Pesticides (Amendment) (EU Exit) Regulations 2020

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd November 2020 Grand Committee

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP) [V]]

My Lords, I must begin by thanking the Minister for his generous response to my contribution in the previous debate. I look forward to future exchanges on the subject.

On the subject of this debate, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Randall of Uxbridge, who is a great champion of nature, and indeed the two previous noble Lords, who said many things with which I can agree. The noble Lords, Lord Randall and Lord Greaves, in particular reflected on the widespread disappointment that the amendments to the Agriculture Bill that would have protected people who live in close proximity to agricultural land ultimately did not make it through the system. As both noble Lords said, we can but try again in the Environment Bill.

I am going to pick up something that the Minister said in his introduction when he referred to continued high levels of protection. The practical reality, whether we are talking about pesticides or persistent organic pollutants, is that we have a poisoned country, a poisoned landscape and, indeed, a poisoned planet. To start any debate on this topic, it is important to acknowledge that we have utterly failed in the past and that, while today we are bringing forward regulations that are much better than those in the United States and other regimes, even the EU regulations that we are transferring across are not nearly strong enough.

I have a couple of specific detailed questions. Like others, I rely rather heavily on the work of ClientEarth. Regulation 3(8) removes the wording that would permit the appropriate authority to make regulations in respect of the official controls, first, relating to production, packaging, labelling, storage, transport, marketing, formulation, parallel trade and the use of plant protection products, and, secondly and particularly, regarding the collection of information on the reporting of suspected poisonings. This is a direct question for the Minister, either for now or in future: that apparent loss of collection reporting on suspected poisonings is obviously a deeply worrying one, and it would be interesting to hear why that has happened and how it might be fixed. I also refer to wording relating to health and the hazards and risk of pesticides in Article 24 of new EU regulation 625/2017 regarding protection from pesticides and the risk of poisoning.

I also want to refer to chronic poisoning. Often, we hope or expect that, where there is an acute case, there will be reporting; it is the kind of thing that we might expect our media to pick up on. But with chronic poisoning developing over a number of years, such as in operators, agricultural workers or people living close to pesticide application areas—the amendment to the Agriculture Bill tried to address this issue—we have seen reports going back to 1987 of inadequate monitoring in the UK, yet we have not seen any change in policy or any real move to deal with that chronic situation.

Finally, I want to move on to some broader points that build on what the noble Lord, Lord Randall, said. The sale of pesticides in the UK each year is worth £627 million and, around the world, it is nearly $60 billion. Obviously, this is a big, powerful vested interest. As the noble Lord said, that vested interest wants to protect its sales, but I very much agree with what the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, said earlier: we want and need to move toward a world that uses no pesticides.

My response to the noble Lord’s concerns about neonicotinoids and the impact of their withdrawal on growing rapeseed in the UK is that we must grow a diverse range of crops that are suited to our conditions. I have stood in a field in Lincolnshire with a star rapeseed grower and discussed the difficulties of growing rapeseed in the UK. It has always been clear that rapeseed is not particularly suited to UK conditions, so we need to move to a different approach. It is one that the Government have focused on, at least in terms of talking about it, including to some degree in the Agriculture Bill—agroecology. If we are going to move in the direction of working with nature to use the power, force and richness of healthy soils and the richness of the interactions of integrated pest management, that is the way we need to go. Indeed, I note that both the EU directives that we are transferring across here focus on the need to move to pest management systems that do not rely on pesticides. What are the Government doing to take further steps in that direction?

We have been through so many cycles, from DDT onwards, of a pesticide being discovered and promoted as the new wonder chemical—a perfectly safe, perfectly wonderful solution to all our problems. Usually, a couple of decades later, we ban it because it has been a disaster. That is a cycle that we desperately need to stop.