Trade (Australia and New Zealand) Bill

Debate between Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle and Lord Inglewood

Report stage
Tuesday 14th March 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Inglewood (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I think your Lordships must agree that I am a very fortunate Member of your Lordships’ House, because with the possible exception of the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, everyone has been speaking on my account as a Cumbrian hill farmer. I should declare that interest, and that I am president of the National Sheep Association and of the Livestock Auctioneers’ Association.

The fundamental concern of agriculture about this seems to go back to the fact that when you have a carcass it is not really very clear whether it has been nurtured under benign environmental conditions or malignant ones. Equally, you cannot necessarily tell very easily, because of complicated scientific aspects that I had explained to me but do not entirely understand, whether it has had hormones introduced into it, and so on and so forth.

As I understand the law, under the international agreements, lamb in particular and beef from the two countries that we are talking about can be imported into our country. The legal impediment rests not there but with the fact that we are, under the WTO rules, allowed under certain circumstances to use welfare and environmental standards, as part of our domestic consumer protection legislation, to prohibit such products being placed on the market.

Against that background, what is needed in the context of the wider concerns that we have been touching on seems to be some kind of mechanism so that the British consumer and the British farmer know whether carcasses that might come into this country actually adhere to the appropriate standards. Speaking for myself as a Cumbrian hill farmer, I have no problems about competing with animals that have been reared in accordance with the standards that apply here. My worry is that you might in theory be undercut by products that come in from outside that do not adhere to those standards, for the simple reasons that the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh, gave about the level playing field. The difficulty in theory is establishing whether that is the case.

Therefore, the question I put to the Minister—if he cannot answer me now, I ask him to do so by letter—is whether the Australian and New Zealand Governments will have proper farm assurance schemes in place to enable the traceability of the carcasses so that they can be identified. That seems to me, and to a number of other people who have been thinking about this, probably the most effective way of ensuring that this provision is properly adhered to in terms of our own domestic production. That would go a very long way towards allaying a lot of the concerns that have been expressed.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I rise briefly to offer general support for the direction of all the amendments in this group. I am sure that the Front-Benchers will have more to say. In response to the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, I note that the commitment from the Minister to offer regular impact assessments is not the same as something written into the Bill. The Procurement Bill contains increasing promises from the Government for more local and national public procurement for schools, hospitals, prisons, et cetera. I am not quite sure of the timing or how this interacts with the nature of the procurement in this Bill.

I want to pick up on a point from the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville. She noted concerns about ongoing negotiations with Canada and Mexico. These amendments can also be taken as a broader expression of concern about the potential impact of opening up our markets to agricultural products from around the world, produced under far worse environmental, animal welfare and public health conditions than the standards we have been used to under EU membership and those of our own producers.

For anyone who has not seen it, there is a very interesting report on Politico reflecting on discussion around the potential CPTPP membership in which Canada is pushing with Mexico to have the same market access for agriculture as Australia and New Zealand have won under their deals with the UK. If we look at Mexico’s production conditions, we see that its beef imports have very high carbon emissions. Canada uses farrowing crates, tail docking, teeth trimming and lots of other practices that we would regard as wholly unacceptable in the pigmeat industry.

These amendments are to be taken together as a real expression of concern about what kind of food we will potentially see on our plates and the environmental impact of the food our farmers will be producing.

Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill

Debate between Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle and Lord Inglewood

Committee stage
Thursday 2nd March 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Inglewood (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, being a bear of rather little brain, it has taken me quite a long time to digest the extremely helpful and valuable contribution of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas. He approached the issue from the perspective of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, but, given that the United Kingdom is a single market, which is a single integrated entity, what will the consequences be for England of the kind of overlooking that he described? We do not seem to have touched on that.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I will share the deep concerns of Green parties around these islands about the issues that we have been discussing. Like Members from all corners of your Lordships’ House, Green parties would like to see the Bill thrown out altogether, although the proposal of the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, of a pause and a chance to think and understand is, at least, a positive alternative that we should consider. We have heard lots of metaphors—the noble Lord, Lord Wilson, gave us one. I am imagining the fudge, which you have unwisely packed in your suitcase when flying back from a hot place, dripping out all over everything and making a mess everywhere. That is possibly a useful metaphor for where the Bill has put us.

I put on the record a highly unusual and important joint letter written to the Financial Times on 28 November by the Cabinet Secretary for the Constitution from the Scottish Government and the Counsel General and Minister for the Constitution from the Welsh Government. A small part of it said:

“This bill allows UK ministers to take decisions in policy areas that are devolved to the Welsh senedd and the Scottish parliament and to do so without consultation or the need for their consent.”


That is essentially what we have been talking about.

There has been an implicit point in our debate that has not been made explicitly. I will draw particularly on the work of Dr Viviane Gravey from Queen’s University Belfast, who points out that the laws have been transposed into the nations of these islands in different ways, so we have huge diversity. That means that the devolved nations cannot help each other out. A natural situation would be that, with the issues of resources that the noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas, raised, ideally, people would help each other out and work co-operatively. In most cases, that will not work in this situation because each nation is different.

I will briefly highlight some of the ways in which the nations are different. On Wales, we have not discussed this much but there is a huge impact on the well-being of future generations Act, which has to be considered in the context of the Bill mentioning no increase in “regulatory burden”. That and the well-being of future generations Act are profoundly contradictory, and I do not see any way of resolving that contradiction.

Many people with vastly more knowledge than I—including the noble Baroness, Lady Ritchie, and others—have commented on Northern Ireland. I saw some telling figures. Until autumn, when the caretaker Ministers ceased to hold office, the Department for Infrastructure had identified 500 rules and regulations and the Department of Agriculture and Rural Development had identified 600 rules and regulations—experts describe that as the tip of the iceberg. Given all of the issues that Northern Ireland needs to deal with, dumping that on it as well is simply unacceptable. That is why, in the context of this group, Amendment 29 from the noble Baroness, Lady Humphreys, and others at least takes us to the core of the issues that we need to address.

On Scotland, the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh of Pickering, covered a great deal of this, but I will mention some conclusions from the Scottish Human Rights Commission, which said that this would create incredible legal uncertainty about human rights and the ability to deliver them, and it would make it difficult to enforce those rights if the Bill goes through in its current form.

The noble Lord, Lord Cormack, made an important point about the tone and direction of travel here. The Windsor agreement is a significant reset in our approach to our relationship with Brussels. The tone and approach have changed in a positive manner. I suggest that we need to see a similar change in tone and approach at Westminster, where, under previous Prime Ministers, we saw an extremely aggressive and unco-operative approach towards the nations of these islands. We need a different tone and approach in this not very united kingdom. Dealing with the Bill—stopping it, pausing it or at least implementing something like Amendment 29—is absolutely essential.