing on them in isolation misses the bigger picture. Growth cannot be mandated by selecting winners. It emerges from a system in which all viable growers have the conditions to remain competitive.
At its core, horticulture is a cost-sensitive, trade-exposed sector. Producers operate in markets where imports, often produced under different regulatory, labour, and energy conditions, set the competitive benchmark.
If UK growers face structurally higher costs, whether through labour policy, energy prices, or regulatory burdens, then no amount of targeted support for specific crops will deliver sustained growth. Production will simply shift elsewhere.
“Competitiveness is the enabler of growth, not a by-product of it.”
NFU Horticulture and Potatoes Board Chair Martin Emmett
This is why competitiveness must be the starting point. It is not about favouring one commodity over another; it is about ensuring that the entire sector has the ability to compete on a level playing field. That means addressing the fundamentals:
- Labour costs and availability, which represent one of the largest cost components in horticulture.
- Energy affordability, particularly for protected cropping systems.
- Regulatory alignment and proportionality, ensuring standards are high but not unworkable.
- Access to investment capital and innovation, to improve productivity and resilience.
- Remove supplementary forms of taxation, such as BNG and standing charge price increases.
If these foundations are weak, even the most promising subsectors will struggle to scale. Conversely, if they are strong, growers will naturally respond to market signals, expanding production where demand exists, investing in efficiency, and innovating where margins justify it.
Competitiveness enables growth
Critically, this principle applies equally in the UK and the EU context. The EU’s long-standing approach, particularly through the Common Agricultural Policy and Fruit and Vegetable Aid Scheme, has not been to prescribe what should be grown, but to support the conditions under which producers can organise, invest, and compete. That model reflects an understanding that competitiveness is the enabler of growth, not a by-product of it.
For the UK, this insight is particularly important post-EU exit. UK growers now operate outside many of the structural supports that helped underpin competitiveness in European markets, while still competing directly with EU producers. This creates a risk of policy asymmetry: higher domestic costs paired with exposure to lower-cost imports.
A growth plan that ignores this reality risks accelerating contraction rather than expansion. Businesses cannot invest in growth if their margins are being eroded by structural disadvantages. Nor can they absorb increasing costs indefinitely without consequences for output, employment, or prices.
Growth driven by businesses
In the end, horticulture growth will not be driven by targets or strategies alone. It will be driven by individual business decisions, whether to plant, invest or expand. Those decisions depend on confidence in the underlying conditions.
Get competitiveness right, and growth will follow. Get it wrong, and even the most promising opportunities will remain unrealised.
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