The document pack: what makes each one valid, not just which ones you need

Why a list of documents is not much help

Every competitor guide we examined lists the documents. That is not where consignments come unstuck.

They come unstuck on the contents. A phytosanitary certificate with no place-of-production code on it does not satisfy the false codling moth requirement. An origin declaration claiming approved-exporter status without an authorisation number is not what the protocol describes. A Saudi permit naming the wrong entry port does not cover the entry. In each case the document exists, is genuine, and does not do the job.

So this page is organised by what has to be on each document, with the instrument that requires it. It covers the regulatory documents only — the ones with checkable legal conditions. The commercial documents that also travel with a shipment are dealt with where they belong, on the quotation page and the Incoterms page.

1 · The phytosanitary certificate

The certificate read field by field under ISPM 12, with the standard's list of what makes one invalid mapped onto the British record →

Issued by KEPHIS, as Kenya's national plant protection organisation, once it is satisfied the consignment meets the destination's conditions — not a general standard. How that process works, and what it costs, is on the KEPHIS page.

What has to be on it depends on where the flowers are going.

The rose requirement is the one most likely to be missing, because it only began to apply on 26 April 2025 and it is not a general statement of health — it is a specific attestation with codes attached. The four routes, and what each one leaves on the paperwork, are set out here.

The certificate has a date window, and it is not the one people assume

Into Great Britain, a phytosanitary certificate must have been issued no more than 13 days before or after the date the consignment left the country of export.

The guidance then says something unusually helpful, and it is worth quoting because it pre-empts the obvious misreading:

"There is no requirement for a consignment to arrive in Great Britain within 13 days of it leaving the country of export."

So the window governs issue against departure, not arrival. A delay in transit does not invalidate a certificate that was correctly dated when the flowers left Nairobi. What would invalidate it is a certificate issued too long before loading — which is the failure mode on a consignment that was booked, postponed and then shipped against the original paperwork.

Three handling obligations that sit on the importer, not the exporter:

• Get a scanned copy from your exporter before the consignment arrives. The guidance says so in terms.
• For high risk and medium risk A goods, a copy must be uploaded on IPAFFS when the import is notified.
• Where the original certificate is a paper copy, it must be posted to APHA — or SASA for Scotland — within 3 days of the consignment reaching Great Britain. This is the obligation most easily missed, because it falls due after the flowers have been delivered and everyone has moved on.

2 · The proof of origin

This is the document the 0% duty rests on, and it is separate from the phytosanitary certificate in every respect — different issuer, different law, different failure mode. The full position for both the UK and the EU is here.

Two forms are accepted, and for a flower consignment the choice is usually already made:

• A EUR.1 certificate, or
• An origin declaration on an invoice or commercial document — but only from an approved exporter, or for a consignment not exceeding EUR 6,000. A commercial flower shipment will ordinarily exceed that.

Three field-level checks:

• If approved-exporter status is claimed, the customs authorisation number must appear on the declaration. A declaration asserting the status without a number is not what the instrument describes.
• Every other exporter's origin declaration must carry an original manuscript signature. Only an approved exporter, having given a written undertaking, is excused from signing by hand.
• A proof of origin is valid for ten months from the date of issue in Kenya — not from arrival. On a slow route that margin is generous; it is still a date to read rather than assume.

3 · The pre-notification

This one is the importer's, not the exporter's, and it is the document most often overlooked by a buyer who assumes the supplier handles paperwork.

Into Great Britain: the consignment is pre-notified on IPAFFS, and the notice period is short — at least four working hours before landing. The notification generates a CHED PP, which covers one consignment, from one exporter to one importer. The consignment must arrive at a port or airport with a suitable Border Control Post.

Two practical consequences that follow from the CHED PP being the unit. Charges are levied per CHED PP, so splitting one purchase across two entries doubles that line. And the invoice goes to the importer named on the CHED PP application — which, on an airport-to-airport purchase, is the buyer. What that costs, and how it behaves as the order grows, is set out here.

For other destinations this site does not claim an equivalent. We have not verified a pre-notification system for Saudi Arabia or Australia to the standard applied to the GB position, and we do not assume one by analogy.

4 · The import permit, where one is required

Not every market requires one, and the conditions differ sharply.

Australia requires an import permit where pests are managed through an NPPO-approved systems approach — a condition in which the department names Colombia, Kenya and Ecuador. A valid copy must accompany the consignment. Separately, only species with import conditions published in BICON may be imported at all: a species not listed cannot enter until conditions have been developed and published.

Saudi Arabia requires a Plant Products (Picked Flowers) permit, applied for electronically, and it carries five conditions that are easy to fail:

The 15-day validity is the one to plan around. On a perishable airfreight lane a schedule slip is normally a freshness problem. Into Saudi Arabia it can also be a compliance problem, and the two failures compound.

What actually stops Kenyan flowers at the British border — and it is not pests

The causes ranked, with the check that would have caught each before departure, and what every border does with a failed consignment →

Great Britain publishes its interceptions, weekly, by exporting country, commodity and reason. Most buyers never see it. It is the closest thing to an answer to "how often does this actually go wrong, and why?", and for Kenyan cut flowers the answer is unusually clear.

In 2026 to date — weeks 1 to 35 — Great Britain recorded 23 interceptions of Kenyan cut flowers. Every single one was documentary. Not one was a pest.

And the separate harmful-organisms report for the same period records no interception of Kenyan cut flowers at all. Kenya appears in it ten times — on basil and aubergine, for leaf miners, whitefly and false codling moth. Not once on a flower.

The single largest category is the field this page is about

What belongs in that field, destination by destination →

Ten of the twenty-three — nearly half — were an additional declaration that was missing, inadequate or invalid.

An "additional declaration" is the official statement an importing country requires on the phytosanitary certificate. For Kenyan roses into Great Britain since 26 April 2025, the false codling moth statement is exactly that — the codes, the route, the treatment detail set out earlier on this page. We are not asserting that every one of those ten was the false codling moth statement, because the published data does not name which declaration failed. What it does show is that the field is the most common point of failure on this lane, which is the reason this page is organised around contents rather than a checklist.

What happened to the consignments

Twenty of twenty-three were released. A paperwork interception is usually recoverable — but it costs time on a product that has days, and the three that were not recovered are the ones to look at. Both destructions on documentary grounds were a phytosanitary certificate recorded as absent, and one consignment was destroyed because the documentation had expired.

Roses carry most of it: sixteen of the twenty-three were Rosa, with Eryngium three, Gypsophila two, and Chrysanthemum and Dianthus one each.

Read these as counts, not as a rate. The published data gives the number of interceptions and not the number of consignments they came from, so nothing here supports a percentage and we are not going to compute one. What it supports is a ranking of causes — and on that, the paperwork is the exposure and the pests are not.

And the part of this that does not flatter Kenya

The same report covers every origin, and Kenya leads it.

Sixty were recorded in total. Kenya accounts for twenty-three of them — more than any other origin, three times Colombia's, and twenty-three times Ethiopia's.

We are publishing that because the alternative is to publish only the half that suits us. The section above — that none of Kenya's interceptions were pests — is the flattering half. This is the other one.

What this does not establish, and the limit is real. The report gives no denominator. It counts interceptions, not consignments, so a high-volume origin will record more of them at an identical error rate. Kenya is the United Kingdom's second-largest source of cut flowers at 25.0% of imports by value, and Ethiopia is roughly a fifth of Kenya's total export size — so part of this gap is simply how much flower arrives.

What we can say is that Kenya's 38% share of these interceptions is larger than its 25% share of UK imports by value, and that value share is not the same thing as consignment share. That is a flag worth raising and it is not a rate. Anyone quoting one from this data is inventing the denominator.

The actionable reading is the same either way. Whatever the underlying rate, the failures are concentrated in a small number of fields — the additional declaration, the endorsement, the certificate itself — and every one of them is checkable before the flowers leave Nairobi. That is the point of setting them out on this page.

What this page does not tell you

• Whether your particular supplier can meet any of it. We publish no supplier directory and assert no producer's status. These are questions to put to whoever you are buying from, and the point of the field-level detail above is that you can check the answers against the documents themselves.
• A pre-notification requirement for Saudi Arabia or Australia. Not verified, and not assumed from the GB position.
• What the commercial documents must contain. The invoice, air waybill and packing list travel with every consignment, but their contents are matters of trade practice and contract rather than of an instrument we can cite, and this site does not publish requirements it cannot source.
• Whether a document is genuine. Nothing here is a fraud check. What it gives you is the ability to see that a document is incomplete, which is the far more common problem.

What to ask

• Which destination's conditions was this consignment inspected against, and on what date?
• For roses into the UK or EU: which false codling moth route applies, and will the codes be on the certificate?
• Which proof of origin will accompany it — and if an origin declaration, on what basis?
• Who is filing the pre-notification, and against which importer of record? This follows from your trading terms rather than from the border.
• For Saudi Arabia: when will the permit be issued, and does the 15-day window cover the planned arrival with a margin?

The terms used on this page — additional declaration, CHED PP, approved exporter, the 13-day window — are each defined once in the glossary.