Importing Kenyan flowers into the UK: duty, VAT, plant health and the deadline in December

What this page is, and what it is not

This is a statement of published requirements, with dates. It is not legal advice, not a customs ruling, and not a quotation. Where the published sources disagree — and on one significant point they do — that disagreement is shown rather than resolved.

Requirements change. Every figure carries the date it was read. The GB plant-health tables in particular are revised, which is why they carry their own "last updated" dates.

The duty position

Duty, VAT, the suspension to 31 December 2026 and the via-EU question, on their own page →

Cut flowers from Kenya enter the United Kingdom at 0% customs duty. There are two independent reasons for that, and the distinction matters more than it may appear.

Source: UK Integrated Online Tariff, commodity 0603110000, read 22 September 2026.

Why the distinction matters. It is common to see it written that UK tariffs on Kenyan flowers are "suspended". Kenya's 0% does not depend on the suspension. Kenya has a tariff preference under the EPA in its own right. When the autonomous suspension expires on 31 December 2026, origins relying on the suspension lose their 0%; Kenya's preference is a separate instrument.

Import VAT is charged at 20% and is a separate liability from duty.

A published duty rate is not a landed cost. Duty and VAT are two lines. Freight, terminal handling, clearance, plant-health charges, storage and onward transport are not included in either, and are not stated on this page.

Routing: the rule is non-alteration, not direct transport

A preference can be lost in transit, and the rule that governs it is more permissive than most summaries suggest. We have now read the origin protocol itself rather than guidance about it.

Article 15 of Protocol 1 is titled "Non-alteration", not "direct transport". What it requires is that the products declared for home use in the UK are the same products exported from Kenya, and that they have not been "altered, transformed in any way or subjected to operations other than to preserve them in good condition" — beyond adding marks, labels, seals or documentation needed to meet UK domestic requirements.

Three things follow that matter on a Kenyan lane, because almost nothing flies Nairobi to Britain without touching a third country:

And the burden sits the right way round for a buyer. Article 15(4) states that compliance "shall be considered as satisfied unless the customs authorities have reason to believe the contrary". Only then may evidence be requested — and it "may be given by any means", including transport documents such as bills of lading, or marking and numbering of packages.

Two practical consequences. Transit through a hub does not by itself break the preference, so the common worry is often misplaced. But splitting must be done by or under the responsibility of the exporter, which is a contractual question about who controls the consignment, not merely a logistical one — and customs supervision must be unbroken, which is a question about the status the goods are held under, not about how carefully they were handled.

One further figure from the same protocol: a proof of origin is valid for ten months from the date of issue in the exporting country, and must be submitted to the importing country's customs within that period. Late submission may still be accepted in exceptional circumstances.

Source: Economic Partnership Agreement between the United Kingdom and the Republic of Kenya, Protocol 1, Articles 14, 15 and 24, UK Treaty Series text, read 25 September 2026.

Plant health: the part most guides leave out

The depth now sits on three pages: IPAFFS — registering, notifying, the CHED PP → · the four certificate rules → · the inspection — frequency by flower, fee, place →

Cut flowers are regulated plant material. Three things follow, and each has a source.

A phytosanitary certificate is required, and your exporter obtains it — not you. GOV.UK is explicit: "your exporter must get a phytosanitary certificate for each consignment from the plant health authority in the country they're exporting from." One certificate per consignment.

The consignment must be pre-notified on IPAFFS, and the notice period is short.

Notification goes to APHA in England and Wales, or SASA in Scotland. Source: GOV.UK, importing plants and plant products from non-EU countries to Great Britain; page updated 27 August 2026.

Four working hours is the figure to plan against for flowers, because flowers fly. It is a genuinely tight window on an overnight sector, and it is an administrative step that has to happen whether or not anyone remembers to do it.

Check which system a guide names. Current GOV.UK guidance names IPAFFS. Pages still instructing importers to register for the older PEACH system are describing an arrangement that current guidance does not reference — and at least one page ranking for this exact search still does. It is a useful test of how recently anything you are reading was checked.

The consignment must arrive at a port or airport with a suitable Border Control Post. GOV.UK: "All high risk and medium risk A plants and plant products imported from non-EU countries must enter Great Britain at an airport or a port with a BCP that can handle plants and plant products." Defra states separately that "High and medium risk A goods will require a phytosanitary certificate and pre-notification (CHED PP) to be made on IPAFFS" (page updated 3 August 2026).

This is not a matter of inference for Kenyan roses. Defra's own fee schedule charges Kenyan rose consignments per CHED PP — so the CHED PP, the IPAFFS notification and Border Control Post entry are already the established route for this commodity. You cannot clear these goods at an arbitrary airport.

Great Britain here means England, Scotland and Wales. Northern Ireland applies EU plant-health rules under the Windsor Framework and is not covered by the GB tables below.

One caution about figures you may encounter elsewhere. Defra publishes reduced inspection frequencies for certain cut flowers imported from the EU — single-digit percentages that are sometimes quoted loosely as though they were general. They apply to EU origin and have nothing to do with Kenya. The Kenya figures are in the next section and come from the third-country table.

How often consignments are actually inspected

Every consignment's documents are checked. A proportion are physically opened. The proportion depends on the genus and the country of origin, and for Kenyan roses it is high.

Source: Defra, UK Plant Health Information Portal, frequency of plant health import inspections across GB. Page last updated 15 June 2026; read 23 September 2026.

Two things are worth drawing out of that table.

First, roses are the outlier, not Kenya. A Kenyan rose consignment is physically opened roughly eight times more often than an Ecuadorian one. But Kenyan carnations and gypsophila sit at 5% — named individually, alongside Ecuador and Colombia. Across the rest of the summer-flower range Kenya is treated as a lower-risk origin.

Second, a higher inspection rate is not a compliance problem. It is risk-based targeting. It means more consignments are opened, handled and delayed — which matters for a product with a working life measured in days — but it is not a finding against the origin.

What inspection costs

Charges are based on the CHED PP number, which covers one consignment, from one exporter to one importer. Not per box, not per pallet.

Source: Defra, fees for plant health import inspections in England and Wales. Page last updated 15 June 2026; read 23 September 2026. Scotland charges on a different basis.

The most commonly misunderstood point on this page: a 25% inspection rate does not mean a 25% chance of being charged. Defra's own explanation is that every consignment receives the combined charge "regardless of whether they are inspected", on a blanket basis chosen deliberately to give businesses certainty over the fees they will be charged. The percentage reduces the fee everyone pays, and separately sets how many consignments are opened. The documentary fee is never reduced.

Invoices are sent to the importer named on the CHED PP application — which, on an airport-to-airport purchase, is the buyer.

A point of uncertainty, stated rather than smoothed over. Defra's frequency table and its fee table both carry the date 15 June 2026, and they group countries differently for roses. The frequency table names Kenya at 25%. The fee table does not name Kenya for Rosa; Kenya falls into a residual line whose fee implies a materially lower rate. An older Defra page gives a third figure. We have not resolved this and are not averaging it: the frequency above is taken from the frequency table, and the fees from the fee table. Confirm with APHA if the point is material to you.

Where the inspection happens, which need not be the airport

This is the operational detail most likely to be useful and least likely to be published elsewhere.

High risk and medium risk A goods from a non-EU country must enter Great Britain at an airport or port with a border control post able to handle plants. But entry and inspection are not the same event. The guidance is explicit:

"You can then transport your goods to a CP, if you wish to."

A control point is an inland inspection facility, and Defra publishes a list of them alongside the border control posts. For a product with a working life of about three days, moving the consignment to an inland facility instead of holding it at the airport is a materially different proposition — though we have found nothing published on whether it is faster in practice, and we are not going to assume that it is.

Your own premises can be a control point. To do that, the premises must be designated as a control point by Defra and authorised as a temporary storage facility where plant health inspections can be carried out — as either an authorised consignee temporary storage (ACTS) facility or an external temporary storage facility (ETSF).

That is a real option for a buyer with a cold store, and a real irrelevance for one without. It is not a quick arrangement — it is two separate authorisations — so it belongs in a decision about how you intend to import over a season, not in a decision about one consignment.

After clearance: no plant passport for cut flowers within Great Britain

Great Britain runs its own plant passport system for moving regulated material inside the country, and what it covers is published as a list. The list, last updated 9 September 2024, has three parts. Plants means all plants for planting — plants that are planted and meant to stay planted, whole plants or living parts of plants that are not yet planted but are meant to be, and lifted plants meant for replanting. Then wood and wood products of named genera, and seed of named agricultural and vegetable species. Cut flowers appear in none of the three.

So a Kenyan consignment released at the border control post or the control point moves on to a wholesaler, a florist or a supermarket depot with no further plant health document. The list does note additional requirements for moving specified plants and seeds into and within pest free areas in Great Britain; cut flowers are not among the material it specifies. The plant health work is done before release, which is the argument of this whole section: get the certificate and its declarations right in Nairobi, because nothing downstream will ask for anything else.

Buying the same Kenyan flowers through the Dutch auction changes the regime

This is a question the site has been carrying openly, and the plant health half of it is now answered.

A large share of Kenyan flowers reaches buyers through the Netherlands. If you buy there rather than direct, your goods may be treated by Great Britain as an EU import rather than a Kenyan one. The guidance sets three conditions, and they are cumulative. While in the EU the goods must have:

• entered into free circulation — customs cleared, with any VAT or duty paid;
• passed EU plant health checks; and
• been issued with a phytosanitary certificate from an EU member state, if applicable.

"They will be treated as a non-EU country import if they did not enter into free circulation and pass plant health checks in the EU."

So the route determines the regime, not the origin of the flowers. The same Kenyan roses can meet Great Britain as an EU import or as a non-EU import depending on what happened to them in the Netherlands — and the two regimes have different risk categories, different documents and different check frequencies.

What this does not settle. It answers the plant health question. It does not answer whether the UK–Kenya tariff preference survives a sale in free circulation in a third country — that is a customs and origin question, it is a different body of law, and it remains open on this page. Treating one as an answer to the other is exactly the mistake this section exists to prevent. How the auction and direct routes differ commercially is set out here.

False Codling Moth — in force since April 2025

Since 26 April 2025, cut roses from any African country, including Kenya, have been subject to a specific Great Britain requirement for Thaumatotibia leucotreta, False Codling Moth. This is a GB requirement under GB's own retained annex. It is not the EU requirement, and the two should not be read across. Why this rule exists, what the EU analogue requires, and what each of the four routes puts on your certificate.

The phytosanitary certificate must carry an official statement under one of four alternative routes:

1. The country of origin is free of the pest;
2. The flowers come from a pest-free area;
3. The flowers come from a pest-free place of production, with inspection before export;
4. The flowers come from sites of production under an approved systems approach or post-harvest treatment, with inspection before export.

The area, place or site of production must be named on the certificate under "Additional declaration".

There is a precondition that is easy to miss. The certificate may not carry the statement unless the exporting country's plant protection organisation has first provided the UK's plant protection organisation with written details of the area, place or sites concerned and, for route 4, of the systems approach itself. The sites are approved by the exporting country's own organisation — but the notification to the UK must already have happened.

What we can and cannot tell you. The GB requirement is established and stated above. Whether the Kenyan authority has made the necessary notification to the UK for any particular site is not something we have been able to establish from published sources, and we will not assert it. It is a question for your exporter and their plant protection authority, and it is a reasonable one to ask before you commit to a programme.

Delay, and why it is the real exposure

The fees above are small. £7.64 against a consignment worth hundreds or thousands is close to immaterial.

Time is the exposure, not money. Cut roses have a working life of roughly three days, and approximately one Kenyan rose consignment in four is physically opened at a border control post.

We have not located any published inspection turnaround time, nor any published charge for overtime, out-of-hours attendance, travel or storage at a border control post. What is published is what actually gets stopped: in 2026 to date Great Britain recorded 23 interceptions of Kenyan cut flowers, every one documentary and not one a pest, with the additional declaration the largest single cause. The full breakdown is on the document pack page. Rather than offer an estimate, we say plainly that we have not found one. Anyone offering you a firm clearance time should be asked what it is based on.

This is a matter for your terms of sale, alongside pest interception and flight cancellation. On an airport-to-airport purchase the buyer is the importer of record, and the exposure sits with the buyer whether or not it has been discussed.

What happens if a consignment fails the checks

What actually stops Kenyan consignments — the causes ranked, and what every border does with a failure →

This is published, and it is short. Where all or part of a consignment fails plant health checks, an inspector advises the importer what to do with it. Where the inspector decides the failed goods present a risk to plant health, the department states two possible outcomes:

• destroy the goods, or
• ask you to return them.

Two details in that wording matter more than they look.

"All or part." A failure does not necessarily condemn the shipment — the outcome can attach to the affected portion. That is worth knowing before assuming a single interception writes off an entire order.

Returned goods are treated as an export. If you are asked to send a consignment back, it leaves Great Britain as an export, and the plant health authority in the receiving country explains how that is done. So a return is not a reversal of the import; it is a second, separate regulatory process, with its own paperwork and its own timetable — on goods that are already several days old.

What is not published, and we will not supply. GB publishes no timescale for any of this, and no schedule of storage, overtime or out-of-hours charges that might accrue while it is resolved. The charges that are published are set out here. Where the commercial loss falls between buyer and supplier is a matter for your terms of sale, not for the regulator — and it is not something this site states on anyone's behalf.

One avoidable cause, stated plainly by the guidance. Notice must be given at least 4 working hours before the goods land for air freight, and at least 1 working day for other freight. If you do not give enough notice, the guidance says the consignment may be delayed — which on a three-day product is the same category of problem as an interception, arrived at by paperwork rather than by pests.

What to ask before you commit

• Which route under the FCM requirement will the certificate rely on, and has the notification to the UK been made for the specific site?
• Who is making the IPAFFS notification, and do they have the flight details four working hours before landing?
• Which Border Control Post will the consignment clear through, and does it handle plants?
• Who is named as importer on the CHED PP, and therefore receives the inspection invoice?
• What happens, contractually, if a consignment is held for inspection?
• Is the preference being claimed under the UK–Kenya EPA, and does the routing preserve it?