The British plant health inspection: how often, what it costs, where, and what fails

Three checks, one always

APHA in England and Wales, and SASA in Scotland, carry out documentary, identity and physical checks to establish that a consignment includes all required documents, contains the plants declared, and is free from pests and diseases. The documentary check is applied to every consignment. The identity and physical checks are applied at a rate set by genus and origin.

The frequency table, for Kenyan flowers

Source: Defra, UK Plant Health Information Portal, frequency of plant health import inspections across GB, table dated 15 June 2026, read 25 September 2026.

Two things the table says that the European Union's does not. Great Britain publishes a residual rate — 5% — for genera it does not name, where the Union's rule for an unlisted genus is 100%. And Great Britain names chrysanthemums explicitly at 100%, from every third country outside the EU and Switzerland. So Kenyan alstroemeria is opened on one consignment in twenty into Great Britain and on every consignment into the Netherlands; Kenyan chrysanthemums are opened every time on both lanes. Each product page states which rows apply to its flower →

The rose figure is the pest, not the origin. Kenya and Ethiopia sit at 25% together because the false codling moth requirement is a measure on the whole African continent; Colombia and Ecuador sit at 5% and 3% because it is not theirs.

The fee: £7.64 per consignment, opened or not

The published plant health check fee for a Kenyan rose consignment in England and Wales is £7.64 per CHED PP, made of three lines on Defra's fee table: £5.25 for the documentary check, £0.26 for the identity check and £2.13 for the physical check — and it is charged on every consignment whether or not the consignment is selected for opening. A further £147.35 is charged per laboratory sample where one is taken on suspicion of a controlled pest. Invoices are sent to the importer stated on the CHED PP application. Scotland publishes its own schedule.

It is a fee per consignment, not per box or per stem — the same £7.64 whether the entry covers one box or forty — so its weight per stem falls as the order grows, and it is trivial against the value of a commercial consignment. What that structure means beside the EU's per-check and the Gulf's ad valorem charges →

It is not the cost of importing. It is the published plant health check fee only; duty, VAT, terminal handling, clearance, storage and transport are other lines of a bill this site does not total.

Where the check happens: a BCP, or your own premises

All high risk and medium risk A plants and plant products from non-EU countries must enter Great Britain at an airport or port with a border control post that can handle plants and plant products. But entry and inspection are not the same event: the goods may then be transported to an inland control point, and it is possible to use your own premises as one, provided they are designated as a control point by Defra and authorised as a temporary storage facility — either an authorised consignee temporary storage (ACTS) facility or an external temporary storage facility (ETSF). Defra publishes the list of BCPs and control points for plant imports.

For a buyer with regular volume this is the decision that shortens the cold chain: a consignment released at the airport and a consignment inspected at the buyer's own designated depot have very different exposures to the one number below.

What happens if it fails

If all or part of a consignment fails plant health checks, an inspector advises what must be done with it. Where the inspector decides the failed goods pose a plant health risk, they may destroy them or require them to be returned — and returned goods are treated as an export, handled under the plant health rules of the receiving country. In Great Britain's records for 2026 to date, every Kenyan cut-flower interception has been documentary and none a pest: 23 interceptions, 20 released after the documents were put right and 3 destroyed. The errors, ranked, and how each is checkable before departure →

The number that is not published: turnaround

The fee is trivial; the time is not. Cut roses have a working life of roughly three days and one Kenyan rose consignment in four is opened. Defra publishes no processing or turnaround time for plant health import inspections that we have located, and no published overtime, out-of-hours, travel or storage charge was found. We state neither. It is the open question on this lane, and the reason the control-point decision above matters.

What to ask

• Which genera are in the consignment, and which rows of the table do they meet?
• Which BCP does it enter at, and is a control point — yours or the importer's — designated?
• Who is the importer on the CHED PP, and therefore on the invoice?
• What is the plan for a held consignment? Not a promise from this site — a question for your supplier and your importer.