Direct Payments to Farmers (Reductions) (England) Regulations 2023

Baroness Boycott Excerpts

Tuesday 28th March 2023 Lords Chamber

Another important point, which I made during the Agriculture Bill, is that farmers need to have their hand held during this transition. Any change is difficult, particularly when the situation is affecting the whole of Europe because of low yields of wheat in France and the problems with water in Spain, but at the end of this dark tunnel will be a better farming system. Some of the big farmers will adapt more quickly; it is the smaller farmers that I am worried about. I hope that my noble friend can reassure me that his ELM scheme will give a helping hand to smaller farmers and to the agents trying to help them, who are still a bit confused as to what the final picture will look like. Having said that, I firmly support the direction in which the Government are heading, and I hope that the House will resoundingly defeat any attempt to divide on either of these amendments.

[Baroness Boycott (CB)]

My Lords, I too support the ELM scheme, and, broadly, I support everything that the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman of Ullock, said. I understand what the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell, said, but I do not believe for a second that we should effectively cancel the ELM scheme at this moment.

I think it is important to put another point of view, to do with the food price situation. The noble Earl, Lord Caithness, talked about when we were progressing the then Agriculture Bill and we debated the ELM scheme. It was decided that sustainable food growing would not be classed as something that could get any sort of payment. It was thought that if you grow food, you have a means of making money; that is fundamentally correct but, at that time, the reckoning was that about 8p in every pound got to the farmer; the rest disappeared into supermarket profit, packaging, production, processing and all the different things up the chain. New figures that have come through in the last year—compounded by issues that the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, set out to do with the war in Ukraine and energy costs—reveal that UK farmers receive less than 1% of the retail price for goods that go through our main supermarkets.

That is not a percentage on the production cost but a percentage of the total price; it is pathetic and tiny. For example—I am referring to the research—for a wrapped, sliced loaf of bread, a cereal farmer will spend 9.03p yet will receive a negligible profit of 0.09p on something sold as a unit for £l.14. If they sold it as a loaf of “real bread” through an independent bakery they would make 0.5p profit; that is not much but it is something. For four beefburgers, the processor gains 10 times the profit of the beef farmer. A carrot grower spending about 14p per bag and selling to the supermarket will get virtually no money in return.

This leaves them with nothing to fund the transition. We all know that we need to have this transition. The agri-food sector currently makes up a third of UK greenhouse gas emissions, while agriculture accounts for 10% or possibly more. Farming drives 70% of terrestrial biodiversity loss. Intensive livestock farming poses a serious threat to climate change—we have debated many times in this House what industrial chicken farming does—and 85% of our land is used to graze livestock or produce crops to feed animals rather than feed us.

Everyone in this House agrees that we have to reform the farming sector, but if we are to reform it through the ELM system, people will need some reason to put in the herbal leys and they need to make some decent money out of food. This is driven by our commercial and rubbish food system dominated by supermarkets, which are driving farmers—especially small farmers—completely out of business.

So I have three small ideas: accelerate ELMS—madly so, putting more money in—introduce a land use framework that supports farm diversity, and support the transition to agroecological farming. Farming can be nature-friendly; it does not need to be industrial. We are pushing big farmers in the middle of England towards being more industrial rather than thinking, “I will grow some hedgerows”.

The Government should set up new, legally binding sector-based supply chain with codes of practice and use data to help farmers deliver more public goods and get supermarkets to help by giving farmers a much fairer deal. Given what we know about the two big supermarkets that recently distributed £1 billion to their shareholders, we could do something; we could have some higher prices paid to the farmers.

Given all that we have learned from recent shortages in fruit and vegetables, the UK must have a coherent and ambitious horticulture strategy to improve our nutritional food security. We are already importing large amounts of fruit and veg from climate and water-stressed countries. As it worsens, this threatens our own food security. As many people have said, we need to support our small and family farmers; but we need also to support our big farmers so that they see a proper advantage in transitioning out of industrial farming methods that cause so much damage.

[Lord Taylor of Holbeach (Con)]

I ought perhaps to draw the attention of the House to my interests as in the register. I am also president of the Institute of Agricultural Management and I have the good fortune to be involved in a horticultural and farming business. I consider it good fortune because that business has grown. As my noble friend Lord Caithness would say, we are in some of the most fertile parts of England, and we have flexibility available to us that is not available to everybody involved in farming.

It is inevitable that we will talk about farming in general as we talk about this SI. The noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, spoke particularly about the strains that face farmers—the difficulties that they have in marketing their produce—but we can all agree that we want to take the industry forward. We want to see the agricultural and horticultural industries going forward.

There may be a certain amount of frustration in the criticism of this SI. Change is, of course, difficult. Nobody likes change, least of all farmers, but we are blessed in this House in that I always feel that we generally have a consensus on this issue. I am slightly distressed to suddenly find that we are talking about a “fatal Motion” and a “regret Motion”. We have in my noble friend the Minister someone who was a colleague of mine in Defra some 11 years ago and whom we can rely on to make sure that the interests that we express here this evening are expressed within government.

I know that change is a difficult matter, but what are we trying to achieve? We are trying to achieve a diversity in farming that has not existed before. We are trying to induce a situation where farmers realise that what is environmentally beneficial to this country is also part and parcel of the way that the state, the Government, funds farming and gives farmers a chance. This SI is a step on the way. It is only the beginning of a continuing process, but we should support it at this stage. This change will be to the benefit of the country and to the benefit of the industry of which I consider myself through my family connections to be a part, and I consider it to be to the benefit of the world in which the majority of our fellow citizens want to live.

I am sorry that the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell, has proposed this amendment. I cannot agree with her. I think it is looking backwards when we need to be looking forwards. I know that we and the Labour Party are both anxious to make sure that we have a policy for agriculture and horticulture which builds on where we are and what we want to achieve; it is something that I think we share.

Imported Beef

Baroness Boycott Excerpts

Wednesday 22nd March 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

I will follow up my noble friend’s request. I am mystified by some science that gets thrown at me occasionally in this place which suggests that beef reared 12,000 miles away, transported in refrigerated trucks and ships and then distributed to retailers here can have a lower carbon footprint than beef or lamb produced on grass fields here and going just a few miles to a retailer. When I hear that, one word comes into my head. It is an unparliamentary one and begins with B.

[Baroness Boycott (CB)]

My Lords, as the Minister outlined, the Conservative Party pledged:

“In all of our trade negotiations, we will not compromise on our high environmental protection, animal welfare … standards”.


But the Australians said of Liz Truss’s trade deal that tariff elimination on such a scale through a free trade agreement was almost unprecedented, and it is not clear what on earth the UK negotiators extracted in reciprocal concessions. The Australians’ welfare standards are lower. They have battery cages for laying hens, still legal, as are sow pens, as is the technique of mulesing on lambs, which I will not go into because it is too distressing. These are not permitted here. Although this deal may not amount to much—Australia is very far away—it is a really dangerous precedent, so can the Government assure the House that we will not be signing any more deals that undercut our welfare standards?

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

I can assure the noble Baroness, who knows a lot about these matters, that animal welfare and environmental standards will be absolutely at the forefront of all future trade negotiations. I just say that these deals balance open and free trade with protections for the agricultural industry. Australia and New Zealand will remove customs duties on 100% of tariff lines for originating products in line with agreed treatments that will be set out in respective tariff schedules on the day the agreements enter into force. There are huge opportunities, particularly for the dairy sector. Imports of dairy products into Australia and New Zealand have increased by around 30%, and I hope our farmers will be able to benefit from that.

Environmental Improvement Plan 2023

Baroness Boycott Excerpts

Monday 6th February 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

I share my noble friend’s delight that we are taking forward this part of the Flood and Water Management Act. I know that it has been a long time coming. There are a lot of different players in this and we want to get it right, but we are now on the home run. I will be able to give her more details on timings in the very near future.

[Baroness Boycott (CB)]

My Lords, can the Minister explain why the Government have decided to relicense neonicotinoids for this year? They were banned here and are banned across other countries that have similar soil structures to ours. As I understand it, this was brought in a few years ago only as an emergency, yet now they have been relicensed again. That slightly goes in the face of what the Minister was saying about banning chemicals.

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

We have certainly not gone back on the commitment to ban neonicotinoids. As has happened in the last two years, we have given an indication that we might be in favour of the application of something called Cruiser SB, a plant protection product containing the active substance thiamethoxam, for the sugar beet industry. It will be allowed to be applied only if winter data shows that there will be a considerable loss of crop. If there is a considerable loss of crop, the sugar that would have been produced would have to come from other parts of the world at a higher carbon cost, and probably grown in circumstances where neonicotinoids are allowed. We will not allow spraying when the plant is in flower, so it will not be as damaging as the seed dressing that caused such a problem. It is a very rare circumstance; in the years in which this derogation has been allowed, on many occasions it has not actually been used because the threshold of potential crop loss was not reached.

Sustainable Farming Incentive Grants

Baroness Boycott Excerpts

Monday 5th December 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

This year we have rolled out our arable and horticultural soil standard, our improved grassland and moorland standards and the annual health and welfare review for animals. Next year we will roll out nutrient management, integrated pest management, hedgerows and advanced levels for the two soils standards, so farmers will start to see what they are doing. They will also receive £265 to cover the cost of the time it takes to fill in the forms. We want to make sure this is as easy as possible. As farmers see the benefits that will accrue to their businesses from the standards that will be applied, I think they will readily accept that this bedrock scheme is of great interest.

I should add that 36,000 farmers—nearly half the farmers in England—are already in agri-environment in the Countryside Stewardship scheme, which will morph into our mid-tier system, which is local nature recovery. So I hope that over the next few months noble Lords will see a really thoughtful, environmentally based system that is attractive to farmers and shows them they can get an income in return for good environmental actions that will support their businesses and give them a future in this business.

[Baroness Boycott (CB)]

My Lords, the Secretary of State said in a recent speech at the CLA conference that the scheme the Minister just mentioned, the local nature recovery scheme, was not going ahead but its aims would be incorporated into the Countryside Stewardship scheme. Can the Minister comment on how on earth this is going to work in practice? Will there be extra money, or will the Countryside Stewardship money be divvied up yet further?

Water Companies: Pollution

Baroness Boycott Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd November 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

My noble friend is absolutely right to raise this. One of the problems is that water coming off roofs and driveways—absolutely clean water—goes into the same sewerage system. To separate foul water from clean water has been estimated at costing between £350 billion and £600 billion, which would have a dramatic effect on people’s bills. However, there is nothing to stop us trying to do this with new housing, as well as retrofitting it into existing housing, and ongoing discussions are taking place with other government departments to see if this can happen.

[Baroness Boycott (CB)]

My Lords, by no means wanting to excuse the water companies anything, I say that, certainly in the west of England, a lot of the river pollution comes from industrial food farming, particularly chickens and nitrates. What are the Government doing to fine it for its contribution to the pollution in our rivers?

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

The noble Baroness raises a very severe problem. We rightly hold water companies to account, but they are only part of the problem. Phosphates from the poultry industry have caused rivers such as the Wye—one of the great rivers of our country—to become, in part and at certain times of the year, practically ecologically dead. We have to recognise that there is a planning issue, alongside the way in which we support and incentivise farmers, and the way in which we enforce these issues, which all have to be brought together. We all want to see things such as food security, free-range eggs and broiler houses in this country, but not at the price that we are now paying in rivers such as the Wye.

Growth Plan 2022

Baroness Boycott Excerpts

Tuesday 25th October 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

Investment zones will happen only where they are wanted by the local authority. The local authority might in some cases be a national park, and national parks do not want them. There are certain areas where they can be, but the Government are committed to green open spaces, the green belt and designated landscapes being maintained. We want to make sure that where there is a need for growth and jobs, which help the economy and help families and households keep a roof over their head and their pensions secured, this is not being done at a risk to the environment.

[Baroness Boycott (CB)]

My Lords, recent data from the Food Foundation, of which I am proud to be a trustee, points out that, this September, 18% of households —over 10 million adults—had food insecurity. Some 58% of those households had cut down on buying fruit and 48% had cut down on buying vegetables, because they are too expensive. Where in the growth and future farming plans will we make vegetables and fruit more available to hungry people at reasonable prices?

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

First, we want to see more of our fruit and vegetables grown in this country and shorten the food miles to get them to the people who need them. We are supporting families as never before in a variety of ways, and food is a vital part of household expenditure, but it is far from the largest. The Government have to act holistically to make sure that, in these difficult times, we help families with energy and other household costs as well as food.

Food: Imports and Security

Baroness Boycott Excerpts

Monday 24th October 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

I am very happy to take up any specific cases where the noble Baroness feels that undue influence has been applied to the supply chain. We have complex supply chains in this country; she is quite right to state that some companies are based overseas. However, where we find problems we can take action, not just through the Environment Act but through the Groceries Code Adjudicator, which this Government also set up.

[Baroness Boycott (CB)]

My Lords, the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit report last week found that the combined impacts of climate change as well as oil and gas prices have driven up food prices by £11.4 billion—that is £407 per household. Obviously, that is much more serious for those on lower incomes. Of that £407, £170 is due to climate change and £236 is due to oil and gas prices. That really tells us, if we ever need reminding, how much the food system is dependent on fossil fuels. Can the Minister agree and support the transition now to agroecological food systems? Can he give us any reassurance that the new ELMS subsidy system will be back on track with the announcement of the new Prime Minister?

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

I think that it is back on track with the existing Prime Minister, or the one that is still there as we speak. I assure the noble Baroness that the very basis of ELMS is an agroecological understanding of our soil standard, getting proper functioning ecosystems to support the food that we produce—so I can absolutely give her that assurance.

Climate Change and Biodiversity: Food Security

Baroness Boycott Excerpts

Thursday 8th September 2022 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Baroness Boycott]

To move that this House takes note of the impact of climate change and biodiversity loss on food security.

[Baroness Boycott (CB)]

My Lords, I am very pleased to introduce this debate today. It was topical when I first tabled it, and it is even more so now. I thank all noble Lords who have signed up to speak, and I especially welcome the noble Baroness, Lady Willis of Summertown, who will be making her maiden speech today. I am sure I join everyone in the House in welcoming her and being extremely grateful for her expertise, which is much needed now. I am also sure, like everyone else, we send our best wishes to the Royal Family.

The war in Ukraine has weaponised global food supply. In blockading ports and destroying infrastructure, Russia has severed the ties between acutely food insecure populations and the Ukrainian wheat and cooking oil on which they depend. The war is not the sole cause, but it has thrown fire on an already unstable situation which is being undermined across the world by climate change. The record-breaking 40-degree heatwave and prolonged drought in the UK—July 2022 was the driest July since 1911, and it has been the driest nine months since 1975—are stark reminders to us all, not least for the farmers and food producers in the UK. Retailers are rejecting vegetables because they are stunted due to a lack of water. Some 50% of the potato crop is not going to be up to much. They are being ploughed back into the soil—a quite horrific prospect as we face the most severe cost of living crisis in my lifetime. Livestock farmers are already using their winter silage or haylage due to a severe lack of grass. What is this going to mean for the winter months ahead? No one knows, because there is no plan.

This is not a problem for us alone. The shocks from climate change, such as drought and other extreme weather, and the associated biodiversity loss are not going anywhere. They are everywhere. Like us, China and Kenya are experiencing their worst droughts in living memory. Alarmingly, research by the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine highlights that we import 32% of our fresh produce—the key to healthy diets—from countries that are most vulnerable to climate change.

But I now turn to the other part of the debate: biodiversity. All too often it is overlooked as part of the fight against climate change. But make no mistake: you will not get one without the other. Some 40 years ago, the world scoffed at James Lovelock’s understanding of the interconnectivity of life on earth—now, when it is almost too late, we are starting to understand just what a miracle it is.

A 2021 report gave a damning verdict on biodiversity in the UK: we are one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world. Institutionally, we are not just failing nature; we are actually hastening its demise. The Dasgupta review, published brilliantly by our Treasury in 2021, highlighted this in one shocking statistic: globally, we subsidise the destruction of nature to the tune of between $4 trillion and $6 trillion annually. In the UK, it is a minimum of $70 million. COP 15, taking place in Montreal later this year, will be a critical test of the world’s resolve and a chance to change that trajectory.

Back to the UK specifically, since the 1970s our food system, from farm to fork, has been the key driver in the decline of nature. A study by the Natural History Museum found that we have lost half of our biodiversity since the industrial revolution. At present, we know that over 40% of UK species are in decline and that one in 10 are threatened with extinction, and that 85% of our soils have been severely degraded. Changes in the way we farm—overusing chemicals, planting monocultures and removing habitat features, partly driven by our own implementation of subsidies—have been a leading contributor to this loss.

Biodiversity plays a central role in both tackling climate change and establishing a farming system that naturally provides pollination and pest predation, as well as soil fertility and carbon storage. We cannot tackle these two issues in isolation; we must see them as one challenge.

Solutions start with the food system. It can be tempting to see something as sprawling as the global food system as completely beyond the reach of Governments. Yet global food insecurity and our food insecurity are the product of policy decisions—they did not just happen. The virtual exclusion of agriculture from climate change policy has spared the sector from the pressure to transition to more sustainable practices. Just as Governments have favoured fossil fuels over renewables, so they have favoured large corporations that say they will deliver cheap food and economic growth. We need to reimagine this system, from what happens in the field to what we eat.

Research is helping us understand that embedding biodiversity into farming systems and increasing the carbon content of soil will improve yields. But how do we manage that soil and the land to feed people and nurture the planet? That is critical. As the national food strategy set out, 22% of land that produces food in the UK is used to produce crops to feed animals. This is massively inefficient.

On land use, I want to debunk something that has been doing the rounds. It has been said that solar farms are a threat to food production. This is emphatically not the case. Solar farms currently take up 0.1% of land in the UK. Even if that is rapidly scaled up, as the previous Government said they would, that would still rise to only 0.3%. In context, that is only 0.5% of all our farming land and about half the size of the land used for golf courses. In addition, solar farms can be biodiversity hotspots if they are not grazed. On this, as on many aspects, we can hit multiple birds with a single stone.

The ecosystems that we degrade through overuse should be helping to absorb carbon, regulating surface temperature and protecting against the destruction wrought by weather and extremes. Instead, we have relentlessly weakened nature’s resilience and limited the capacity of soil to deliver healthy harvests. Agro-ecological approaches have very encouraging outcomes. For instance, Hillesden Farm, a 1,000 acre farm in Buckinghamshire, has since 2005 increased biodiversity while never losing crop yields. As farmers manage 70% of the UK’s land area, and the need to tackle the climate and nature crisis is great, the Government must consider increasing the budget for farming from its current £3.2 billion a year. A land-use framework for not just farmland but all land is crucial, and the Government must not miss the opportunity they now have to act.

Let us turn to another part of the food system. We know that the agri-food supply chain on both an international and national level is concentrated within a handful of companies which hide behind opaqueness. The just-in-time model and the oligopolistic nature of our food system make it vulnerable and fragile to geopolitical and climate shocks. We must have shorter supply chains and local food systems that are built on diversity. The Sustain alliance carried out a significant piece of market research in 2021 which found that most farmers in England and Wales want to supply much more locally and regionally. However, there are very big barriers, from a lack of affordable finance to any investment in infrastructure such as abattoirs.

There is a massive opportunity for our Government to marry up the levelling-up agenda and the net-zero strategy to deliver more climate-friendly and resilient supply chains that create decent jobs and put some pride in place around farming and food. Can the Minister confirm whether he will push for this to happen?

On procurement, the public purse spends over £2 billion a year on catering. It is therefore one of the Government’s most direct tools to change what people eat, reduce the amount of cheap industrial meat and introduce more fruit, veg and pulses, but the standard of public sector food across the UK is really patchy. It is the Government’s job to set standards that all caterers are legally obliged to follow, so that they will serve nutritious meals that demonstrate and normalise healthy diets, rather than cheap junk food.

The Food for Life programme, run by the Soil Association, is proof that good food can be served on public sector budgets. I have seen this for myself over many years. It serves 2 million meals a day and is produced to higher environmental and welfare standards. The Government are currently consulting on introducing a target for 50% of local food, of which at least 20% should come from high production standards, as I have proposed in an amendment to the Procurement Bill.

On what we actually eat, changing how we farm will not be enough to break the vicious cycle of poor diets and environmental harm; only by radically lowering the demand for meat in high-income countries can we do that. Animal products are an important part of high-quality protein but they are a huge drain on global resources. Our overconsumption is costing us our planet as well as our health. One-third of all the grain grown in the world is destined for animal feeds, and if population and the demand for meat keep rising as is forecast, agricultural production will have to increase by 50% in the next 30 years. Clearly, that is quite impossible. As an aside, right now there are 80 billion animals living in cages or feed-lots to feed us—that is four for every single person. It is quite disgusting.

The Committee on Climate Change has repeatedly called for the UK to reduce meat and dairy by a fifth, while the Dimbleby-led national food strategy called for a 30% increase in fruit and veg. How do we get there? The time for being reticent on making policy interventions to shape how we eat must be over. We are not just facing a climate and nature emergency but a big public health one. Governments, policymakers and parliamentarians can no longer claim that this is a simple case of educating children better or asking them to exercise more. In England alone, 28% of adults are obese and 36.2% are overweight; the Covid pandemic has exacerbated that. This is a disgrace.

How have the Government responded to this new challenge? In April, they cut £100 million of funding to local authority weight management services and in May introduced a go-slow on their own obesity policies to restrict “buy one, get one free” on junk food and junk food marketing. I would be interested in hearing from the Minister an explanation of exactly how junk food adverts help citizens afford good food.

The problems of poor diets do not just lie at the feet of individuals, and not all meat and dairy has the same impact. The challenge for all of us—government, policymakers and businesses—is how, in the face of a rocketing cost of living, to guarantee that everyone has access to a healthy diet that does not cost the earth. According to the Food Foundation, there has been a 57% increase in food insecurity since January 2022, and we now have 17.2% of households with kids experiencing lack of food, which affects 2.6 million children. The poorest fifth of UK households would need to spend 47% of their disposable income just to meet the cost of the government-recommended healthy diet. Clearly, they cannot do it.

Here are some things that the Government could do: uprate benefits in line with inflation; increase Healthy Start; and have supermarkets, the top four of which announced pre-tax profits this year of £4 billion, top up the value of vouchers. Government could auto-enrol eligible children in free school meals. The Child Poverty Action Group estimates that currently nearly 900,000 kids are missing out, and they have parents on universal credit. If we are to live in a green and pleasant land, all children going to school must receive a hot and healthy meal, in the same way that they receive a pencil and a ruler.

Can the Government think more creatively about shifting dietary habits? Are there ways that prices could be lowered on healthier foods? Given how resource-intensive and damaging intensive meat farming is, what could Governments, national and local, do to curb their spread? We need to study food insecurity in the round. We should at the very least have a special inquiry into this issue.

It is possible to get a better world, but changes must be fundamental. Farming lobbies are powerful, leaving politicians reluctant to shift from large-scale agriculture. while advising people what to eat is regarded as the nanny state. The result is that our tackling of the environmental harms of industrial agriculture is weak to pathetic. The worst health outcomes have been blamed on the individual, never the system. Food poverty and food insecurity is the result of being unable to cook or being a rotten household manager. We have done everything to prop up a system that is not only killing us—diet-related disease is now the number one cause of preventable death on the planet—but killing our wildlife and soil, and contributing massively to the climate change that is destroying the planet.

Finally, what are the Government for if they fail to look after their people and ensure that they are adequately fed, their children can grow into healthy adults and the soil, the country and the fields they inherited are not used just as an inexhaustible cupboard? This is no easy task for any Government, but I should really like the Minister to agree that just because something might be really difficult does not mean it is not worth doing.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Boycott (CB)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for his reply. As I think he knows, I have a great deal of time and respect for his points of view. I am afraid I do not completely share his optimism that we are getting it all right and looking at green and pleasant lands or sunlit uplands—whatever you want to call them. I have been told that I only have two minutes, so I cannot refer to everyone’s fantastic contributions, but I would obviously like to single out the noble Baroness, Lady Willis, and say how thrilled I am that she is here.

I also point out that people have talked about what is happening in Pakistan and across the world. In this country we have always been shielded from this stuff; we do not think it affects us. In fact, it is affecting us hugely. The noble Baroness, Lady Mobarik, talked about the rice production of Pakistan being severely curtailed. That will affect not only our supply but our prices. I chair Feeding Britain and see this every day.

Food security is to do with everyone. Food is at the bottom—or top, wherever you want to put it—of practically everything we do. We can live without energy, but we cannot live without food. This has been shown by the fantastic contributions from everyone in this House. It is in everything, whether we are talking about water, soil or big companies that run the world. It needs an extreme shake-up. At the moment, we fiddle at the margins. Politically it looks impossible, but that is no reason to say that we should not try.

I thank noble Lords very much for being here tonight. I would be grateful if the Minister could write to as many people as possible as some really important points were made.

Motion agreed.

Clean Air (Human Rights) Bill [HL]

Baroness Boycott Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 8th July 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Boycott (CB)]

It is a pleasure, as always, to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, and I hugely congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, on getting to No. 1 on the Bill list and on getting this Bill going. I honour the presence of Rosamund here in the House—it seems wrong to say “congratulate”, but it is amazing how she has turned a personal tragedy into the most powerful campaign.

I am going to start with a really bad joke that is going round the States this week. It goes like this. The United States Supreme Court decision to curtail the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to regulate carbon dioxide has drawn a puzzled reaction from the nation’s foetuses. A statement from the Association of American Foetuses expressed bafflement that the court would issue a ruling that increased the amount of atmospheric carbon monoxide, which has been shown to have a damaging effect on foetal health. “It’s impossible for us to see today’s ruling as anything but flagrantly anti-foetus,” the statement read. “To say that we are disappointed would be putting it mildly. When you consider that this has followed the decision to overturn Roe v Wade”, the foetuses added, “it just doesn’t seem very pro-life to us”. I am kind of with them on that—not on the Roe v Wade bit but on the other.

My daughter is pregnant with twins. They are 26 weeks and bouncing along; they could be born at any time. She lives in the city and she rides a bike. I guess that the twins are going to be biking, and they might also inherit the asthma that so tortured her father. We live near the Edgware Road, a site that was later found under one of our mayors to be one of the most polluted areas in the city. We spent many nights in A&E, literally waiting for the oxygen supplies while he gasped on the floor. They did not say then that it was to do with air pollution, but I absolutely know that it was. Unlike dear young Ella, he survived, but it was a really miserable experience.

The weird thing about air is that it is a bit like pumping sewage into rivers, about which we had a debate yesterday. You think to yourself: why are we legislating about this? The curious thing about the right to clean air is that, when any constitution or such things were set up, it was not even debated.

There is a case going through in America called Juliana v United States, which involves a group of young people taking on the American Government to demand the right to clean water, clean air and a clean environment. The Trump Government managed to knock this back at every turn of the screw. A friend of mine, who is an academic, was asked to stand up and talk about clean air. She made the point that when the founding fathers wrote the constitution of America, no one assumed that you would ever have anything but clean air—it was just an assumption. Why do we have to legislate for something that is humanity’s right, as the Bill of the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, points out?

I want to make one specific point about something I am pleased to see in the Bill. Clause 8 excludes biomass and wood from the definition of renewable energy. I welcome the fact that this definition would exclude generating electricity from wood pellets, as we do in the UK with companies such as Drax. I have spoken about Drax before and am going to again, briefly. Drax is currently classed as a type of energy generation that is renewable, but Drax’s power plants are the most polluting sites in Europe. Drax is the single largest source of CO₂ emissions in the UK, according to Ember, and the fourth largest emitter in the EU among coal plants. However, we do not count these as carbon emissions due to their classification as renewables and the fact that the trees which were harvested to feed the power plants could, theoretically, be regrown.

Furthermore, the emissions that we produce in the next 30 to 60 years are those which are going to have the make-or-break impact on the warming of the planet. If you look at the info from Drax itself, you see that the emissions from biomass being burned today will not be fully offset, according to analysis by the MIT Sloan School of Management, until 2140. That is a long payback. Biomass pellets produce emissions all along the supply chain: they are harvested, transported, dried and processed, and then transported to Yorkshire. As MIT said, it is actually better to burn coal at source, because the coal is at least dry.

The post-2027 future is wholly dependent on a technology which does not currently operate at a scale even close to what is required—carbon capture and storage. If Drax gets its way and expands its production, we could end up using our entire government budget to offset for biomass while simultaneously subsidising it at £1 billion a year. We are locked into contracts until 2027. If we can get the Bill of the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, into place long before that, that would be one of the many things that will not happen. I thoroughly support the Bill and absolutely congratulate her.

Food Strategy White Paper

Baroness Boycott Excerpts

Thursday 7th July 2022 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Baroness Boycott]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what steps they will take to monitor the delivery of the proposals in their food strategy white paper, published on 13 June.

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

My Lords, I declare my farming interests as set out in the register. The Government food strategy is cross-departmental. We will monitor delivery of the strategy across government, including drawing together evidence on the impacts of individual policies to determine the overall progress of the strategy. We have committed to report on how we are taking forward our actions under the strategy alongside the next UK food security report, drawing on independent analysis from the Climate Change Committee, the Food Standards Agency, and the Office for Environmental Protection.

[Baroness Boycott (CB)]

I thank the Minister for his reply. I am very glad that he is still in his job this morning. However, I beg to disagree. The National Food Strategy, in its original state, was a real attempt to bring food together across all the different departments. In fact, the White Paper response from the Government has put various elements back in different departments, and the one chance that we have had since the war to see food systemically as a whole has been thrown away. No one can be in any doubt that the food system is breaking: childhood obesity, health, effects on farming and biodiversity, and now an inability to get three decent meals a day by some 10 million people in this country. How can the Government call this a cross-cutting strategy?

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

I always defer to the noble Baroness because of her great experience and passion on this issue. However, this is absolutely a cross-government initiative. We have set up our cross-government food group, which brings together senior civil servants across government departments and the FSA to examine our strategy and monitor it on key delivery points. We will bring together the monitoring and evaluation of individual policies to enable us, and the wider population, to evaluate the food strategy and how we are performing against our targets.