Rural Landlords and Land Letting: Reform

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Thursday 21st January 2021 Grand Committee

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

My Lords, I thank the Whips for organising my participation after an administrative snafu, and the noble Baroness, Lady Rock, for calling this debate. It is a pleasure to follow the noble Earl, Lord Devon. We share many concerns, although on this occasion my perspective is different.

I begin with the observation from Defra’s consultation feedback analysis report that tenancies reform is not adequate to tackle the many ills of our current system. It is treating the symptoms of a disease, not the disease itself, which is our acute concentration of land ownership. A lightning recap: half of the land is owned by 1% of the people; much land ownership is not recorded or publicly available; and the vast majority of people cannot get access to land to grow food. A handful of NGOs, including the Kindling Trust and the Biodynamic Land Trust, go to great lengths to get land for a small percentage of the huge numbers of people who would like to start businesses on it.

Your Lordships’ House is often accused of being medieval, as it sometimes can be, but the very nature of our proceedings demonstrates how fast a change is possible. We need an even larger-scale reform of land ownership and access to land to get us out of the medieval relic that is our 21st-century reality.

I have one specific question for the Minister and one suggestion. In the past, the Government have sought to use policy to achieve consolidation of land ownership. The clear view has been that the increasing size of farms is inevitable and even desirable. That has been hugely destructive to the environment, productivity and public health, with the focus being on grain and oil production rather than vegetables and fruit. It has also led to the hollowing out and ageing of rural communities. Have the Government abandoned this ideological position? Are they looking to increase the number of growers and farmers in the UK, and to reduce the average size of growing and farm businesses? My suggestion is for the Minister to read, or get one of his officials to read, a quite short book: Miraculous Abundance: One Quarter Acre, Two French Farmers, and Enough Food to Feed the World.

Official Controls (Animals, Feed and Food, Plant Health etc.) (Amendment) (EU Exit) (No. 2) Regulations 2020

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Tuesday 19th January 2021 Grand Committee

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

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Fookes, who has reflected some of our shared interests as a fellow member of the APPG on horticulture. I thank the Minister for his detailed introduction to these statutory instruments. He made clear the complexity of what we are dealing with. It is clear that we are far from the frictionless trade that we were sometimes implausibly promised by the Government. The noble Lord, Lord Bilimoria, referred to some of the difficulties being encountered now on the border.

I would like to begin with this question to the Minister. The Official Controls (Animals, Feed and Food, Plant Health etc.) (Amendment) (EU Exit) (No. 2) Regulations were made on 21 December and laid on 22 December. Can he make it clear how well they have been communicated to small businesses and to academics—the people who have a real interest in this area? What steps are the Government taking to ensure that people understand what is actually going on, if they do not have time to spend their entire day focusing on the fine details of statutory instruments?

I pay tribute Friends of the Earth, which prepared two excellent briefings on these statutory instruments that I relied on quite heavily. I have a question about the use of the negative statutory instrument process. Regulation 2 of the official controls regulations allows regulations to be made on special import conditions on animal and related products, and Regulation 13 gives the Secretary of State and Welsh Ministers special powers to make regulations concerning meat and bivalve production by negative statutory instrument. It appears that similar procedures in the European Commission operate in a much more democratic way, so could the Minister comment on how this squares with the taking back control agenda if Parliament has less oversight than we see in Europe?

The noble Lord, Lord Rooker, referred to the European Union Reference Laboratory for Animal Proteins in Feedingstuffs. I would like some reassurance from the Minister that there will be continual ongoing skills and knowledge sharing, and that we have a real sense that we are still right up at and contributing to the cutting edge, co-operation obviously being much more useful than competition.

Finally, I come to the plant health amendment regulations 2020. Again, my question relates to transparency and openness. The noble Lord, Lord Rooker, and the noble Earl, Lord Caithness, both referred to the question of openness in the reporting of the UK plant health risk group’s proceedings—both minutes and agendas, one would hope. The comparable EU body, the Standing Committee on Plants, Animals, Food and Feed, does this with commendable regularity and openness. Given that all these meetings are, I am sure, now conducted by teleconferencing, as most of us in your Lordships’ House now operate, I see no reason why they should not be broadcast for anyone with an interest. There is, of course, a great deal of interest in issues around plant diseases, invasive species, diseases like Xylella, and, as the noble Lord, Lord Clark of Windermere, referred to, antibiotic resistance, and the risk of importing it and antibiotic-tainted meat. Has the Minister considered whether the plant health risk group’s meetings could be fully conducted in public by means of Zoom or similar so that they are available to everyone?

Official Controls (Animals, Feed and Food, Plant Health etc.) (Amendment) (EU Exit) Regulations 2020

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd December 2020 Grand Committee

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

My Lords, I thank the Minister for his outline of this very complex and rather packed schedule for the hour, and it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh of Pickering. I will do my best not to repeat any of her questions, because I will cover some similar ground.

I will start where she left off, with the Veterinary Medicines and Residues (Amendment) (EU Exit) Regulations 2020. The Minister in his introduction—and the Government right through this whole process—stressed that this is a straight transfer over. But, like the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh of Pickering, I have relied heavily on the work of Friends of the Earth, which retains significant concerns, having looked at this in great detail.

One specific question that it has raised concerns Regulation 5 of this SI, which deletes Regulation 18 of the Animals and Animal Products (Examination for Residues and Maximum Residue Limits) (England and Scotland) Regulations 2015, which set out the EU-authorised methods of analysis. Defra has said that this is covered under article 7 of the EU regulation 2019, but that refers to a different EU regulation, so a significant part of Regulation 18 has been omitted. This suggests that there is a disapplication of the requirements within the context, despite claims to the contrary. I appreciate that this is very complex, and if the Minister is unable to respond now, perhaps he might write on this. I would be happy to put it in writing if that would be easier.

Also, Regulation 7(8) omits an update to reference points for action that are set out in retained EU law, in Article 8 of regulation 2019/1871. That refers to things such as chloramphenicol, malachite green and nitro- furans. This appears to be a weakening of the previous intent, so do the Government plan to put in place RPAs on or before 28 November 2022 that are as strong as or stronger than those that will exist up until 31 December?

Finally in this section, I come to Regulation 8(3), which removes references to MRL levels, as previously agreed at EU level and set out in regulation 37/2010, and replaces them with references to regulation 470/2009. It has been suggested that administrative processes will be the way this will be achieved, but it has not been clarified when this will happen, and whether the EU levels will be used as a baseline. Can the Minister set out what the Government’s immediate plans are for setting out relevant MRLs and other restrictions relating to the use of veterinary medicines in food-producing animals, and say whether this process will be complete before the end of the transition period?

I will move on to something that is perhaps a little simpler. The noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh of Pickering, referred to the issue of pet passports. We know that, certainly before Covid, around 300,000 pets were moving into the UK every year through the pet travel scheme. The report of the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee noted that much will depend on the category of third country that Great Britain falls in after the transition period—which in turn, of course, will depend on what happens in the talks that are still going on, with less than a month to go. On the practicalities, and putting this in everyday language, it may be that, despite Covid, some people are thinking of travelling with their pets over the Christmas period. What advice would the Minister give—what security and certainty can he provide—to people travelling with their pets on the circumstances that will prevail when they return to the UK after 1 January?

Finally, I will move on to the Import of, and Trade in, Animals and Animal Products (Miscellaneous Amendments) (EU Exit) Regulations. Here I am again relying heavily on Friends of the Earth, to whom I pay tribute for the huge amount of work it has done on this. Again, we have had reassurances that things are not changing, but there appear to be some very clear changes. For example, Regulation 16 omits Regulation 21 of the Trade in Animals and Related Products Regulations 2011, covering in particular where a consignment is regarded as a serious threat to animal or human health and the official veterinary surgeon or fish inspector must immediately place the consignment under official detention and order that the person responsible for it should destroy it or arrange for the appropriate treatment. This has now been deleted, which could result in consignments being released from border control posts without detention. Can the Minister clarify whether this change illustrates a difference in government intent regarding the way in which goods that may endanger human or animal health are dealt with at border posts? If not, what future legislative or regulatory changes are planned to deal with this apparent gap?

I will refer also to Regulation 17, which amends Regulation 22 of the TARP regulation, covering situations where products entering the UK have been the subject of serious contraventions of an import requirement, or contraventions that form part of a series, or where checks reveal that maximum residue levels have been exceeded. That regulation states that a person

“must carry out a physical check”—

but it seems that this is now being removed. Perhaps the Minister could clarify in what circumstances it would be acceptable for the appropriate person to refrain from carrying out a physical check on goods suspected of being non-compliant with UK import standards. How do the Government envisage that physical checks will be guaranteed in the light of this legislative change?

I move on to Regulation 29(a) to (d), which deletes references to a number of offences. Will the Minister clarify whether it is the intention that activities such as consigning an animal without a health certificate will no longer be considered offences under the TARP regulation? If so, why is enforcement effectively being abandoned? If this provision is seen to be duplicative of provisions elsewhere in legislation or regulations, can the Minister clarify where they are?

I had a question about equine health certificates, which I think the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh, covered, so I will skip that. I now come to Regulation 40(4), which amends Commission decision 2000/572. I will boil this down, as I am aware of the time. This is all about EU forms. Do the Government intend to replicate EU forms, are they in the process of developing new forms, and how will they ensure ongoing consistency in this area?

I have two final points. The first is on official controls on composite products at the border. This refers to Regulation 49, which adds a new article 3. Will the Minister clarify whether future UK controls on composite products at the border will cover these products, as set out in the annexes of Commission decision 2007/275? Will a complete list be published by the end of the transition period? If not, do the Government expect to be able to clarify which composite products will be subject to controls at the border?

Finally—noble Lords will probably be pleased to hear—I come to Regulation 53(26)(a)(i)(bb), which amends annexe 8 of the Commission’s regulation that refers to poultry and eggs sourced from establishments with conditions

“as strict as those laid down”

in the EU. This appears to be an opportunity for equivalence to be applied in ways that will allow imports that do not meet standards as strict as those laid down in EU legislation. Will the Minister clarify whether there is any significance in the change from reference to standards “laid down” to those described in the regulation? What processes or criteria do the Government plan to use to determine equivalence of standards in future, and how will the Government ensure that, where direct references to standards are replaced with references to equivalence, this does not lead to a weakening of standards in practice?

I can only say at this point that I thank the Committee for its patience.

Animal Welfare and Invasive Non-native Species (Amendment etc.) (EU Exit) Regulations 2020

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Monday 30th November 2020 Grand Committee

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

My Lords, I thank the Minister for outlining this statutory instrument, which clearly is necessary. Like the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh of Pickering, I thank the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee for clearly outlining some of the issues arising from it. I will try not to ask the same questions that the noble Baroness asked, but I will address some of the same issues, perhaps sometimes from a different perspective.

I will start with transport. Obviously, there is some concern that a changeover will happen rapidly, in one day. The noble Baroness talked about what might happen in the coming months, particularly from 1 January. Has any consideration been given to asking for a moratorium or even providing a regulatory limit, given that there clearly is a risk of real problems in the early days and weeks, in order to ensure that animals do not get trapped in enormously long queues? Will there be provision to ensure that animal transports with possible welfare issues can be shuffled through those queues, so that the animals do not remain in what could be very cold conditions for an inappropriately long time?

Turning to EU transporters having to apply for all the paperwork listed in the statutory instrument, does the Minister know how many vehicles are likely to be affected? How many that can already apply have already done so? I am thinking of situations that could arise from a shortage of vehicles and new people coming into the industry without the experience that operators might have built up over many years. Have the Government considered whether there are any extra training needs, in order to ensure that there are skilled, experienced people with the right equipment and knowledge to ensure that animals are transported, where necessary, safely?

I also want to address the issue of mink and Covid-19, which the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh, raised, although I am definitely coming from a different perspective. I consider mink farming to be a disastrous and, as we now know, dangerous practice; it would be very good if no more mink pelts came into the UK—or, indeed, farmed animal pelts of any kind, perhaps. However, given the risk of zoonoses such as Covid-19, what continuing monitoring will the Government bring in to make sure that the risk of transmission of both animal and human disease through pelts is adequately addressed?

I also want to address some broader issues. As others have already noted, the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee was told that the Government have ambitions to strengthen welfare and transport standards in the near future. I note that during both the Brexit referendum campaign and the 2019 general election, Boris Johnson, among many others, suggested that, for some people, a reason for leaving a European Union with very little in the way of a level playing field would be a ban on live animal exports. How is that ban coming along, and what are the Government’s plans?

I note the general desire expressed by the Government to strengthen animal welfare provisions; however, some deeply disturbing events are taking place. In the Peak District in recent weeks, mountain hares have been slaughtered and used in stink pits to trap other animals. The Sheffield and Rotherham Wildlife Trust, among many others, has been campaigning to end the use of stink pits. Scotland plans to increase the protections for mountain hares. Can the Minister tell me now or at some future point whether the Government are looking at the situation of mountain hares and stink pits? Are there any plans to change the current situation?

The statutory instrument refers to leg-hold traps. We are one of only five countries in Europe in which snares are legal. There are slightly different rules and interpretations in Wales, Scotland and England, but this is of course an area of grave concern to many people. The League Against Cruel Sports calculated, based on the Government’s own research, that 1.7 million animals a year are killed in these traps. Although the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981 states that they should be set only for rabbits and foxes, given that so many other animals are regularly caught in them—I am thinking of particularly horrific film footage of a badger, and the reports we hear about domestic pets regularly being caught in, injured by and sometimes even killed by such snares—are the Government taking this opportunity, in reconsidering animal welfare, to look at the whole issue of snares and to consider joining most of the countries of Europe in banning them?

I am aware that I have asked lots of questions and I understand that it might not be possible to get answers to all of them today, but I would appreciate answers at some point.

Agriculture Bill

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Report stage & Report: 2nd sitting (Hansard) & Report: 2nd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Thursday 17th September 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Judd (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, as we have heard from my noble friend Lady Jones, there is a great deal of agreement between the Opposition and the Government on the importance of the Government’s amendments. The only point that I would make in strong support of what my noble friend has said is that food security is such a vital issue and that things can, through unforeseen circumstances, change so rapidly that, if we are to make what we are attempting to achieve through these amendments effective, shorter time spans are not only necessary but absolutely essential. I hope that the Minister will be able to agree.

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

My Lords, I shall speak to Amendment 50, in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Whitchurch, and to Amendment 53, in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, both of which I have attached my name to.

I start with Amendment 53, which concerns adding household food insecurity to the matters on which the Government must report. As the noble Baroness, Lady Wilcox, noted earlier, adding to our remarks last week, although we can treasure the contribution of people who donate to food banks and the volunteers who work in them, food banks themselves are a national disgrace. No one should have to rely on charity to feed themselves. The government reports on food security and insecurity should also include not just what food is available but whether everyone has access to a full, healthy diet, and whether it is available to them financially, physically—I am thinking of things such as food deserts—and practically. On that latter point, do they have the cooking facilities and the energy they need to prepare the food?

On Amendments 50 and 52, I agree with an earlier comment that the question of whether the Government should report every three or five years is finely balanced. I welcome the fact that the Government agree that reporting every five years is not nearly often enough. I think that there is an argument to be made either way, although I can probably live with a three-year reporting cycle, and I hope it is something that we can get a real national focus on. Food security is one of the central roles of government—surely making sure that people do not starve has to be right up there.

I did a little survey of the news this morning, looking at what is happening around the world. I discovered that the Chinese corn crop is expected to fall by 10 million tonnes—nearly 4%—from the latest government estimates after heavy wind and rain toppled crops in major production areas in the north-east corn belt. That follows the events in America in August, when, across Iowa, 14 million acres of insured crops were damaged by what is known as the derecho—that is, conditions very similar to those experienced in China. I do not need to rehearse for your Lordships’ House just how difficult a year this has been for our farmers. The idea that we can simply rely on buying food on the global market is a very dangerous approach for all kinds of reasons, but food security has to be top of the list.

Just this morning I was at a Westminster Food & Nutrition Forum policy conference on the future of agricultural land use. There was a very interesting contribution from Adrian Aebi of the Federal Office for Agriculture at the Swiss embassy in the United Kingdom. I was interested to learn that Article 104 of the Swiss constitution provides that the agricultural sector shall sustainably make

“an essential contribution towards … the reliable provision”

of food and

“the conservation of natural resources and the upkeep of the countryside”.

Mr Aebi also informed us that the Swiss Government have clear targets for local food supplies and for improving diets, and they have expressed their intention of pushing towards a more plant-based diet for both environmental and human health reasons. I do not have the information to judge exactly where Switzerland might sit on a global league table of food policy but the UK clearly needs to do better. The Government keep saying that they want to be world leading in these areas, so we need to see clear targets from them on such things, particularly in relation to England.

It is interesting that reference to this issue is made in the Swiss constitution. Of course, we have our unwritten, accidentally accreted over many centuries, constitution that lacks such provisions. That is perhaps something to think about for the future.

I welcome the progress that we have made in this area. We have moved forward but we need to keep focusing on food security as a crucial part of government policy. Seeing all the work that is happening in your Lordships’ House on this issue, I am confident that certainly we will keep working on it.

[Baroness McIntosh of Pickering (Con)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend for recognising that the House was very uneasy about there being a five-year period between the initial and subsequent reports. If I understood him correctly when he spoke to this group of amendments, the Government will report at least every three years. However, if, for example, there is a shortage of food supply at home and a big fall in our self-sufficiency from the current 60%, and if, at any time after 1 January, there is any threat to the level of food imports into this country that could cause a future shock or crisis, I hope that my noble friend will take the opportunity to review this matter and report more frequently than every three years. However, I thank him for listening to the House and to those of us who raised these concerns at Second Reading and in Committee.

I support the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of St Albans in his Amendment 57, to which I have appended my name. It would require the Government to specify food security targets and implement actions to ensure that those targets were met. I hope that my noble friend would in the course of natural events seek to do that in the reports to which he has referred.

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[Lord Greaves (LD)]

My Lords, I support this amendment. I hope it will go to a vote and that we will pass it, because it is so important and requires further discussion, and it would be very helpful for the House of Commons to have to discuss it.

This amendment is like the proverbial good pudding—it is full of good things or plums, or whatever you want to say. In particular, I pick out the question of food waste, which is such an important issue—everybody says it is important but nobody does a huge amount about it. How important it is to support local and regional food identities in the production of quality and diverse food. On restricting the marketing, promotion and advertising of less healthy food, I agree with everything that the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, has said.

There has been huge political, economic and commercial pressure in this country in recent years for cheap food. A lot of food in this country is in fact, by historical standards, incredibly cheap—but being cheap does not necessarily mean that it is good food. It can be: in Trawden, an old weaving village just up the valley from where we live, there was no shop left, but a group of volunteers got together to set up a community shop that provides an astonishing range of really good, diverse, nutritious food which is incredibly cheap. Of course, most of the staff there are volunteers; you can do it on that basis, but it is not a basis for everywhere.

On the other hand, in June, when I came down before the recess, the facilities here were not all that great, due to the position that we are in. So I called at a convenience store on the way in and bought a couple of what, from the pictures on the packet, looked like rather nice ready meals. I could not believe how ridiculously cheap they were—less than a couple of bags of crisps, really. I put them in the microwave in the pantry on our corridor and thought I would have my tea. I have not eaten such nasty food for a long time. It was awful. You can tell that I do not do much shopping, given that I was buying these things. Nevertheless, it was an eye-opener as to how nasty cheap food can be.

The problem is that people who are living on the absolute minimum income—the sort of people whom the Minister was talking about earlier, who rely on the DWP—have to buy the cheapest food that they can get, because of their circumstances. So, for the people who buy a lot of the cheapest food because they cannot afford more, not only is the food cheap, it is not good. This is so important.

This amendment, in a way, underlines the whole Bill. We have talked about food production; the environment in which it is produced; the effect of food production on the environment; the quality of food; the standards that will be applied to food that is imported and to the production of that food—and all the rest of it. But where is the food strategy itself? What is the Government’s view on the food strategy? The Minister spoke of “safe, healthy, affordable food” and was quoted again by the noble Lord, Lord Krebs. But we do not know what the present Government’s overall strategy will be when it comes to the trade-offs between incomes for farmers, quality of food, price of food and where it all rests with international trade. We are still waiting for the Government to tell us.

We know what the different systems can be. First, if farmers are to produce food in this country, they must have sufficient income—that is pretty obvious—but the question is how that income will be put together. We know that the existing CAP system, which is mainly, though not entirely, based on the area of land in a farm, will be replaced by payments for public goods. In Committee, I tried to tease out from the Government a definition of “public goods” but such a definition was not forthcoming. It means different things to different people, according to what they think is important. I think that access is an important public good; other people do not necessarily disagree but put more priority on other things—even I might put more priority on other things. What is a public good? Is the production of good, healthy, affordable food a public good or is it, as the Minister said several times previously in his replies on this Bill, a private good, because it is something that can be left to the market and the price that farmers and producers get for that food is a private, not public, good? There is a muddle about this.

You can put tariffs up, which is basically what the Common Market did originally. It protected the European farmers behind tariffs in order to provide food security in Europe. That then turned into production subsidies and a level of intervention in the market that resulted in the famous beefs mountains—which people out there still think are part of the CAP, although they disappeared long ago. Then it was all decoupled from production and the farm payments were based on land; that is the system that we have more or less got to now, with some environmental bells and whistles added. Now it is going to be decoupled from land and based on public goods. That is all very well, but none of that says what our trade relationships with other countries will be—the countries that we import food from and export food to—or what trade arrangements we will have. Deal or no deal, we will have arrangements with the European Union and with countries in the rest of the world. The nature of those arrangements and how they will work will have as much effect on the future of farming and of food—the price and what we get—in this country as everything in this Bill. They must be looked at together.

I would say that we need to concentrate on fair trade, health and well-being and environmental sustainability, putting the whole trade thing in the context of the environment. One of the best books I have read in the last year or two was Doughnut Economics, by Kate Raworth, an economist. She puts economics into the framework of society and the environment, rather than at the top. I recommend it to all noble Lords—and to the Minister. I hope he can tell us what our strategy for food will be in the future, in relation not just to all the things in this Bill but to our trading relationships with the rest of the world.

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

My Lords, I rise to offer the Green Party’s wholehearted support for this amendment. I reflect, as I did yesterday with the immigration Bill, that the current system of a maximum of four signatures does not allow the full breadth of cross-party support for an amendment to be shown on the Marshalled List. This is something that I may be raising with the House authorities.

I begin by returning to the words of the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, in introducing this amendment: neither human health nor the environment can wait any longer. That made me think of Oral Questions yesterday when the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter, in a supplementary question, asked the noble Lord, Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park, where our peat strategy was. This is an extremely urgent climate matter. I heard the chief scientist from Defra reflecting this morning on how crucial this was, how the UN will soon be including peat emissions in its global calculations and how we need to act. Yet we are still waiting. We have no legislative framework and we do not know when we will get this delayed strategy. When we are talking about the food, health and diet of the nation and the well-being of our agricultural land, we cannot afford to leave this hanging.

It is often said that we are talking about creating, for the first time, a food strategy for England. Wales and Scotland have been well ahead of us in this area for many years—particularly Scotland. But we do have a food strategy. Our current strategy, although it is not written down, is to let supermarkets and multinational manufacturing companies decide what we eat. As the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, set out in her extremely informed speech—she is of course your Lordships’ House’s expert in these areas—how that has given us a truly dreadful diet and a truly dreadful environment. We have to give people the chance to eat well and healthily, which simply is not available to them at the moment through our current food strategy.

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

My Lords, I speak in support of Amendment 109, in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Ritchie of Downpatrick, to which I have attached my name, and I also wish to express my support for Amendments 60 and 92.

On Amendment 60, which concerns a promise to consult, as the noble Lord, Lord Bruce of Bennachie, indicated, the Government have said that that commitment has already been made, so surely it would not be too difficult to agree to put it on the face of the Bill. Securing consent would be stronger, and to avoid conflict or rows, and to make things clear, transparent and open, surely that would be the best way forward.

To address primarily Amendment 109, the absence of a sunset clause in the Bill as it currently stands presents a risk that Northern Ireland will be left with basic payments regulations indefinitely. A sunset clause such as proposed would create an expectation that Northern Ireland’s Government would develop their own specialised agriculture legislation and a fairer, more environmentally friendly alternative to the basic payment scheme. Of course, they could just decide to roll over the existing provisions in 2026. The amendment, or something like it, would not force action but would open up a democratic window and opportunity for debate about action.

In yesterday’s debate on the immigration Bill, the Government Benches spent a great deal of time expressing a desire for non-discrimination. Surely this proposed new clause would put Northern Ireland on the same footing as Scotland and Wales in deciding agricultural policy. This is non-discrimination that should surely apply in this crucial case, given that agriculture is very important to the economies of all three of those nations.

As the noble Baroness, Lady Ritchie, said, the absence of a sitting Assembly from 2017 to 2020 meant that little consultation took place on this issue, but the Committee for Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs, in a single day of very packed evidence on a number of issues, said that it wanted this sunset clause, and that is surely where the Government should take their guidance from. It recommended a timescale of 2024, but in terms of the electoral cycle there are good reasons to provide a bit more time. Your Lordships certainly know how long these considerations can take.

In the interests of ensuring that the Minister does not feel too uncomfortable, I shall not refer specifically to internal market issues, which have been creating difficulties for some of his colleagues, but I hope that the Government will take on board this call. It is not political, except in the broadest sense of seeking to ensure that the people of Northern Ireland have democratic control over their own future. Amendment 109 would provide flexibility and the opportunity for action, and I commend it to the House.

[Lord Thomas of Gresford (LD) [V]]

My Lords, these powers under Chapter 2 of Part 2 of the Bill make a declaration that exceptional market conditions which trigger financial assistance of a varying kind are to be exercised by the English Minister by way of regulations made under the negative procedure. That means that they will escape extensive parliamentary scrutiny, as we are well aware.

The sort of market conditions that Clause 18 has in mind is where there is a severe disturbance or a threat of such disturbance to agricultural markets that would have such a significantly adverse effect on producers in England as to constitute exceptional market conditions. That is to be judged by the limited criterion of the prices farmers receive for the sale of their agricultural produce. It is made clear in the Explanatory Notes that the devolved Administrations in Wales and Scotland have the ability, under their devolved powers, to make similar arrangements within their own jurisdictions. The noble Baronesses, Lady Ritchie of Downpatrick and Lady Bennett, have outlined the unsatisfactory position in Northern Ireland, and I support their call for clarity. However, I suppose that that is the reason it is thought these clauses do not require legislative consent from the Welsh Senedd or the Scottish Parliament —let them do their own thing.

But of course, if exceptional market conditions exist in England, they are bound to have an effect, certainly in the borders of Wales that I know best. I recall that Welshpool was once the largest market for sheep in Europe, but there are equally strong markets in both Oswestry and Shrewsbury, and what happens in one affects the others. I remember that when I was chair of Marcher Sound, broadcasting to north Wales and Cheshire, our farming report every morning at six o’clock broadcast the price of hoggets in markets on both sides of the border. This was vital early intelligence as I headed for the London train.

It seems common sense that introducing financial assistance to English farmers under Chapter 2 would have a vital effect on prices and risk unfair competition. Moreover, agriculture is a significant part of both the Welsh and Scottish economies, as the noble Lord, Lord Bruce of Bennachie, pointed out. Surely decisions of this nature should be subject to consultation with, and consent by, the devolved nations. I have no knowledge of the markets of Carlisle and Berwick, but I have no doubt that there would be serious financial implications for those agricultural markets, and equally for those in Northern Ireland.

It may be suggested that exceptional market conditions could be so exceptional that an English Secretary of State would have to move quickly with no time for consultation, but surely he would move and should move in step with the devolved Administrations, and certainly not with any of the belligerence to which my noble friend Lady Humphreys referred.

The Minister will recall that, at the Second Reading and Committee stages of this Bill, I raised the issue of internal markets and price stability, not knowing that the now infamous Internal Market Bill was about to be unveiled to the world. Did the devolved Administrations know of the contents of that Bill? Their alarmed reaction demonstrates that they did not. It is a Bill that is perceived to be a unilateral grab at former EU powers which ought to be directed immediately to the devolved Administrations, and I promise that I will not even mention the attack on the rule of law.

The Government sometimes tell us that we have already left the EU, so get over it. Well, devolution is a fact of 20 years’ standing, and it is about time that the Government understood that one of its main implications is the need for consultation and consent. There is a limit to the extent to which lack of time can be pushed when there is no consultation. As the whole country knows, the reason for the rush and haste and us being here until midnight discussing this Bill is due to the hazard which this Government chose to construct for themselves. I support Amendments 60 and 92 in this group, and I look forward to the Minister’s response.

Agriculture Bill

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Report stage & Report stage (Hansard): House of Lords & Report: 1st sitting & Report: 1st sitting: House of Lords
Tuesday 15th September 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Randall of Uxbridge (Con) [V]]

My Lords, I shall not detain the House long. I have added my name to those of my noble friends Lord Caithness and Lord Dundee on Amendment 5, because, as has been said, it is important that we get clarification. We must also ensure that farmers and other land managers realise that the access provisions are voluntary and will not be imposed. We need to take everybody along with the new framework, and the new way of looking at how we finance our agricultural system. If land managers fear that this will be compulsory they may not take part in it. Obviously, there is a good reason why we want more access—but it must be voluntary.

I echo the thoughts of the noble Lord, Lord Addington, about making paths, if possible, accessible to all, not just to what he called the hardened rambler. I also concur that there are occasions when paths and access must be curbed, for various reasons. Even nature reserves have to close paths because a bird—or some other creature, but it is normally a bird—has decided to nest right by them, and the last thing it needs is a lot of people walking past. I hope that the Minister can give us the clarification that we desire.

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

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Randall of Uxbridge. I offer the Green group’s support for Amendment 2 in the name of the noble Earl, Lord Devon. My noble friend Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb will speak on other amendments, so I shall confine myself to this one. Amendment 2 has multiple benefits. As the noble Earl explained, it would improve the clarity of the Bill, with “health and wellbeing” being measurable and quantifiable terms rather than the—if I may say so—rather woolly drafting of “enjoyment”.

This also helps us to come to terms with the rest of the debate and to set out clearly what the Bill is trying to achieve. We need our countryside to provide multiple services for us. In terms of our health and well-being, we need a great improvement from our present diet, to one packed with fruit and vegetables. We also need widespread broadly available leisure opportunities, and we need to look after the health and well-being of the natural world so that it can maintain biodiversity and bio-abundance, store carbon, prevent flooding, provide clean water, et cetera.

The economy is a complete sub-set of the environment, and ours is in a parlous state, as the RSPB reminded us this week with its reflections on our “lost decade for nature”. There is a context to the Bill involving contesting views, summed up as “sparing versus sharing”. The idea behind sparing is that we trash much of the land—the soils, the biodiversity and the waters—but we leave some of it, in its still surviving or restored state, as pristine as possible. Spare some, and the devil—or the agrochemical companies—take the rest.

Sharing involves looking after all our land—the soils, the wildlife, the air and the water. Those are things that everybody needs around them all the time for health and well-being—rural and town residents, visitors, and those who eat the food that comes from them. That is, as the noble Earl’s amendment says, for their health and well-being. An occasional visit to a specially protected treasured area will not deliver health and well-being if the rest of our countryside is trashed.

When we reach Amendment 78 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, and consider the damage done by pesticide application, this will all come into acute focus. Amendment 2 gives us a chance, in the early stages of the Bill, at the start of today’s debates, to set out a crucial understanding of how our health and well-being, and our future, depend on looking after every inch of our environment. If we live in a healthy land, we will have a healthy society.

[Lord Naseby (Con)]

I too thank the Minister for the timeliness and succinctness of the brief we have received. As we will be on this subject for a while, I had better declare an interest, in that I own woodland, which is managed by a professional and with the agreement of the Forestry Commission. And if anything comes up about horticulture, Bedfordshire is part of the heart of the horticultural world, so I will be interested in that.

We should pay tribute to the noble Earl, Lord Devon. I too worried about “enjoyment” for a while and wrestled with it but could not think of anything better at the time. Then I found that he had produced something very helpful, which gives precision. In law, precision is very important, so I hope the Minister will consider it.

I say that particularly because I happen to have some footpaths close to where I live and, as my noble friend will be aware, there is a new hobby of flying drones, which is not necessarily for the enjoyment of anybody other than the person flying the drone. Certainly, if people are walking along a footpath and find somebody else in the middle of the path flying a drone—which is allegedly, but not actually, flying within sight—that is not to the enjoyment of anyone at all.

On Amendment 4, which is the other one that caught my eye, there is no doubt that “accessibility” is vital. There cannot be a Member of your Lordships’ House who has not taken a walk along a footpath and found either a stile broken, something overgrown or another hazard that has appeared, so it is vital. I am slightly worried, though, in that some years ago I experienced that a section of the “rambling community” had gone back to the original maps showing where the closed footpaths were. Those had been closed whenever it was, legally et cetera, but there was then a move to open them up again. There may be a case for opening some of them, but it seems to me that that campaign does not fit with what we require today. However, I come back to the point that accessibility is vital. New public access is much more difficult in today’s world, and I think one has to tread very carefully in that area.

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[The Earl of Caithness (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow my noble friend Lord Dundee. I thank him for introducing my Amendment 16 so eloquently. He has done a brilliant job and it reduces much of what I have to say.

It is quite clear that when nature suffers, we all suffer. That is why I believe that nature-friendly farming should be front and centre of the Bill. When anybody coming into farming picks up such a Bill and reads it—as I did when I started way back in the late 1960s, when I read the 1947 Act—it should say that nature-friendly farming is the route forward. It is the only way that agriculture will survive in the long term.

I hope all your Lordships have read the recent Living Planet Report, which is pretty horrific reading. It says that the populations of mammals, birds, fish, amphibians and reptiles have declined by an alarming 68% since 1970. That is not all farming’s fault, but farming has been a contributor to that decline. For that reason I welcome subsections (a) to (j), but nature-friendly farming should also be in the Bill. I chose to insert it at this point because of its importance. In Committee it was an amendment after (j), but I thought it deserved a paragraph of its own.

I will correct one myth that seems to perpetuate in some quarters: that you cannot farm successfully and profitably if you also farm for nature. Many farmers have signed up to the Nature Friendly Farming Network, but I also draw the House’s attention to the amazing work of the Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust’s Allerton Project, which I know my noble friend the Minister knows about. It has done years of research on this subject and proved time and again that farmers can improve yields, output and productivity at the same time as improving biodiversity and wildlife on farms.

I will take one example in conclusion: the grey partridge, which is mentioned in the Living Planet Report. There has been a huge decline in this country, of some 85%, in the grey partridge population since 1970. The work of the Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust has proven that farmers can get the grey partridge back in large numbers, as well as being successful and profitable. I commend that template to all farmers and to the House. I hope that when my noble friend the Minister implements ELMS, he will bear that very much in mind.

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

My Lords, my noble friend Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb has already addressed the Green group’s support for a number of amendments in this group. I will not repeat that, but I will address a number to which I have attached my name, starting with Amendment 8, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, which focuses on the whole-farm agroecological and agroforestry systems. I thank him for tabling it, and the noble Earls, Lord Dundee and Lord Caithness, for supporting it.

It is clear that the age of industrial monoculture has given us the dreadful condition of our countryside that the noble Earl addressed in his speech. Its waters are polluted and its soil degraded, and biodiversity is in collapse. Yet, at the same time, we have a public with an awful diet and poor health. We need a whole new approach. Actually, agroecological farming is the only kind of farming we should see, with whole-farm systems. Agroforestry is a crucial part of that: trees sheltering animals, holding water, storing carbon, supporting biodiversity, and producing healthier food, including fruits and nuts, and healthier and more varied fodder for livestock. We need the Government to support this transformation, although ultimately that needs to be how all our land is managed.

We have already seen a significant move across most of the farming sector in its approach to soils. It has been a rediscovery of the understanding that the natural facility of soils depends on a flourishing ecosystem of microscopic animals, plants and fungi. I hope the Minister will think about this: I continue to hope that the Government will sort out the Bill’s description of fungi to make it scientifically literate—it currently is not—following the issues I raised in Committee, which are in no way political. They merely seek to ensure technical accuracy. When we focus on agroecology and, indeed, agroforestry, we need to move towards crop diversity. That is part of whole-farm varied systems. It means a system that works with nature, rather than trying to cosh it into submission.

I move to Amendment 9, to which I have also attached my name, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Addington, and backed by the noble Lord, Lord Greaves. We have almost lost track of the fact that this is the Agriculture Bill. We are talking about environmental elements, but agriculture is also about food. We need joined-up thinking and systems thinking. There is really no point in producing more sugar, which the world has and consumes far too much of and does massive damage to rich and valuable soils. By contrast, growing fruit and vegetables is a super-policy—the kind of thing the Government should support and which they will have to, if they are to have regard to health and well-being policies.

Amendment 20, in the name of the noble Earl, Lord Dundee, and signed by the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, focuses on peri-urban land. I have probably done this myself: in the Bill we talk about the countryside, but fringe areas and patches of land in cities, towns and villages that might be quite small are crucial for environmental benefits and healthy food production. I am sure the Minister is aware of an excellent article from 2019 published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution, which found that allotments and gardens often had 10 times more bees and other pollinators than even the rich environments, as we regard them, of parks, cemeteries and urban nature reserves. Increasing allotment use and food growing can be a positive sign for nature and, of course, for people.

I also express support for Amendment 6 on food security, to which Amendment 20 relates. Relying on the market to supply us with food has given us a dreadfully unhealthy diet, as the impact of Covid-19 has sadly demonstrated—one more weakness the pandemic has exposed rather than caused. However, it is also an insecure approach to rely on the market to supply food. Hundreds of millions of people in the world go hungry now not because there is a lack of food, but because of a lack of access to it. There is enormous waste in the system, particularly factory farming, feeding what could be perfectly good human food to animals.

However, we are in the age of shocks. We have just seen harvests in the US in particular be hit hard by extreme weather. Sadly, a lot more like that is on the way. The state of soils is parlous. To assume we can just buy what we need is dangerously uncertain. There is also a moral question: why should we take food out of the mouths of people in other countries when we could and should be growing our own? Those are two powerful reasons for the Government to provide direct, clear support for food security. There can be few more foundational roles for a Government then ensuring that people do not starve.

Finally, I support Amendment 48. I note the comments of the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh of Pickering, and I agree with them.

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, I thank everybody who put their names to Amendment 9. I have a little confession: the original intention was to discuss it in the context of the part of the Bill dealing with access, because of the idea of tying health and well-being into public legislation. It is clear, as I have already said—and nobody has argued otherwise—that if you are fit and active, you tend to have better health. However, does the amendment fit in its allocated group? Having thought about it, those organising the Bill have got it right. It fits because it ties in with the general thrust of what we are saying.

What are we doing to try to improve life for the whole planet and for ourselves together? I am afraid it sounds rather meaningless when I put it like that. The idea is that it is a whole, so we are taking something on board and relating it to other activities. If one thing is done under this Bill, it should be to ensure that we look at the whole of what we are doing. The amendment sits better in this group because we have to consider people’s health and well-being and the public good when we are putting money in. I hope that, when the Minister replies, he will not totally dismiss the idea that we should have better access to public spaces in order to undertake physical activity. However, that does not fit in with some of the other concerns being raised here about better diet and so on, because it is part of that whole.

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[The Deputy Speaker (Baroness Finlay of Llandaff) (CB)]

I call the noble and learned Lord, Lord Morris of Aberavon. No? Then we will move on to the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle.

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

My Lords, during the dinner break, I went for a brief walk and reflected then on what feels like ancient history: my honours thesis in 1983, which was on abomasal bloat in goat kids. Your Lordships can be reassured that I am aware it is dinner time, so I will not venture further into that subject. However, one thing that emerged during that year, as I was completing that honours thesis, was that the work had received some modest support from a milk manufacturer. It had donated the supplies for the goat kids, and in return got an awful lot of free student labour and the imprimatur of a university using its product. Soon, however, we found that there was a conflict between the commercial interest of the manufacturer and that of the science. It was private profit versus public good.

My noble friend Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb and I have been reflecting on that again and again today. Relying on the market rather than public service’s guidance and rules has led us to the society and countryside we have today. The market will, and by law our commercial companies have to, maximise private profit. All too often, that is at the cost of public good.

A seed company, fertiliser or pesticide manufacturer, or tractor company will want to sell more of their products, but moving in the direction we are talking about—agroecology, agroforestry, looking after the land—often means reducing, and using fewer, inputs: for example, using a local tree nursery for hedges and fruits rather than a multinational seed company. Yet, so much of the advice and information that farmers have been forced to rely on over recent decades has come from those commercial sources, which do not want to head in the direction provided by this Bill. So, we have to provide an alternative source of advice.

If we look at the history of this—to where we went backwards and went wrong—we go back to 1996 and the debate in your Lordships’ House on the privatisation of ADAS. Lord Mackie of Benshie said then that charging for its services had led to less advice being requested, a shift towards commercial suppliers’ advice and a concern about how public opinion of farmers had declined. In Committee on this Bill, I put forward a modest little amendment, 234, suggesting that a service be established by means of which farmers could associate, lead research and work with the experts we have now.

I ask the Minister at some point to look back to that discussion. One interesting, original contribution came from the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, who developed this proposal into something like a NICE for farming. Where otherwise is the advice and support in this clause to come from? It is clear that we need a duty to provide that advice, as so many other noble Lords have said in this debate. Farmers cannot be left on their own in this fast-changing, uncertain situation. This is not just about the Agriculture Bill; so many other aspects of the world are changing—the climate emergency, for example, and different markets and economic situations. We need to develop the expertise; we need the Government to do this. I would argue that this amendment is a crucial step in that direction, and I commend it to your Lordships’ House.

[Lord Carrington (CB)]

My Lords, I declare my interests as set out in the register. I supported the noble Lord, Lord Grantchester, on the same amendment in Committee and I continue to support him. I will not repeat my previous remarks but emphasise that, without access to funding for advice, the take-up of the proposed environmental land management schemes will be more limited. I certainly agree with the interesting hypothecation idea of the noble Lord, Lord Inglewood.

Farmers will be considering new ventures of which they may have no experience, so they need funding for advice. The average farmer is not a rich man; his success is likely to have come from concentrating on what he knows best. Our capricious climate has clearly demonstrated that sticking to what you do best is a sensible policy in farming. The farmer is therefore unlikely to rush into a new scheme without considerable thought and encouragement. As mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Grantchester, he is also aware that under previous schemes, including BPS, the sanction regime has been tough. So, once again, he is unlikely to move swiftly into ELMS without a great deal of thought and advice.

I raised in Committee the issue of the digital divide, which was identified by the University of Sheffield and the Institute for Sustainable Food. For many in rural areas, access to good broadband may be limited. This, together with lack of time and, perhaps, age and social isolation, has made it difficult to follow developments on the ELM schemes. All this means that it is so important to provide financial advice to farmers for training and guidance so that they can be encouraged into ELMS on the basis of knowledge and confidence.

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[Baroness Young of Old Scone (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, I hope that the Minister will resist Amendment 36, which would delay the start of the agricultural transition. Climate change and the biodiversity challenge are urgent, and we need to provide the financial support and the advice and guidance as soon as possible to equip farmers and land managers to tackle these challenges.

On Amendment 38, in his name, the noble Duke, the Duke of Wellington, admitted that he was not a great fan of organic farming in the past. I have not exactly waved a flag for it either—but he, like me, is concerned about the decline in the area of land farmed organically in the UK compared with most other developed countries. Organic production accounts for only about 2.5% of agricultural land in the UK; the EU average is 7.5%, and Austria has a whacking great 24%. Yet the UK organic market is growing like a mushroom—far faster—and we are sucking in imports as a result. UK farmers are basically missing out on the growth in the organic market.

The public benefits of organic production are well attested in things like biodiversity, environmental performance and animal welfare, so growth in the organic acreage would be a good thing. What is needed is not only support for the organic transition to be enhanced into the future; it needs to be coupled with the provision of advice. It is a big step change for farmers and to do the transition well they need support. There used to be something called the Organic Conversion Information Service, but support for peer-to-peer learning would be a help.

We also need to see help with ongoing market development, as other countries have done. Using public procurement to increase the amount of organic food consumed in public settings would be an excellent thing. Copenhagen, for example, can now boast of over 80% of food consumed in public settings being organic. What support can the Minister give to organic growth?

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

I support Amendment 38 in the name of the noble Duke, the Duke of Wellington. There is really no doubt that UK performance in the area of organic conversion has been astonishingly poor, and we have not seen a will or determination from the Government to make the progress that we might have hoped for in the past but can now hope for in the future. This amendment is a very modest step in that direction.

We can only look with envy at what is happening across the channel. The EU’s farm to fork strategy aims to see a 50% reduction in the use of pesticides by 2030 and a 50% reduction in the use of antimicrobials for farmed animals and aquaculture, as well as 25% of farmland being used for organic farming—roughly 10 times as much as we have now—by 2030. We are being horribly left behind. We look at countries around the EU and see that Austria is already at 24% and Italy at 15%.

As the noble Baroness, Lady Young of Old Scone, said, one of the things our failure to support this conversion means is that we are seeing more imported food. It is often food of higher value and it is being denied to our farmers—that is, farmers do not have access to that market because they are not growing organic food.

The noble Earl, Lord Caithness, said that other forms of farming can be environmentally friendly and sensitive. I would certainly say that of course you do not have to be organically certified to be environmentally sensitive, but this is the only system of registration, recognition and guidance that we have for agroecology. Organic systems by definition are agroecological. Anything else is just making a claim or suggesting that it is happening. Many of us probably feel we know it when we see it when we walk into a field, but that is not the same as something that immediately pushes in that direction.

I encourage the noble Duke, the Duke of Wellington, to consider pushing this issue forward if we do not hear a satisfactory answer from the Minister. We need to take at least this modest step forward.

I also want briefly to express support for Amendment 42. We know that farmers, like many other small and medium-sized enterprises, can have huge problems with payments from the large companies they supply, such as multinational manufacturers and supermarkets, but they really should not be waiting for payment from the Government; they should be able to rely on that.

[Lord Judd (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, the proposed legislation will inevitably cause a great deal of extra work for not only Whitehall but many farmers on the front line. They have a lot of burden and a lot of challenges; their time is scarce.

In recent years, but particularly in the context of Covid-19, we have seen the consequences of ill planning, of the rushed implementation of new measures and of promises unfulfilled, including the consequent maximum disruption. Rationalisations after the event are no substitute for all the promises at the beginning. For those reasons, there must be time for civil servants and others, and particularly farmers themselves, to prepare properly. In that context, the amendment moved by the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh of Pickering, has insight and sensitivity and realises the practicalities of what is involved.

When it comes to Amendment 41, in the name of my noble friend, the same arguments that I have just applied are highly relevant. What is important about this amendment is that it sets out in detail the things that must be in place and tested. That means not just uttering words off the back of an envelope or making a press statement from No. 10 Downing Street, but ensuring that these things are tested and proven. At stake is the success of the new arrangements. That will be very important, as we do not want disruption of agriculture and total chaos for farmers. From that standpoint, I believe that Parliament has an overriding duty to make sure that it is convinced about what is proposed and that we are able to vet it and give, or withhold, our approval. This is an important amendment and I am glad to be able to support it.

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[Lord Carrington (CB)]

My Lords, I declare my interests as set out in the register. I support both amendments. In the case of Amendment 43, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Cameron of Dillington, I believe that, with our existing knowledge of the precarious existence of farmers—particularly in upland areas—and their importance to the physical and social landscape of their localities, it is important to be able to support them through non-production-related schemes, as many of the existing and proposed schemes may not work for them. I hate to bang on about this, but it is particularly relevant in the light of the proposed cuts to BPS—even if it is only 5% in the first year, although some of us argue about how important 5% is. There is a lack of detail about what will follow in subsequent years, and also a lack of detail on ELMS.

I see no reason why Amendment 44, in the name of the noble Earl, Lord Devon, cannot be adopted, as it should cost the Government nothing since contributions to the RDP should already have been budgeted and, as I understand it, are expected to be rolled into the new proposed UK Shared Prosperity Fund. It is therefore just a timing issue, and correctly gives the necessary reassurances to the current RDPs.

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

My Lords, I am in favour of both these amendments. I was just reflecting on a visit I made to a small town in south Shropshire called Clun, which was then home to what was said to be the food bank in the smallest community anywhere in the UK. I am glad that both noble Lords introducing these amendments have focused not just on the individual situations, as pressing as they often are, but on the need for communities to be assured that money is coming in. On that basis, we want a Britain where there is no need for any food banks; we should not rest until the last food bank closes due to lack of demand. In the meantime, we have to find other ways to make sure that money is going into communities that sometimes are, and have for some time been, really struggling.

[Baroness Chisholm of Owlpen (Con)]

My Lords, I hesitate to disagree with this amendment, tabled by my noble friend Lord Cameron of Dillington. He is godfather to my daughter and one of my oldest friends. When I say that, I mean that I have known him forever, not that he is old in age, obviously.

I understand where the noble Lord is coming from: the needs of farmers and their households, along with rural communities, must be supported through the challenges they face. Now that we have left the EU, we have the opportunity to drive enterprise and jobs by re-energising our rural areas and those who live and work in them, and the UK Shared Prosperity Fund will do just that. It will cut out bureaucracy and create a fund that invests in UK priorities and is easier for local areas to access. To that end, I know that departments are working closely together to address the challenges faced by our rural communities. I hope that the Minister can elaborate on how that will pan out, with the UK Shared Prosperity Fund being very much part of dealing with those challenges.

Importantly, the problem with the support programme suggested by my noble friend is, I believe, that it would bring unintended consequences, taking money away from the UK Shared Prosperity Fund and therefore muddying the waters—which, I am sure, is not what was intended by this amendment.

Agriculture Bill

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Committee stage & Committee: 7th sitting (Hansard) & Committee: 7th sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 28th July 2020 Lords Chamber

It has been very interesting and, as I say, I have found it very valuable to have the intricacies of some of the points that have been made about particular amendments. However, this evening, I hope that my noble friend Lady McIntosh of Pickering will feel able to withdraw her amendment.

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

My Lords, speaking in this particular spot I feel I have to echo the thanks and compliments to the Minister from many noble Lords in this debate for his usual detailed answers that fully engaged with the issues, as we have seen throughout this debate and particularly in this marathon session.

I note what the Minister said about food standards and attempts to guarantee those in the UK, which—if we think back the horsemeat scandal—have not always been successful. In establishing the Trade and Agriculture Commission, the Government have acknowledged that there are issues here to be addressed, which the amendments in this group are seeking to get to grips with on perhaps a deeper and longer level.

I am sure the Minister knows that, just this month, the first shipment of Chinese-cooked chicken went into the United States market—unlabelled—and, were chicken to be shipped from the US to here, it could equally make its way here. It is planned that, by the end of the year, uncooked chicken will be going from China to the US, despite the issues of food adulteration that have occurred in that country, and also the issues of avian influenza, for example.

My question is not specifically about the Chinese chicken in the US potentially coming here; it is a broader question. How can the Trade and Agriculture Commission, operating for six months, deal with the situation of the continually changing global trade in food and issues that will keep arising after its six-month term?

[Lord Gardiner of Kimble]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness for that question. As I say, that is precisely why we have established stakeholder groups as well. I think the commission is going to be invaluable to the Government; it will set the parameters and the issues at large with an expert group, but we will always continue to work with stakeholders because we want to have successful trading partnerships around the world, particularly—as I say—promoting great British food and drink.

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The potential to help our plant scientists and British-based seed companies to address global challenges such as food and nutrition security, climate change and sustainable development means that we should adopt this technology. What the amendment suggests, and what I believe is correct, is a real and practical opportunity to have a public debate about reframing our legislation on gene editing and to help develop a post-Brexit food and agricultural sector driven by science-led and evidence-based policy.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle [V]]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Young of Old Scone, for leading the way for those of us speaking in opposition to the amendment. As a relatively new Member of your Lordships’ House, I am very glad that such a respected Member went first.

I begin by reflecting on the scope of this debate. I think it was the Minister who said that it had taken 54 hours a couple of hours ago. There has been a great deal of dissatisfaction with this Bill. That is very obvious. We have just spent a long time on the trade issues. There is also the lack of agroecology at its centre, where it should be; the lack of duties on the Government, only access to powers; food not being a public good; and the lack of regular reporting.

I refer to all of that, not to try to use this speech as a round-up but to make a specific point about the amendment. In a discussion before Committee started, the Minister said that the Government were minded to consider this amendment outside the Bill’s scope at this time. I find myself in a slightly odd situation, since I am often in the Bill office arguing for things to be in Bills that I am told are outside scope. However, I put it to the Government that they need to ask themselves whether they want to engage in this debate in this Bill when so many other issues will be hugely contentious when we get to Report. Indeed, a noble Lord who has been in the House for many years suggested earlier that Report might be as long as Committee.

I will pick up on a point that the noble Baroness, Lady Young of Old Scone, made. Some people, primarily advocates for this technology blazing ahead, try to turn this into a culture war. They try to label those who say, “Hang on, slow down, what are you doing?” as anti-science. I regret that, because my first training was as a scientist. I very much embrace and am fascinated by agroecology. I share the interest in soil science of the noble Lord, Lord Cameron of Dillington. I am very much interested in the science of nutrition. All these sciences take a holistic approach to our interaction with the natural world and with our food system. They are fundamentally different kinds of science and approaches from the silver bullet, single-step approach that GM technology represents.

In the past, we have seen that kind of approach and technology dominate for decades. It is the approach that produced the green revolution. We have seen quite a few reports coming out of India reflecting on the huge damage that taking that approach has caused, including enormous problems with water, pests, pesticides and a lack of variety in diet.

I refer to some of the issues that noble Lords have already raised. In an earlier debate, the noble Viscount, Lord Trenchard, talked about rapeseed and the difficulty of growing it here without neonicotinoids. Of course, that crop was only introduced to Britain in the 1970s. There has been quite a bit of discussion about sugar beet, a crop that is responsible for 10% of the entire soil loss of some of the richest soils, certainly in England. This crop also produces sugar, which we already have far too much of.

We need to think about what crops we grow and whether we grow them in the right places. I often discuss with farmers the growing of wheat in Scotland. There is a reason why Scotland is famous for oatcakes. Wheat is a crop that is fundamentally unsuited to the Scottish climate. We need to look at these things holistically, rather than essentially trying to ram square pegs into round holes, often for the convenience of large multinational companies that want a small number of certain crops and their food to taste the same all around the world.

I referred to the issue of time. I do not think that this is the place to engage fully with the issue of technology and its potential dangers, but I want to pick the noble Lord, Lord Cameron of Dillington, up on a phrase he used, which I think another noble Lord repeated. He said that GM technology is producing precise changes. I refer noble Lords to a report in Nature on 25 June. The headline read: “CRISPR gene editing in human embryos wreaks chromosomal mayhem.” This actually refers to a series of pre-print reports that have not yet been peer reviewed, which, in the age of Covid, is very much the way a lot of medicine is going. If noble Lords want to wait and see on that one, I refer them to a debate in your Lordships’ House on gene editing, when the House considered a Motion in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell. I quote from that debate the noble Lord, Lord Winston, whom I am sure noble Lords would wish to listen to on these issues. He said:

“CRISPR is not an accurate technique.”—[Official Report, 30/1/20; col. 1530.]


So, there are far more issues and questions about these technologies than has been suggested in the debate thus far.

I want to come back to the practical arguments that those who do not really want to engage with the scientific debate might be interested in listening to. I want to make a point about subsection (3) of the new clause proposed by the amendment. It states:

“Regulations under subsection (1) may only be made in relation to England.”


If you were to bring an amendment such as this at the next stage of the Bill—whether a government amendment or otherwise—certainly, it should refer to widespread consultation and discussion with the other nations of the United Kingdom. Seeds and pollen and other such crops will not be stopped by Hadrian’s Wall—even less so by Offa’s Dyke. This issue has to be considered on a scale across the United Kingdom; then, of course, Ireland may raise some pretty interesting concerns about and issues with the land border.

That brings me to a final point and gives me a chance to engage with the noble Earl, Lord Devon, who talked about the wonders of Devon cream teas. I am going to indulge in Yorkshire parkin and the wonderful products of the rhubarb triangle. Many noble Lords at many stages in this debate have spoken about the reputation of food from the UK, its potential in export markets and how that reputation is founded on images of cleanness, wholesomeness and quality. The noble Lord, Lord Krebs, reflected on international views of the use of GM technology in crops and how that affects people’s views. If noble Lords are concerned about promoting in that area of export markets—it is not my personal focus, which is on producing local food for local consumption—some of which can be small volumes of high-value products that are valuable and useful ambassadors for Britain around the world, they want to look very carefully at this amendment and consider what its impact would be.

[Viscount Ridley (Con) [V]]

My Lords, like the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, this is my first contribution on this Bill since Second Reading, but I will be brief and I declare my farming interests. The amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Cameron of Dillington, is one that the Government and the House should embrace with enthusiasm. Noble Lords will recognise that I have been raising precisely this issue of gene editing in plants in Oral Questions for some years. I have become something of a cracked record on the subject. I say to the noble Baroness, Lady Young, that the amendment would not change British policy on biotechnology; it would merely require the Government to consider doing so after consultation. Who can be against debate? If we then decide to go ahead, we would be in a position to rescue the British plant breeding industry, as my noble friend Lord Taylor said, which has a perfect safety record but is being left behind in the rush to make crops that need fewer pesticides and less fertiliser, are more nutritious and more drought-tolerant and can be grown with fewer emissions. If we fail to act today, British farming will be using more chemicals and generating more emissions than it would otherwise.

I was therefore surprised at Second Reading to hear the noble Baronesses, Lady Parminter and Lady Bennett of Manor Castle, argue against this proposal. I genuinely do not understand why Liberal Democrats or Greens would argue effectively in favour of more chemicals and more emissions in agriculture. Indeed, harking back to the very lengthy debate on previous amendments today, I suggest that if we do not take steps in this direction we may find that other countries reject our agricultural exports because of the low environmental standards of this country. That is where we are headed. We will be hoist by our own petard.

Many modern varieties are produced by scrambling the genes of seeds with gamma rays or chemical mutagens and then selecting from the resulting hopeful monsters. That is an extremely imprecise technology, but it is the one, I am afraid, that the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle, is recommending because that is the method by which much-loved organic varieties, such as Golden Promise, the barley variety used in brewing, were generated. To quote the noble Baroness, Lady Young, once these varieties are released, it is irreversible. They cannot come back. Is that not a worse technology? However, that method is not subject to strict regulation, despite the fact that it produces lots of unintended changes to DNA. It is specifically exempted from the GMO rules in the European Union.

In July 2018, as we have heard, the European Court of Justice decided, against the advice of its Advocate-General and virtually all European scientists, not to give gene editing the same exemption as that mutagenesis method. This puts the EU and the UK at odds with the rest of the world. Japan, Australia, Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Colombia, Israel, Canada and the US all say that if no foreign DNA is introduced, the plant is not a GMO, which is what the Cartagena protocol gathered by the United Nations also says. India, Bangladesh, the Philippines, Indonesia, Nigeria, Kenya, Paraguay, Uruguay and Norway are all moving towards enshrining the same position in law. Only New Zealand is still in the same camp as the European Union.

I refer to one other point raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Young: if we use gene editing or genetic modification to make crops resistant to insects we will reduce the biomass of insects. That is not the case because, as the example of sugar beet, raised by my noble friend Lord Taylor shows, the alternative is not no resistance against insects but using pesticides—insecticides, in the case of sugar beet. We have had to give up on neonicotinoids, so it is worse pesticides. They kill not just the aphids you are aiming at but innocent bystanders—other insects that happen to be about—so the effect on the biomass of insects of introducing insect-resistant crops has been shown to be positive, not negative.

Agriculture Bill

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Committee stage & Committee: 6th sitting (Hansard) & Committee: 6th sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Thursday 23rd July 2020 Lords Chamber

My final point is that not only is that the case, but every four years the Assembly could be asked whether it accepts and is prepared to continue with these arrangements, with us being left in the European Union regulations. When the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Hain, looked for multi-year financial deals, how do you even contemplate that when you have these levels of uncertainty? It is very difficult, and I sincerely hope my noble friend will be able to clarify the matter absolutely so that everybody in Belfast will know where they are.

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

My Lords, I follow the noble Lord, Lord Empey, and somewhat to my surprise very much agree with his call for honesty, a reality-based politics about the situation of the border down the middle of the Irish Sea and the need to acknowledge and deal with it. However, I disagree that that means there is any sort of argument against Amendment 290 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Whitchurch, or Amendment 291 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Wigley.

Whether it is a co-ordination council or a framework, the particular situation of Northern Ireland and the differences that will happen under each of the devolved Administrations in all our nations demands some kind of co-ordination. I can imagine that the Minister may get up and say, as we hear so often, “Wait for the regulations, we will sort this out later”. Let us focus on the fact that the other place has already gone off on its summer break. Time is moving on and it is surely essential to have a mechanism for co-ordination in the Bill.

I also support Amendment 283 in this group in the name of my noble friend Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb. She has done a sterling job throughout this Bill, as I am sure your Lordships’ House has noticed, in ensuring that animal welfare issues remain front and centre of all aspects of the Bill, as they must.

At the special request of the Green Party of Northern Ireland, I have risen chiefly to speak to Amendment 289 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Ritchie of Downpatrick—in shorthand, the sunset clause for Northern Ireland. Particular circumstances here demand action from the Government to incorporate this into the Bill. Due to the absence of a sitting Assembly from January 2017 to January 2020, there was very little consultation in Northern Ireland on this Bill. The scrutiny that did take place was over one day. The Committee on Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs heard evidence from stakeholders, looking also at the Environment Bill and the Fisheries Bill. Due to the complexity, the committee was unable to explore fully the situation of this Bill, but it indicated in its report that it would endorse a sunset clause similar to that provided by Wales—the provision in Amendment 289.

The committee then recommended a timeframe ending at 2024, but I think that the noble Baroness, Lady Ritchie, is right: given the practicalities of Covid-19 and the electoral cycle, 2026 is the right timing for this. Without this amendment, Northern Ireland will be stuck with a basic payment system without any end in sight, with all the complexities and complications that the noble Lord, Lord Empey, has just outlined. Northern Ireland needs the opportunity to develop its own agricultural legislation, specific to its context. Here we are talking about geography, climate, soils and the political framework.

I hope that the Government will agree to the amendment. Looking to the future, I do not think that I can do better than to quote the remarkably elegant words of the noble Lord, Lord Wigley, when he said very late on Tuesday evening that we need a system that works for all the nations and respects the rights and wishes of all the nations,

“based on transparent and equitable mechanisms and underpinned by mutual respect”.—[Official Report, 21/7/20; col. 2200.]

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I do not need to speak any further on these two amendments. I think they are exciting; they may need some tweaking and may need to be looked at again, but I thank the noble Baroness for triggering one of the most exciting and important debates we have had on the Bill.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle [V]]

My Lords, I offer the Green group’s support for Amendments 218 and 219. I associate myself particularly with the remarks of the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Whitchurch, as she moved Amendment 218, referring to the lack of collective bargaining for agricultural workers in England as exceptionally damaging. As the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, commented, the loss of the Agricultural Wages Board was a disaster and something that I also opposed at the time.

Where I perhaps have cause for some pause is on

“an appropriate supply of seasonal agricultural workers”.

As a number of noble Lords have reflected, a heavy reliance on seasonal workers is not necessarily a way to produce fair, decent jobs, a well-populated countryside and strong communities in it. We want people who are resident year-round to have good, solid, reliable jobs. We should still think of agricultural labour as something that fits in with the desire of many people for part-time and flexible working that suits their needs. Back in 2013, I was at a Fruit Focus horticultural field day and spoke to a grower there who talked about how, back in the 1970s, housewives—as they were then described—students home from the holidays and people coming from the towns into surrounding orchards would work as and when they could. That of course requires a very different sort of agriculture and food supply system that supermarkets would have great difficulty with, but it would be a way of ensuring that people had the opportunity to earn money. Labour is available.

I contrast that with a report in the Times newspaper a couple of weeks ago reflecting, as many noble Lords have done, on how the lack of workers from the European Union and beyond this year has caused difficulties. An asparagus grower was quoted as saying, “Well, you know, British workers just won’t do 12 hours a day of back-breaking work.” Well, I do not believe that we should have a food system that relies on anybody doing 12 hours a day of back-breaking work. We need to ensure that there are jobs that a reasonable range of people can do over a reasonable range of their lifetime, and that needs to fit in with people’s capabilities and capacities, and the skills, as the amendment alludes to, very much need to be developed through far more education and training.

I want to reflect also on what the noble Lord, Lord Naseby, just said about mutuals being involved in supplying housing for workers. We also need to look at encouraging, supporting and assisting in the growth of co-operative models of food production and food growing. Your Lordships might be interested in looking at OrganicLea, not very far from where those of you who are in the Chamber are sitting. It is a co-operative growing good, healthy fruit and vegetables and ensuring that its workers are part of a whole team.

I want also to commend the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Whitchurch, on her reference to mental health. An issue that I have been raising elsewhere in your Lordships’ House is the epidemic and truly awful levels of mental ill-health in the building industry. We have been talking a lot about key workers recently; builders and farm workers are clearly key workers. They need to have good, stable, secure jobs that can last through a working life, that fit within their practical capabilities and that give them a decent life and decent wages. So I commend both amendments to the Committee.

[Viscount Trenchard (Con)]

My Lords, I acknowledge the expertise in this area of the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, but am sceptical that her Amendment 218 would achieve the purposes she envisages and believe that it is unnecessary and indeed could be counterproductive. As my noble friend Lord Naseby mentioned, we already have excellent agricultural colleges, such as Shuttleworth and Cirencester.

The amendment represents an attempt to interfere with the supply of workers in ways which the market may or may not support. It presumes that there is likely to remain a shortage of trained agricultural workers. Is it not likely that further mechanisation will reduce the demand for agricultural workers? Is it not also true that much agricultural work does not require much training and is seasonal in nature? I ask the Minister to confirm that our future immigration policy will recognise the need and provide that foreign workers may be admitted to the UK for limited periods to carry out fruit picking and related jobs.

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[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle [V]]

My Lords, I was delighted to attach my name to Amendment 227, in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Young of Old Scone, and Amendment 228, in the name of the noble Earl, Lord Dundee. I also express my support for Amendment 228A, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, which makes an important point about the need for joined-up thinking to ensure that what is being decided and acted on at a local level is reflected in national action. I also very much put myself behind his comments on the state of our SSSIs and the issues in that whole area that desperately need to be addressed.

When I came to think about the whole idea of a land use strategy, I started by reflecting on how many invitations I have had to conferences, how many reports I have had sent to me, and how much work has been done by a whole range of civil society actors, academics and campaign groups over recent years on how land is used in the UK, and in particular in England. There is real frustration, determination and understanding of the need for change. I will refer to a couple of these.

Back in 2014, perhaps one of the most aptly and clearly named was a report on The Best Use of UK Agricultural Land, produced by the University of Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership. Look at the ongoing work from what was the Royal Society of Arts’ Food, Farming and Countryside Commission—it does a great deal of exciting work, although it has now perhaps moved more towards a local level. It asked how we should, can and must use our land. I also point to an excellent report from Dr Helen Harwatt from Harvard University, Eating Away at Climate Change with Negative Emissions, which was presented at an excellent Grow Green conference that I went to.

I will not take up too much of your Lordships’ time in making a long list, but I am sure that most noble Lords taking part in this debate would be able to add a dozen or half a dozen similar to those on that list. There is clearly a real hunger for an overview or vision of what land use should look like. If we are to say how we, as the nation of England, are to form a view of what we want our land to be used for, surely the Government have to provide the place where that is coalesced. I hope that that would be in some kind of citizens’ assembly, with a consultative process, but producing the sort of outcome that Amendment 227 refers to.

Before I comment directly on Amendment 228, I stress that what I am about to say reflects my personal views. I should be fair to the noble Earl and say that it may or may not reflect exactly his intentions in placing the amendment. When I saw this amendment and decided to put my name to it, I thought of a brilliant performance which has been described as a show, a sing-along, and a TED talk-style live event: “Three Acres and a Cow”. It draws its title from campaigns over land use and access to land in the 1880s, and which we saw again in the 1920s. We have a long-term drive in England in particular—we have already seen some fruitful developments in Scotland in these areas—for people to be able to get access to land to start their own small businesses, produce food for themselves and for others, and get together in co-operatives. I point also to the excellent The Land Magazine, which describes itself as an occasional magazine about land rights and which often explores these issues.

These two amendments aim to ensure that there is a sense of direction— something which we have heard again and again is lacking from the Bill. However, I want briefly to address the comments made in an earlier debate by the noble Lord, Lord Naseby, when talking about pesticides. He said that this is not the year to make dramatic changes. Respectfully, I very strongly disagree with him. ELMS is a dramatic change from the CAP, we are seeing dramatic changes in the climate, and Covid-19 is of course imposing dramatic changes on us all. We are heading in a very different direction from what we have seen for decades. The British countryside is headed in the direction of ever-larger farms, ever-greater mechanisation, and the production of fewer and fewer crops, very often with more and more expensive inputs. We are changing direction, so it is very important that we have a sense of where we are going, which is what these amendments aim to achieve.

I see from looking at the news during the break that there are hints that, over the weekend, we will see a dramatic change in the Government’s obesity strategy. The noble Viscount, Lord Trenchard, made reference to the drop in rapeseed plantings, which is a dramatic change that has come about through the ban on neonicotinoid pesticides—here I commend the Minister for her strong defence of that ban. Perhaps now, when we are seeing this big change in the Government’s obesity strategy, we will see a similar change in direction and great reductions in the planting of sugar beets, and the preservation of fields and very good soils by the planting of vegetables instead.

We are very much in a time of change and we need some kind of road map or guide, so that we do not flail around wildly. We cannot just say that we have a Secretary of State with the power to make decisions, while we have no idea where he is seeking to direct the use of our land, which is so valuable and so scarce.

[Lord Addington]

My Lords, I will try to focus on the amendments in front of us. If we are talking about land use and a land use strategy, it has to go fairly wide —a bit of lateral thought will make this stick together better.

My name is down, along with that of my noble friend Lord Greaves, on the amendment to bring the local government plan in alongside this. However, it encapsulates just about everything we have in the Bill. I spoke about many things, such as access. If I can remind the Government Front Bench about Clause 1 without them grimacing too much, all the things we have down there should be working into a strategy. A strategy is a good idea, but it has to go wide and bring things in. The exact form of that will be slightly difficult, but the idea of the noble Baroness, Lady Young, is sound.

I am not quite sure how you do this without having a list that never ends. What is and what is not on the list has always been a parliamentary challenge, has it not? I like going back to the parliamentary clichés every now and again. If we are to try to get this, it has to encapsulate much more thinking. It cannot just be about agriculture but must touch on other things as well. We have established that agriculture does not stand by itself. Whether it is housing or other things, everything else has to be in there. I will be interested to hear what the Government say about this. This cannot stand alone; agriculture is not another planet.

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[Lord Randall of Uxbridge [V]]

My Lords, it is always a great honour to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Young of Old Scone, and I am sure that nobody would tire of hearing her, even at this time. I am sure that I will hear a collective sigh of relief because I think this will be my last contribution to the Committee. I thank the Committee for its indulgence, not least my two noble friends on the Front Bench who have had to listen to my ramblings.

The noble Baroness, Lady Young of Old Scone, has already referred to the two amendments standing in my name. I am grateful to her and to the noble Baronesses, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle and Lady Quin, for putting their names to Amendment 230. I am grateful again to the noble Baroness, Lady Young, and to the noble Lords, Lord Greaves and Lord Addington, for doing so on Amendment 231.

As has been discussed, these amendments regard the potential loss of the good agricultural and environmental conditions—the GAECs, or whatever they are to be called. Amendment 230 relates to GAEC 7a, which includes: maintaining green cover at the base of a hedge for two metres either side from its centre; not trimming hedges during the main breeding season of nesting birds; not removing stone walls, earth banks, stone banks or material from these, as they provide important habitats for many plants and animals. If this amendment were inserted, it would amend the Hedgerows Regulations 1997 to ensure that these important protections are maintained.

Replacing elements of GAEC 1 to protect ponds and small water body habitats is also important, because a wide variety of small water bodies are vital for freshwater biodiversity. But they remain largely overlooked and generally excluded, as I understand it, from government policies such as the water framework directive and river basin management plans, which describe how we should protect freshwaters. Small standing waters, ponds and small lakes are particularly important for biodiversity compared to other freshwaters. These waters support a surprisingly large proportion of freshwater biodiversity and are especially important for uncommon freshwater species.

Amendment 231 would change the Reduction and Prevention of Agricultural Diffuse Pollution (England) Regulations 2018 to provide a requirement for buffer strips of green cover adjacent to watercourses, surface waters, et cetera, mirroring the current cross-compliance requirements in GAEC 1. This amendment would also require land managers to keep a farm map with surface water, boreholes and so on marked outside nitrate-vulnerable zones. The term “surface waters” is included in GAEC 1 and is taken in common parlance to include ponds and lakes. I think that Amendment 231 would provide legal certainty on this. I thank noble Lords for listening to me.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle [V]]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Randall of Uxbridge. He set out very clearly the benefits of Amendment 230, to which I was pleased to attach my name, and Amendment 231, to which I am pleased to offer my support. It is a little unfortunate that this got split from Amendment 117 on meadows, which the noble Lord kindly backed after I had tabled it, because the two fit together rather nicely. They are two hugely valuable biological and ecological resources that are to a large extent being destroyed and lost in parts of our countryside. It is undoubtedly true that the common agricultural policy was responsible for a huge amount of destruction, but the cross-compliance, or GAEC, regulations have in recent years helped to at least keep what we still have. It is crucial that under the new arrangements we do not lose that protection, and that is what these two simple amendments aim to do. I hope very much that the Government will be able to take them on board and incorporate them in the Bill.

[Baroness Quin (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to speak after the previous three speakers. I added my name to the amendment tabled by my noble friend Lady Young of Old Scone and I support the point that she made in moving her amendment, especially her explanation that this is about updating the regulatory framework, plugging gaps in it, bringing it into line with environmental goals and creating, as I think she put it, viable cross-compliance mechanisms.

Earlier in this Committee stage, I spoke about the need to know what we are talking about when we refer to “environmentally friendly farming” and “nature-friendly farming”. I believe that this amendment, along with others, would help to forge a proper understanding of this and avoid getting trapped in silos—a point made a few minutes ago by my noble friend Lady Jones of Whitchurch.

I also added my name to Amendment 230 on hedgerows, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Randall of Uxbridge. I have always felt very strongly about the removal of hedgerows and about their proper maintenance in an environmentally friendly way. The debate about hedgerows goes back a long way—even to before we entered the EU. In many ways, British agriculture was a leader in hedge removal over the years, and I am very glad that the mood on this has changed greatly in recent times.

The replacement of hedges and the retention of hedgerows are very important. There is a certain irony in that originally there were grants for removing hedgerows, whereas now there are grants for replacing them. None the less, I welcome that change in priorities. When I was an Agriculture Minister, I was keen to support EU action to protect hedgerows as part of the development of the CAP’s second pillar.

I believe that many farmers are keen to play their part in the maintenance and re-establishment of hedgerows. An interesting example that I came across recently was of a farmer who had replaced a long stretch of tumbled stone wall with new hedging but then used the redundant stone to construct a series of rubble mounds to create a bespoke habitat for wheatears. It struck me that that was a good example of thinking about the environment at every stage of an agricultural project.

I agree very much with the part of the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Randall, that concerns the ban on cutting hedges from 1 March to 31 August during the breeding and nesting season. In conclusion, perhaps this is something all of us with gardens should consider carefully. Earlier today in this debate, the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, I think, talked about the fact that gardeners as well as farmers use pesticides. Well, gardeners often have hedges and sometimes they cut those hedges, even savagely, during the nesting season. Obviously, action to encourage gardeners on hedges is outwith the scope of this amendment and even of the Bill. But I would ask the Minister whether encouraging gardeners to be more environmentally friendly is something that the Government are taking up with the Education Department, perhaps, to make it part of environmental education in schools.

In short, I support both amendments I have spoken to. I hope the spirit of them, even if not every word of them, will be taken on board by the Government.

Agriculture Bill

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Committee stage & Committee: 5th sitting (Hansard) & Committee: 5th sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 21st July 2020 Lords Chamber

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

My Lords, I offer the Green group’s support for Amendments 155 to 157 and thank the noble Lords who tabled them and supported them. This debate and the questions have brought out the political impact of the relatively low number of votes in the countryside. We have seen just this morning, with the report on the distribution of the Government’s regeneration fund before the last election, how, since we do not have a rules-based system such as the EU’s whereby funds are distributed to the areas that are most disadvantaged and most in need, it very much depends on the Government’s view of where such money should go.

This debate has focused a lot on keeping what we have in the countryside: alternative businesses, non-farm businesses and alternative sources of revenue for farmers. But what is the Government’s vision for the countryside —where do they see money going, say, from the UK shared prosperity fund? Do the Government see the countryside as a place where there can be large numbers of new, growing, farming, food-producing businesses, and large numbers of good jobs—not simply pickers who are casual workers coming in for a couple of months and then going away again having lived in caravans, but people who can make their lives in the countryside? Is that the kind of vision of a horticulture-rich, healthy food-growing countryside—tying together many of our debates from last year—that the Government have?

[Lord Gardiner of Kimble]

My Lords, the vision is for a prosperous rural economy, which obviously includes food production and agriculture. However, a whole range of communities form the rural economy. We want to ensure that all rural dwellers have the same opportunities. I have to say that very few industries have been promised that they will retain the same annual contribution from the taxpayer for the whole of this Parliament; sometimes noble Lords forget that in some of their commentary. That is most exceptional, and it shows that the Government support farmers and rural communities. That is of course why there is a very significant investment in the broadband structure. Therefore, there is a considerable vision for a prosperous, skilled and innovative agricultural sector within a broader rural economy.

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[Baroness Rock [V]]

My Lords, again I declare my interests as a director of a tenant farming enterprise. I support Amendment 237 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh. I was pleased to add my name to Amendments 238 and 243 to 246. I welcome the clear intention to ensure that tenants are not excluded from financial assistance schemes.

Amendment 238 seeks only to ensure that all potential circumstances that could arise for a tenant to need their landlord’s consent are covered. Some schemes, by their nature, require tenants to seek the consent of their landlords, regardless of legislation or their contracts of tenancy. Those individuals would not be able to use the provisions of this legislation to object to a landlord’s refusal, in those circumstances. This amendment merely extends the opportunity for reasonable objection to apply to any and all situations where the landlord’s consent is required. The amendment is not seeking to expand the remit of the legislation beyond what the Government intend, just to ensure that no one is left out of being able to use this provision.

I welcome the provisions of Schedule 3, in particular those allowing tenants to object to a landlord’s refusal to grant consent to enter a financial assistance scheme, but the exclusion of farm business tenants is a mistake. By their short-term nature, restrictive terms and high levels of rent, FBTs deserve the protection of this legislation. Over time, FBTs will become the major way in which non-landowners become farmers, and it is important that the legislative basis for their occupation is secure. As the Government rightly move towards a new mechanism to support farm productivity gains and public goods, it would be tragic if FBTs had no recourse against unreasonable landlords who refuse consent for them to be part of that new direction of travel.

I recognise that there is a balance between ensuring that we do not disincentivise landlords and ensuring that tenants have sufficient opportunities to take part in new schemes. However, given the restrictive terms of many FBTs and the lack of impetus to improve them in the marketplace, the balance should rightly ensure fair scheme access for all tenants.

While it is government policy to ensure long-term FBTs, it is disappointing that the Bill does not contain the provisions to assist with this that were proposed by the Tenancy Reform Industry Group—TRIG— which formed part of the Government’s consultation. Amendment 246 rectifies this. The marketplace does not currently deliver a sufficient number of long-term FBTs and the Government could do more to promote their use. These provisions should provide comfort to landlords who have to deal with tenants who breach the terms of the agreements or when land is required back for non-agricultural use, planning consent for change of use having been obtained. While these new provisions will have direct benefit for landlords, who are prepared to let for longer periods, they will provide indirect benefit to the tenanted sector as a whole, by providing scope for a greater degree of longer-term tenancies.

Finally, on Amendments 243 and 244, many successful businesses are family enterprises, no more so than in agriculture. Tenancy succession provisions ensure the longevity of farming businesses, and it is right that there should be eligibility criteria for who can succeed to a tenancy. Other bits of the Bill speak to that issue. One area that is limiting for many farm businesses with succession rights is the close relative test. Often it is nephews, nieces and grandchildren who are involved in the farm, rather than the children of the retiring or deceased tenant. It is important to recognise that these wider members of a family farm may be the most appropriate individuals to succeed. This issue was considered by TRIG and formed part of the Government’s consultation on agricultural tenancies.

The tenanted sector is responsible for farming at least one-third of the agricultural area of England and Wales. We must ensure that tenant farmers are able to participate fully in schemes to contribute to the future of farming.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle [V]]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Rock, and to echo many of the sentiments she expressed on Amendment 246, to which my noble friend Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb has attached her name. I will speak briefly to Amendments 158 and 159. Amendment 158 is on county farms, which is something that we have heard discussed broadly, its importance stressed by many sides, so I will not detain the Committee on that.

I want particularly to address Amendment 159, in the name of the noble Earl, Lord Dundee. This in many ways addresses the question I put to the Minister after the previous group of amendments. Do we perceive our countryside as a place where we can see a growth of a different kind of business and economy—strong local economies, rich communities of small independent businesses producing food and providing services for those businesses? The vision set out by the noble Earl in this amendment reflects some very exciting work that is being done in Wales. We are seeing exciting experiments and developments in the devolved Administrations that could be transferred to England. That is the idea of One Planet Living: that it is possible to create developments that meet our environmental, social and economic goals and are different from what has gone before, which may not increase the concentration of land ownership, but may create opportunities for small independent landowners, businesses, tenants and people to operate different kinds of businesses, in different ways.

I do not need to tell your Lordships that land ownership in England is incredibly concentrated. We have a situation in which half of England is owned by less than 1% of its population. If we were to share the land of England around the whole population, everyone would get half an acre each. In the light of Covid-19, we may see that people wish to explore different ways of living, different kinds of businesses, different ways to work and support themselves, and different ways to work in communities. This amendment is an exciting possibility and way of doing that. I commend it to the Committee.

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[Lord Greaves]

My Lords, it is a real privilege to take part in the debate on this group of amendments, which has produced some of the most interesting and outstanding speeches in the whole of this Committee stage; the Government may think that some of them were a little long but I think that people can be excused if they are really good.

I signed the amendments tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts. I must say, when I did so, I did not have a clue about what he was going to make of his amendment and what he was going to say. His speech is one of those that I want to go back to and read carefully tomorrow. It was quite outstanding and put some of the problems that we have been talking about in a wider geographical and longer-term context. I am pleased that I signed that amendment.

I am also pleased that I signed the amendment tabled by my long-standing friend, the noble Lord, Lord Hain, who, along with the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, introduced the concept of food insecurity as opposed to food security. It is an absolute scandal, as I have already said in Committee, that we are arguably the fifth or sixth-richest country in the world—one of the richest countries ever in the world—and we have food banks. Something is seriously wrong. I remember that, when I was quite young, in the working class district I grew up in, it was well known that, in the households, the wife would go without food to feed the husband, who was the wage-earner. The vital thing was that that wage continued. Nowadays, even in the town I live in, Colne—near where I represent on the council—we know that young women are going without enough food in order to feed their children. This is 2020. This country has never been as rich as it is now, yet this is going on. Something is seriously wrong. I would say that something has to be done about it, but that is a cliché, I know.

I was very pleased to sign the amendment tabled by my noble friend Lady Parminter about food waste. The noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, had, I think, four apocalyptic subheadings in his speech, and one was shortage of food. The amount of food wasted in this country—in all the developed world—is absolutely shocking. It happens on the farm; in production, to some extent; in the supermarkets, which are getting a bit better but it still happens there; and in the hospitality industry. People are buying too much food and throwing appalling amounts away without even putting it on a plate, and people are putting too much on their plates and throwing half away. The amount of food wasted in households is a disgrace. I was a war baby and it is hard-wired inside my head that if the food is on the plate, you damn well eat it. Sending food back on a plate, even if I hate it and it is horrible, is something I find very difficult to do, because that was hard-wired into me in the first 10 years of my life. Nowadays, people do it all the time and do not think anything about it. We have to get back to the idea that you buy food, you cook food, you eat that food, and you do not eat too much—you cook the appropriate amount. This is very important. If we are talking about government propaganda exercises, which they seem to be heavily into at the moment, that is one that they might take on in a big way.

We have been told that we are leaving the European Union—the common market, the single market and the trade area—to have control over our own borders. Then we get this Bill, which is about providing farmers with sufficient income and providing sufficient food and food security and so on. The Bill gives the Government all these powers but, as the noble Lords, Lord Adonis and Lord Whitty, and many others keep saying, we do not know what the Government’s policy is for using these new powers that they will have. We do not know if, as far as trade is concerned, they will go for open borders and cheaper food. If that happens, how will they support the farmers? We do not know whether they will encourage more expensive and higher-quality food and keep the imports out. We have no idea. We know that some members of the Conservative Party are very pro-farmer and very worried, but we know that lots of others want us to be a buccaneering, free-trading country and want us to go back to the repeal of the Corn Laws and so on. Until we know the answers to those questions, we do not really know how this Agriculture Bill will pan out. It is very unsatisfactory that we are providing the Government with the framework, but it is in a vacuum.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle [V]]

My Lords, I begin by referring to Amendment 168, which appears under my name on the Marshalled List, and I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, for her support for it. I have already referred to the many environmental and health advantages of plant-based foods, but this amendment refers specifically to the issue of food security.

I refer noble Lords to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations 2019 report, The State of the World’s Biodiversity for Food and Agriculture. It points out that nine species are responsible for two-thirds of the world’s crops, and 40 types of livestock produce nearly all the meat, milk and eggs. We suffer from a similar lack of diversity in the UK. A handful of crops dominate our land, as you see when you travel around the country. Not having crop diversity also means that you do not have the variety of insects and microbes—the suite of ecosystems that would accompany different crops. There is also the huge risk of one disease or bad season for a particular crop having a huge impact. But moving more into plant-based foods—perennial crops, tree crops, nuts and fruits—creates a more diverse and secure system, in terms of the first sort of food security identified by the noble Lord, Lord Krebs. Moving towards plant-based foods gives you a more diverse and secure food supply.

I refer also to Amendment 169, which appears under the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter, and which I was pleased to sign. It refers to the issue of food waste, which many noble Lords have already referred to, and demands a report from the Government on food waste and surplus. It would be a crucial step forward that I hope the Government will be prepared to accept. We have a situation where many sides of the House and many parts of the country agree that food waste is a problem, but action has chiefly come from independent charities and community groups. FareShare, for example, rescues huge quantities—but still a tiny percentage—of the food from supermarkets that is largely going to waste, and reaches 11,000 charities and community groups around the country.

That brings me to the crucial way in which waste interrelates with food security in the second sense referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, which is people being able to afford the food. A shocking figure from FareShare is that half of the people accessing its food have recently gone a day without food before being able to access that food that has been rescued. I will also mention the Real Junk Food Project, which started just up the road from me in Leeds and has spread to 120 projects in seven countries. We cannot keep relying on such groups to act on food waste; this needs to happen at a government level.

I also refer to Amendment 171 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh of Pickering, signed by my noble friend Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb. There is a crucial point to be made about this: it says that the Government must have targets for food security. We have addressed, in many different contexts, the fact that the Government cannot just have powers; they need to have duties. As the noble Baroness, Lady Ritchie of Downpatrick, said, this is possibly one of the most important areas of the Bill. This has to be a duty, not just a power to act.

This brings me to Amendment 162 on annual reports. I shall refer noble Lords to what is now an old report, from 2008, but still worth looking at: Nine Meals from Anarchy from the New Economics Foundation. Noble Lords may recall the fuel blockade, another occasion on which our shelves suddenly emptied. We have no idea when challenges, risks and sudden changes in the world situation will occur. Many noble Lords have talked about the climate emergency, but they could be natural, political or economic, and all of those things are risks that arise very quickly, so I think annual reports are the way to go.

Agriculture Bill

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Committee stage & Committee: 4th sitting (Hansard) & Committee: 4th sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Thursday 16th July 2020 Lords Chamber

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees]

I now call the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle. The noble Lord, Lord Lilley, will speak after the noble Earl, Lord Devon.

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

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Gardner of Parkes, and to note that she is reflecting the support that is to be found on all sides of your Lordships’ House for the inclusion of the climate emergency in the Bill. I thank the Minister for her responses thus far. She brandished the “we have legally binding targets” stick that the Government very much like to bring out. I point out that we also have a Fixed-term Parliaments Act which supposedly sets the date of elections every five years—and we have had three elections in the past five years.

What we need is action. As the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Whitchurch, said, pointing to the report that has just come out from the independent Committee on Climate Change, we have not had, and do not have in mind, anything like the action that we need. The Minister quoted a 2019 report from the same committee pointing out the difficulties of making agriculture net-zero carbon. But the National Farmers’ Union, which is representative of many farmers in this country, particularly the larger ones, has set that target for itself. It is therefore surprising that the Government are lagging behind the farmers and are perhaps in conflict on yet another subject with what might traditionally have been seen as their natural constituency.

There are a number of amendments in this group, but it will not surprise your Lordships’ House to know that my favourite is Amendment 274, which was tabled by my noble friend Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb and is backed by the noble Lord, Lord Randall of Uxbridge. This amendment goes furthest and says that we must ensure that we meet our legally binding target under Paris and that we need real action in six months’ time. I also commend the elements in Amendment 272 about working with the devolved Administrations. That is a very strong element that I hope the Government will also take forward.

When we were last in Committee, the noble Lord, Lord Dobbs, said that politics,

“is not the stuff of fundamental legislation but for the political hustings.”—[Official Report, 14/7/20; col. 1626.]

I am not sure whether the noble Lord would consider tackling the climate emergency—the existential threat that is facing us all—politics, but it is crucial to this Agriculture Bill and it has to be there.

I very much hope that we will hear in coming days and weeks a more conciliatory approach from the Government on this. They often talk about following the science; the science is that we need action. We have a special role as the chair of the—

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Lord Gardiner of Kimble) (Con)]

Can I ask the noble Baroness to wait a moment? I think it would be a courtesy to the Committee if the noble Baroness could keep remarks to a short intervention. She is speaking after the Minister and I think it would be polite if she were to ask the noble Baroness the Minister a question, rather than making a speech.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle [V]]

I thank the noble Lord for his comment. I was coming to my last sentence, which is this: does the Minister acknowledge that there is support from all sides of your Lordships’ House for including a commitment to climate change action in the Bill? Will she and the Government at least go away and think again?

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Moved by

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle]

90: Clause 1, page 3, line 5, leave out “or plants” and insert “, plants or fungi”

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle [V]]

My Lords, in moving Amendment 90, I will also speak to Amendments 196 and 206 in the name of my noble friend Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, which concern animal welfare and which I commend to the Committee, and Amendment 207, which concerns the role of the Groceries Code Adjudicator.

I shall speak to Amendments 90, 184, 188, 189, 286, 287, 288, 292, 293 and 294; I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, for her support on them. They are all about references to fungi. I have to credit the campaigning group Plantlife, which identified this issue for me and did all the fine-comb work to produce these amendments. I feel that I am contributing to successful answers to pub quizzes up and down the land in saying that there are three kingdoms in the living world—plants, animals and fungi—which together make up the eukaryotes: the organisms with complex cells with features such as mitochondria and nuclei. In fact, fungi are closer to animals than plants. They are not producers of energy but use external sources of it; indeed, the world would soon be covered in undigested waste if they did not.

On many occasions in your Lordships’ House, I say, tongue in cheek, “I am sure that the Government will agree with me,” but in this case I say it with absolute sincerity. I am sure that the Government want our legislation to be scientifically literate. As this legislation currently says, “‘plants’ includes fungi”, it is not. It is like saying, “For ‘apples’, read ‘pineapples’”. That is very easy to fix—and would, I believe, have the added virtue of legal clarity. I am sure that we all recall the arguments about the classification of Jaffa Cakes as cakes or biscuits with regard to VAT. We do not want to see similar arguments in relation to support under this Bill. This Committee must consider why we currently have such confusion. The importance of fungi is grossly understated and still little understood.

I outsourced this speech in part to social media, where mycologists leapt in to offer some suggestions. To start with the familiar, I point your Lordships to fly agaric, the red and white fairy tale favourite, but until mycologists started talking to me, I did not realise how crucial it is, to the growth of birch trees in particular. I also cannot resist noting Phallus impudicus—I leave noble Lords to look up its common name—which is thought to have a close ecological relationship with badger setts. Its scent attracts blow-flies that quickly clean up the bodies of badgers, which most typically die underground—unless there is a badger cull, of course. I note that up to a third of plants’ products of photosynthesis feed fungi and bacteria in the soil. For example, relationships between bacteria help mycorrhizal fungi to use their hyphae to seek out and scavenge particularly biologically valuable elements such as phosphorus from rocks or decaying organic matter.

These are immensely complex and little-understood natural systems. Other noble Lords have said that they imagine the countryside operating like a giant, human-directed machine, with robots buzzing around and everything controlled by chemical application and genetic modification. I would point to the complexities I just outlined to illustrate how faulty that vision is. We do not understand all that, but we do understand the basic biology and we can get it right in the Bill. I look forward to the Minister’s response and beg to move.

[The Earl of Caithness [V]]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendments 177, 179, 180, 182, 186, 188, 190, 191, 192, 193 and 194, which are in my name. We are moving away from fungi, but I say this to my noble friend the Minister: it is not helpful to group such a mass of contradictory and different issues together. My amendments deal with the supply chain and the collection and processing of data, which are rather different to what the noble Baroness was just talking about.

The Bill has incorporated some safeguards around the collection and processing of data to ensure that it is clear how information will be used and how it could be used in accordance with data protection legislation. However, I still have concerns that not all the purposes for which information can be processed relate directly to improving supply chain transparency or supporting the development of risk management tools to help farmers to manage volatility. I therefore want to see these purposes drafted in a more focused way to ensure that they achieve the legitimate aims of improving transparency and managing volatility.

The purpose for which information can be processed under this clause should be linked directly to the overarching objective of improving fairness and transparency in the supply chain. The requirements to provide information will inevitably lead to an increased administrative burden for businesses, and it is therefore important that any information collected is focused on helping those in the agri-food supply chain to make improvements—hence the need for Amendment 177.

Turning to Amendment 190, the Bill as currently drafted provides for information to be processed for wider environmental and waste purposes which do not link specifically to assisting those in the agri-food supply chain. This amendment would focus the processing of environmental and waste information and avoid it being used to pursue wider environmental objectives more appropriately pursued under other legislation such as the Environment Bill. It would enable the Government to collect the kind of information they have stated they are interested in, but would curtail the use of the provisions for purposes which go beyond specific issues in the agri-food supply chain in future.

The Minister will know that the data collection provisions are welcomed by farmers. They should be used in a focused and proportionate way to ensure that the additional administrative burden placed on businesses directly improves the fairness and transparency of the agri-food supply chain. Most of us will be able to remember the days when MAFF was notorious for gold-plating regulations. Therefore, it is very important that these regulations and this part of the Bill are sensibly drafted so as not to impinge too much on farmers.

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[Lord Gardiner of Kimble]

My Lords, I wish that the noble and learned Lord had given me those definitions before I replied, because it would have helped the noble Baroness even further.

On our definition, I specifically mentioned Clause 22(6) and the schedules that contain “fungi”. As I said, I can confirm that in Clause 1, which is about wild fungi and habitat, “fungi” covers plants and fungi, as it does throughout the Bill. My lawyers’ interpretation is that fungi are included.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle [V]]

I thank the Minister for his usual comprehensive and precise response to what is, as noble Lords have reflected, a hugely diverse range of amendments.

I do not intend to attempt to sum them all up, but I want to respond specifically to the noble and learned Lord who just intervened. My academic background is as a scientist. If the law can be scientifically accurate, reflecting modern understanding, many people might think that that is a good thing. I hope that the Minister will go away and talk to his officials and perhaps reflect on how many scientists there are in the Bill drafting team.

As the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, said in his interesting intervention, this is an issue of accurate language. As a feminist, I might come back to the other issues he raised with regard to the House another time, but not today.

I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, and the noble Earl, Lord Dundee, for their support. Reflecting briefly on the animal welfare provisions, some of which were supported by my noble friend Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, came up with an interesting proposal in suggesting that there could be an animal welfare oversight body—something like the Groceries Code Adjudicator. Perhaps we can take that away and look at it in future.

I welcome the Minister’s commitment to close consultation with groups concerned with animal welfare in the regulations. I am sure that we look forward to seeing that, but most of the amendments in this group relate in some way or another to fair dealing and the problem of our current distribution system. The noble Lord, Lord Grantchester, was hugely powerful when he talked about how the supermarkets making massive profits from the current tragic situation bore down on smaller suppliers and producers. The noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh of Pickering, stressed how we need joined-up thinking in ensuring fair dealing. I welcome what the Minister said about consulting the farming and growing sector in this area.

That sums up where we are. We have all done a great deal of work. Perhaps we will come back to some of this but, in the meantime, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 90 withdrawn.

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[Lord Lucas [V]]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 132 in my name. These plans are the fundamental basis for planning farming in this country. It is really not acceptable that the Government should be allowed to let a plan almost expire and then introduce a new one. How does that allow farmers to plan properly? I know that they will not get it under these circumstances, in the first iteration, but thereafter they deserve two years’ notice of changes that will be made between one plan and the next.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle [V]]

My Lords, I associate the Green group with the very useful amendments of the noble Lord, Lord Addington, about transparency and accountability, and Amendments 131 and 133 from the noble Earl, Lord Devon. He displayed a touching faith in the regularity of the electoral cycle in his comments, but none the less a seven-year timeframe is much more realistic.

I will speak primarily to Amendment 112 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Grantchester, to which I was pleased to add my name. This is a simple and practical amendment which says that financial assistance should be rolled over if it is not spent in one year. The noble Lord referred to the risk of funding going down if it is not spent. There is the other risk—as I am sure Members of your Lordships’ House will know, having spent much time over their lives on committees—of the rush that often happens at the end of the year to spend money before it runs out or disappears. That is something we do not want to see happening and do not want to encourage. Thinking particularly about farming and growing, dependence on the weather will mean that sometimes things simply cannot be done in a particular year.

I was also pleased to add my name to Amendment 227, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Young of Old Scone. She has not yet had an opportunity to speak to that amendment, which is also backed by the noble Earl, Lord Caithness. I briefly reflect that this calls for a land use strategy for England and focuses on the two key issues of carbon storage and biodiversity. I am sure that most Members of your Lordships’ House would agree, for example, with the phrase “the right tree in the right place”. To get towards that goal we need a strategy to head in that direction.

I also suggest to your Lordships that any land use strategy would have to consider whether there are some existing land uses in England that cannot be allowed to continue because of the environmental damage they are doing all round. I refer particularly to driven grouse shooting, which has real issues as regards carbon storage and flooding, and which is spatially very closely associated with illegal persecution of raptors, which we saw this morning with the police releasing horrific information about the killing of a goshawk.

I was pleased to add my name to Amendment 228, tabled by the noble Earl, Lord Dundee. This refers to supporting landowners to make land available particularly to new growers, new farmers—new entrants into the industry. We are seeing some exciting developments. I know that in Suffolk there is discussion of the concept of jigsaw farming, whereby a farmer or landowner might be able to welcome on to their land a large number of different growers occupying small parcels and developing their businesses. We have seen how organisations such as the Biodynamic Land Trust and the Kindling Trust have had to work very hard to find land to make it available to people who want to enter the industry, and we have had reference to county farms.

Of course, we have a huge problem in England with the massive concentration of land ownership. Your Lordships have heard me refer before, and will again, to land reform. We need to come back to that, but for landowners who wish to make their land available to others, it is important that the Bill includes provision to make sure that that happens, and financial assistance where that would be useful.

Briefly, I support Amendments 127 and 134, which are backed by my noble friend. Again, they look at strategic priorities and multiannual plans, creating certainty for farmers.