Sheep Farming: No-deal EU Exit
Debate between Baroness Chapman of Darlington and George Eustice(5 years, 2 months ago)
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George Eustice
I can absolutely give my hon. Friend that reassurance. He will be aware that the Government are seeking a free trade agreement with the European Union in the medium to long term and, if we can get it, in the short term. In the short term, the Prime Minister has already made it clear that in the event of a no-deal exit we will show solidarity with the sheep industry and make interventions, where necessary, to support farmers’ incomes.
George Eustice
I am going to conclude because we are running out of time.
The hon. Member for Bishop Auckland (Helen Goodman) raised the important issue of whether we have the legal vires to make those interventions, and I can confirm that we do. The Government have a number of legislative vehicles with which to do so, including elements of retained EU law, and the Natural Environment and Rural Communities Act 2006 also includes general grant-making powers that give us the ability to do so. We are considering two possible options. One is a headage payment on breeding ewes, should that be necessary. That would be important in the event that farmers producing lambs are the ones who have the shock to their income. The second option would be something called a slaughterhouse premium, which would in effect involve a supplementary top-up payment for lambs at the point of slaughter. We could use a combination of those options but, broadly speaking, a headage payment and income-support approach would be the right approach to adopt.
Agriculture Bill (Thirteenth sitting)
Debate between Baroness Chapman of Darlington and George Eustice(6 years ago)
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Jenny Chapman
I have been advised by the Chair not to respond, so I will resist, but there is nothing processy about our objection to the deal. The deal does not include that which we have told the Prime Minister we need in order to support it.
Our fourth test about preventing a race to the bottom is absolutely relevant to the new clause. Unless we have the new clause, or something like it that the Government have the opportunity to introduce—I have never seen a Minister stand up and say, “I accept your clause” to anybody across the way; I understand that they always want to bring back their own—we will see a race to the bottom. For about 18 months, we have set out the criteria by which we would assess a deal. Avoiding a race to the bottom is very important to us for the reasons we are discussing.
The withdrawal agreement and the political declaration mention non-regression measures. I have not got the agreement with me—this is the only time this week that I have not carried the damn thing around with me. Will non-regression measures apply to food standards, environmental protections and animal welfare? The agreement contains something about workers’ rights, but it would be helpful to know from the Minister whether non-regression measures will apply to the issues we are discussing.
Things look uncertain. We are not even sure whether the agreement published last week will be agreed by Parliament, or what steps the Government will take even if it is agreed. Which measures will apply to this industry, and what opportunities will there be to make this type of clause binding if we do not take the opportunity now? I am not certain that we will have the opportunity before the end of March next year. We have a duty to put this in place in some way, shape or form between now and then. If the Minister assures us that there will be an opportunity to do so, we will need to think about that, but for now, I think this is it. If the Government do not adopt these measures today, when will they do so? They are incredibly important, and there is clearly cross-party support for this kind of instrument. I think the Minister gets that. It would be useful to hear how he intends to proceed, how far he intends to go, and what form he thinks the protections need to be in.
George Eustice
The amendments all seek to achieve the same thing: to set out in statute a requirement that no trade deal can be done or put before Parliament unless its terms mean that no good can be imported that does not meet our standards.
Before talking about the approach that we intend to take on future trade deals, I want to say first and foremost that this is an incredibly important issue. As a number of hon. Members highlighted, the Secretary of State and I could not have been clearer that we will not water down our trade and animal welfare standards in pursuit of a trade deal. The Department for International Trade has now adopted that position unambiguously, despite what the hon. Member for Bristol East said. It is clear that we will not water down our food standards in pursuit of a trade deal.
I want to make a number of points. First, the EU regulations on chlorine-washed chicken, hormone-treated beef and other standards are coming across through the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018 and will sit as retained EU law. It will be unlawful to do a trade deal allowing hormone-treated beef or chlorine-washed chicken into the UK unless Parliament decides to repeal the legislation that bans its sale in the UK.
Secondly, we are obviously working on our future trade agreement with the European Union. The approach outlined in the Chequers proposal, which remains the basis for the UK’s approach in the development of a future economic partnership, is that we will have a common rulebook on issues pertinent to the border, which will include sanitary and phytosanitary issues. It is likely that a Bill giving effect to the future economic partnership will give additional protections in this space.
This is an important matter for another reason. The United Kingdom has been on a rather different journey from the United States—in particular, over the past 30 years. In the UK, there has been a growth of consumer interest in food provenance. Consumers want more labelling so they can understand how their food was produced. They want higher standards, and they have sought to purchase locally where possible. We have seen a growth in farmers’ markets and a much stronger consumer interest in the quality of food.
George Eustice
That is a very important point. We are working at the moment to try to get access for British beef to the United States because it is a premium product and their beef tends to be lower grade. There is also a good market for British dairy products, particularly our famous cheeses, in the United States where they largely have a standard cheddar that is not particularly good. There is a market for those. There are offensive opportunities in some of these trade deals, which we should always bear in mind.
Jenny Chapman
I would observe that not all American food is as dire as it might seem from our deliberations. There is a thriving organic, local food market in the United States.
I want to ask the Minister about process. Will there be an opportunity for Parliament at the mandate-setting stage to constrain the trade negotiations, so that it can be made clear to negotiators that Parliament will not accept anything that breaches the standards that we are trying to embed? The Minister seeks to do that agreement by agreement, but we are trying to put those constraints in the Bill.
George Eustice
The hard power, for want of a better term, that Parliament will have is the power to block ratification at the end of the process. As I outlined earlier, there will be a 14-week consultation process where anybody—consumer groups and whoever—can feed in.
As the negotiations progress, there will be regular scrutiny from the International Trade Committee, which will be a parliamentary Committee providing that scrutiny. Therefore, it will not be a mandate as such—in that sense, it is perhaps more akin to the Australian system—but it will have some of the features of the US system, in terms of parliamentary overview as the negotiations progress, but also the ability to block ratification at the end.
Agriculture Bill (Tenth sitting)
Debate between Baroness Chapman of Darlington and George EusticeTuesday 13th November 2018
(6 years ago)
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The Chair
Amendment proposed, 97, in clause 17, page 12, leave out lines 39 to 44 and insert the words on the amendment paper. The question is that the amendment be made.
The Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (George Eustice)
Apologies, Sir Roger: there is quite a large number of amendments in this group, and I am just finding my way to amendment 46. This is another attempt to replace the word “may” with “must”. Again, the argument is that the use of the word “may” is wrong. The Agriculture Act 1947 has not been referred to at all today, and I know that the hon. Member for Stroud likes it a great deal, so let me try this quotation:
“Where…it appears to the appropriate Minister expedient so to do, or if it appears to him otherwise expedient so to do in the public interest, he may by order fix or vary any such price”.
Even provisions in the 1947 Act, in this case relating to deficiency payments or a price support mechanism, use “may”.
The important thing to note about all these sorts of powers is that, by definition, there is a wide element of discretion. We are talking about dealing with crisis scenarios. The aim is not to intervene routinely all the time but to intervene expeditiously and in a fleet-of-foot way when a crisis needs to be addressed. The wording we have used in the clause and in many other areas in this part of the Bill is largely borrowed from what currently sits in EU legislation. The European Union also has discretionary crisis powers for exceptional circumstances, and its wording and approach are similar to what we have here, and, indeed, what we have here is similar to what we had in the 1947 Act.
Amendment 97 would add an additional definition of “exceptional market conditions”: if, on the day the United Kingdom leaves the EU, it is not in a customs union, that, of itself, should be an exceptional market condition. The hon. Member for Darlington comprehensively set out her views on these matters. I do not want to drift too far into the debate about customs unions, because we will have hours and hours of fun in the months ahead debating the agreement that comes back before Parliament.
However, we do not have to be in a customs union with the EU to avert a so-called exceptional market circumstance. We have been clear that we want a comprehensive free trade agreement and, crucially, a customs agreement—although not a customs union. We also seek a transition period. We are clear, as a Government, about what we seek in this negotiation, which is in its closing stages.
George Eustice
Yes, I can. If the hon. Lady reads the proposal that came out of Chequers, she will see that a customs agreement is one that allows us to strike trade deals with the rest of the world and in which we would collect and process, on behalf of the European Union, the duty due on goods destined for the EU.
George Eustice
I will not, because, as I said, I want to deal with the substance of the clause.
The Government are clear about our approach to getting in place a new free trade agreement and a partnership. However, there are several other flaws with the amendment. First, we have to bear in mind that the impacts of a no-deal Brexit will vary from sector to sector; it is not possible to determine exactly what they will be. For instance, we know that the sheep and barley sectors export quite a lot of their goods to the European Union. However, we are net importers in virtually every other sector, so although there may be an impact on sheep, there would almost certainly not be on beef, because there will be less import competition.
I do not think it is wise to put this proviso into the Bill. The reality is that, if the terms on which we left the European Union—be that with no deal or any other circumstance that led to restrictions on trade—led to a severe disturbance in the agricultural market, and if that disturbance threatened to have a significant impact on agricultural producers, the power is already there to act. We do not need to artificially bring a current debate around the customs union into a Bill that is built to last for the long term.
George Eustice
That is the case with a number of other things that we import from other countries, including Iceland, which we import a lot of fish products from. We have ways of dealing with these issues.
As I said, the approach that we have adopted with the common rule book and the customs agreement will address those issues.
George Eustice
I will not give way. With these interventions, a number of Members are giving the impression that they would rather be in the main Chamber taking part in the EU debate than in a debate about future farming policy.
The purpose of this amendment is to define not being in a customs union as being a crisis in and of itself. That is absolutely wrong, because we can have a highly successful partnership and trade agreement that does not require us to be in a customs union with the European Union. Many nations in this world are not in a customs union with the European Union.
Jenny Chapman
Some of the contributions have been helpful in giving the lie to the idea that you cannot trade successfully and extensively with countries in other parts of the world while in a customs union, but that is not the point I wanted to make. The Minister says that not being in a customs union is not a crisis, but can he name any border anywhere on the planet where the kind of frictionless trade on which our industry depends is achieved without being in a customs union?
George Eustice
There are many successful economies in the world that are not in a customs union with the European Union.
I come back to my point: if as a consequence of the agreement—or indeed of there being no agreement—with the European Union, there are market disturbances that have an impact on agricultural producers, the power is there to act. There is no need to try to define additional powers in the way that this amendment does.
Amendments 117 and 123 seek to downgrade the test from a severe market disturbance to a significant market disturbance. It is wrong to lower the threshold in that way, for reasons I want to explain. We had evidence from one of the academics that suggested we needed something akin to the old deficiency payments system in that famous 1947 Act. The world has moved considerably since that point, and in many sectors we are seeing the development of viable futures markets to help farmers manage risk. In some countries—notably the US, in places such as Chicago—they put in place legislation to deliver the transparency needed to get a functioning futures market that enables farmers to defend themselves against price fluctuations.
We also have some interesting projects being developed in the UK. We are world leaders in issues such as agricultural insurance. There are some interesting projects on forming mutual funds—effectively, mutualised risk insurance models—that help farmers to insure their margin and protect a given quantity of milk, for instance, at a given price. Moving these powers away from just intervening where there is catastrophic risk, and away from a “severe” to some sort of “significant” disturbance, is the quickest way to snuff out the development of those private futures markets and risk management models.
Jenny Chapman
A procedure would take place in Parliament but we have all sat on those Committees and seen just how thorough the examination of regulations can be.
The protection of the environment and consumers is very important. We would argue that, if anyone wants to change those important rules and the law of this country, they should introduce a Bill. We can then scrutinise it properly, with votes on the Floor of the House and the involvement of both Houses. Let us have the warranted scrutiny because these incredibly important issues affect how our country perceives itself and is perceived overseas, and the protection of the environment. The protections warrant the hard work that would need to be undertaken by Ministers, which is what people put their hands up for when they voted to leave—they wanted the ability to make their laws properly, as they saw it. To do that by regulation, through whatever procedure, is not what the public had in mind when they voted in 2016.
I am afraid that warm words from the Minister will not do this time, nor will assurances that Parliament can be involved when future regulations are proposed. We are very concerned. Subject to what the Minister says, we might want to test the opinion of the Committee on these amendments.
George Eustice
It is important to note that amendments 47 and 82 are to some extent antagonistic. On amendment 47, as the shadow Minister said, we have debated the issue of “may” or “must” on many clauses. I simply reiterate that having that power conveyed through the term “may” is how comparable legislation is drafted and is the approach we take. In addition, in this instance, there is another reason why “may” is absolutely the appropriate word to use rather than “must”.
The hon. Member for Stroud should read the clause in the context of the fact that all existing EU marketing standards will be brought across through the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018 and placed on a UK statutory footing. It is therefore not the case that, in the absence of immediate action by the Secretary of State, there will be no marketing standards. In the absence of any action under clause 20, the position would be that retained EU law on marketing standards endures and remains after we leave the EU as it was when we were in it. Paradoxically, if there were a requirement that he “must” introduce regulations in all areas, the Government might be forced to change retained EU law that they were perfectly content with and not in a hurry to change.
Jenny Chapman
Let me reassure the Minister. I am not saying that we should keep things as they are and never, ever change anything. I just think that, if he intends to change these things, he ought to introduce an environment Bill or a consumer protection Bill so that we can decide where the country is going, and not just leave it to the Secretary of State.
George Eustice
Of course, at the moment it is just left to the European Union, and we have no input at all. The hon. Lady will note that the set of regulations set out in clause 20 will be subject to the affirmative procedure. We recognise that these are important issues and that retained EU law may be replaced—there is the option to do that—so we have made them subject to the affirmative procedure. Parliament will have a role.
Amendment 83 is about the duty to consult, which we have covered on many occasions. I say again that DEFRA loves consultations. We have consultations on all sorts of matters. I can give the hon. Lady an undertaking that, before making any changes under clause 20, there will indeed be a consultation—not only because we always consult on matters of this sort anyway, but for another reason: as I explained, on issues of food standards, and food safety in particular, there is already a statutory requirement to consult. It is currently contained in article 9 of EU regulation 178/2002, which requires consultations on changes to food law. That EU regulation will come across in the retained EU law. In addition to my normal argument, there is an even stronger argument, which is that there is already a statutory requirement for changes in many of these areas, because they relate to food standards.
Having addressed hon. Members’ concerns and explained that retained EU law will be the starting point, and that we need not be in a hurry to change these things if we do not want to, I hope that the amendment will be withdrawn.
The Chair
Order. I am looking at you, Ms Chapman, in case you want to speak before Mr Drew winds up. I was not able to allow you to speak last time because he had wound up the debate.
Agriculture Bill (Ninth sitting)
Debate between Baroness Chapman of Darlington and George Eustice(6 years ago)
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Dr David Drew (Stroud) (Lab/Co-op)
I am delighted to be back, Sir Roger. I spent much of last week in Northern Ireland and Ireland, and will no doubt be referring to that in Committee.
A couple of points are important to the clause. We need to understand that the Bill should encompass pillar 2 of the common agricultural policy. I am not sure whether it does, although this is the closest that we get to it. I am aware that in due course we will be debating my amendment 115, so I am not going to talk about timetables.
I want to talk about the substance of rural development: it is very important that we understand that although agriculture is crucial to rural development, it is not the totality of it. I would argue that the Government have not got a rural policy, and they need one. Things are going on in rural England, to which the Bill largely refers, that are not good at the moment. Anyone who has read the material that has come out about the relative decline of market towns should be very clear that we need to invest in those communities and the villages around them.
The worry is that the Government not only do not have a rural policy, but they have no one to speak on a rural policy. They dismissed all rural advocacy. I am not saying that new Labour was wonderful in this area, although we did have a good rural policy between 1999 and 2004—principally around the countryside White Paper of 2000 and what the £1 billion earmarked for rural areas implied. It made a significant difference. Sadly, that has all gone: we have lost the rural tsar and the Commission for Rural Communities. That worries me when it comes to this Bill; I do not know how pillar 2, which largely invested in rural communities through the common agricultural policy, transfers into the Bill.
I will be interested to hear what the Minister says. We are back again to the usual game of powers and duties. The Minister and Secretary of State do not need to do anything. They can make lots of warm noises about rural areas, but the reality is that unless we have vibrant rural areas, we will not have a vibrant farming sector because those are inextricably linked.
It is important that we get clarity from the Government on how pillar 2 is embedded in the Act, to make sure that rural areas are not forgotten. The Agriculture Bill is the nearest we will get to being able to talk about rural areas and their need for investment and support through the nature of farming—obviously, a lot of the people who get the benefit of rural development are farmers or farm businesses along the food chain.
Will the Minister clarify what guarantees there are in respect of pillar 2? It was never perfect, but a lot of the academic and support work that goes into rural areas came through that channel. We all know that that sort of funding is highly questionable at the moment. I hope the Government will make some real statements today about how they intend to fund rural development.
The Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (George Eustice)
I want to begin by addressing the shadow Minister’s over-arching point about rural development and the pillar 2 scheme. I will respond to that specific question, which is not directly relevant to this clause but is picked up in other parts of the Bill.
Pillar 2 and pillar 1 are an EU construct: that distinction will no longer exist, but the policy objectives, currently delivered under pillar 2, will be delivered in the following ways. Clause 1(1) is all about the farmed environment and supporting farmers to farm in a more sustainable way and enhance the environment. The objectives delivered by the current countryside stewardship schemes and the previous entry level stewardship and higher level stewardship schemes, which account for the lion’s share of the funding in pillar 2, will be picked up in clause 1(1).
Jenny Chapman
This gets to the nub of the problem. As we have said, the Secretary of State may give financial assistance for those things, but the Bill does not say that the Secretary of State is going to do any of those things.
George Eustice
We had a long debate about the drafting protocols that we have always had in this country, and “may” is the wording that has been used in a number of Acts, including the Natural Environment and Rural Communities Act 2006 and a number of other Acts that Opposition Members are passionate about, such as the Agriculture Act 1947. We covered that in detail last week when we debated this issue.
I want to return to the point that clause 1(2) enables us to make grant aid and loans for farm productivity, and that picks up a number of the other components of the pillar 2 schemes—notably what we currently call countryside productivity schemes, which are all about supporting farmers to invest in new equipment.
Finally, as I also made clear in earlier debates, there will also be a shared prosperity fund with a rural dimension, which will pick up some of the other objectives currently delivered in pillar 2, such as the LEADER scheme. We have a clear plan, both in the Bill and the development of a shared prosperity fund, to deliver rural development and support.
This clause, in common with clauses 9 and 10, is all about the power to modify retained EU law. That is very important because our frustration at the moment with the bureaucracy around the current schemes is horrendous. The amendment seeks to change “simplifying” or “improving” the operation of the scheme to saying simply to make
“changes which the Secretary of State believes to be necessary”.
I am not sure that the hon. Lady’s amendment narrows the scope—it might, in fact, give more discretion to the Secretary of State. We are clear we want that power to be used to simplify and improve. A number of people have asked what “simplify” and “improve” mean. I think that is understood: it is to simplify and improve. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Scarborough and Whitby made clear, we would not want to make the situation worse and more complex.
Jenny Chapman
It is not sufficient to say that people have asked what “simplify” and “improve” mean and then to say that they mean to simplify and improve. It might help if the Minister gave a couple of examples so that we have a clearer idea of what he intends.
George Eustice
Yes, I was coming on to do just that. One frustration at the moment is having LEADER groups up and down the country regularly complaining to me about the process that they have to go through in the application. The current regime has been made more onerous with the number of checks and the amount of paperwork required.
We have had problems in the past when people with relatively small grants have been told that they have to get three or four quotes for the job to be done. There is nothing wrong with that in principle but, if there is a slight modification to their plan and they have to make an adjustment to their investment, they have to go out to the market again and get a whole new set of quotes. They find that kind of bureaucracy deeply frustrating. This provision would enable us to improve that.
Another example comes from the countryside stewardship schemes. People get deeply frustrated about the amount of photographic evidence they have to send in; we have even had complaints that people have had to send in photographs of invisible boundaries because that is a requirement of the scheme rules. Again, that has all been done because of pressure from the IACS regime, as it is called: the integrated administration and control system, enforced by the EU. The provision would give us the ability to take off some of those rough edges.
At the moment, we get about £100 million of disallowance fines a year from the European Union, and a large amount of that is for trivial points around the way something is recorded. One example that I remember particularly well is that we ended up with fines from the European Union because it did not like how we had recorded how we checked whether companies were VAT registered; they were large companies with grants under the fruit and veg regime in that instance. We had checked that they were VAT registered. The check took place and was recorded through an email exchange, but the EU said we should have recorded it on a particular type of form.
That is the monstrous complexity and bureaucracy that bedevils all these schemes, and that is why it is right that we strike down that unnecessary bureaucracy and administration, as we seek to do in clause 9.
George Eustice
I will answer that important point first. The regulations are drafted in a way that assumes guilt—often, it is worse than that. For example, farmers might have made a number of innocent and minor record-keeping errors and we might have chosen to write warning letters instead of imposing fines. Under the penalty matrix, the EU auditors take the view that there almost has to be a quota for guilt: if we were to be more lenient on some farmers because they had made innocent errors, we would have to apply higher penalties to other farmers, deeming them to be guilty. It is an EU process that is completely inconsistent with British notions of justice and the rule of law, but it is a system that we have had to endure for many years.
Jenny Chapman
People watching this will be astonished that we are being asked to assume that one group within society is somehow to be treated differently when they are in receipt of public funds, because they have a tradition of honour and not being misleading and should be viewed differently from other people who are getting support. There will have to be rigorous procedures around all this. The Government are in for a huge shock if they think that the scrutiny and pressure from the EU will not be replaced by pressure from constituents and taxpayers.
George Eustice
That was not my point at all, and it was not my right hon. Friend’s point. The point was that we should allow farmers and other landowners to be treated the same as everybody else; apply the principles of justice and rule of law that we have in this country; and not have an arbitrary system of penalties coming from the EU.
To come back to my point about the areas in which we can improve, clause 9 will be an important area for some of our evidence requirements and rules on deadlines and dates; we would be able to show more flexibility. The powers in clause 11 will probably be more modest, but they enable us to sort out some of that unnecessary administration—on the LEADER scheme, in particular. They would enable us, for instance, to vary the length of agreements when we thought that was appropriate, particularly if we wanted to extend and roll forward some of the legacy agreements for a few years.
George Eustice
Yes. The devolved nations have that retained EU law through the EU withdrawal Act. We have discussed previously that Scotland requires some kind of clause to be able to continue to make payments after we leave the European Union, but that is relatively easy to remedy. A combination of this Bill and the EU withdrawal Act gives us the power right across the UK to honour all those commitments that have been entered into.
Returning to clause 11, the hon. Member for Darlington asked whether subsection (3) is an exhaustive list or whether we can add to it. It is not exhaustive but it covers the bulk of the regulations. I will explain why we drafted it in that way. The regulations listed under subsection (3) are effectively all the current in-force rural development regulations. However, we have kept open the option to broaden the list slightly because we have some legacy schemes—older agreements under previous countryside stewardship or productivity EU schemes that are no longer technically in force—and we might still want the ability to modify and tweak them. The best way to describe it is to say that the list is not exhaustive, but is close to being exhaustive. It covers all the regulations currently in force, but we need just a slight amount of room to capture the previous legacy schemes that are no longer in force.
Jenny Chapman
If there are not many of those additional measures, why did the Minister not include them, just to ensure more clarity in the Bill?
George Eustice
The problem with EU regulations is that they are often chopped and changed all the time. We can capture the snapshot of what is there at the moment, but some of these regulations will have repealed and replaced elements of previous ones, but often not all elements. This is a complex area. Often there will be a grant agreement in place where there are binding requirements between the two, but where the initial regulation under which it was made has lapsed and, sometimes, been partially—but not fully—replaced by new ones. There is a constant churn of EU regulations, so we have tried to capture the vast majority of those in force now, but we need that movement to cover areas that might have been missed.
Amendment 80 proposes that regulations under this clause should be made under the affirmative rather than the negative resolution procedure. We discussed this issue in debates on earlier clauses where we are seeking to modify retained EU law. We are talking about technical changes and improvements to legacy schemes that are going to be wound down anyway, and it is not appropriate to have lots of affirmative resolutions for that type of change. We envisage making a single sweep of changes to improve and simplify these schemes in one point, and that would be the end of it.
However, I can give the hon. Lady some reassurance on her amendment 81. As I explained earlier in relation to a similar amendment, DEFRA needs no encouragement to hold consultations. We love consultations. My constant refrain to officials is: “Are we sure we really need a consultation on this?” We often hold consultations where we have just a couple of dozen people who can bear to respond to them. While we do not need to put this requirement in legislation—the only legislative requirement for consultation in the DEFRA sphere, for obviously good reason, is for food safety, which is in the Food Safety Act 1990—I can give her an undertaking that, before making changes to the scheme under the powers of clause 11, we would hold a consultation to ensure that all relevant parties could be engaged.
Jenny Chapman
I have such concerns about this, because it could become a free-for-all, where the Government can do what on earth they like. We cannot sit back and allow that to happen. Minette Batters said in evidence that she did not wish this kind of support to become politicised. I do not blame her for that, and I would not wish that in her position either, but the fact is that it is going to be politicised, and the Government have no idea what they want to do. I am not accusing the Government of having some sort of sneaky plan up their sleeve that they wish to inflict on rural communities, but I do not think they know what they want to do. They have therefore decided to come up with this clause, to give themselves as much flexibility as possible. I accept the Minister’s undertaking on consultation. I take him at his word and will be holding him to that, but the Government have not been clear. I do not think they know what they want to do. The list is not exhaustive, as we would have hoped.
I will not push each amendment to a vote—aspects of this issue will undoubtedly be dealt with in the House of Lords—but we have genuine concerns. We are not just trying to make a point; it is a real problem for Parliament and, potentially, rural communities that the Secretary of State is being allowed these kinds of sweeping powers under an inadequate procedure, which cuts out parliamentary scrutiny and Members’ ability to voice their concerns. I will therefore put amendment 80 to a vote.
Agriculture Bill (Seventh sitting)
Debate between Baroness Chapman of Darlington and George Eustice(6 years ago)
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The Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (George Eustice)
It is a pleasure to begin the day by responding to this particular amendment. At its heart is an attempt to put into the Bill a requirement to have something akin to the existing cross-compliance regime. I will come back to that later.
There are two key points I would make about the amendment. Clause 2 and clause 3, which we will come to later, as already drafted, make allowance and provision for a Government to create such conditions through an affirmative statutory instrument should they feel that that is the right thing to do. Under clause 2(2) it is open to the Government to say that there are conditions attached to entry into these schemes and that there may be, under clause 3(2)(g), penalties for breaches of the regulatory baseline.
There is already an option, given how the Bill is drafted, for a Government to bring forward proposals of that sort through an SI. My argument is that the detail spelled out in amendment 84 would be the appropriate level of detail that might be in a particular SI brought in under, for instance, clause 2, and probably addressed through anything brought in under clause 3 as well. We could do that, if we wanted, through the SI and that would be the appropriate place to do it.
However, my general view is that we should separate out as far as we can the regulatory baseline, which should apply to everyone equally whether they are in or out of a scheme, and conditions that we attach to financial schemes to support farmers to go above and beyond that regulatory baseline. The danger of the amendment here, as I see it, is that the very first thing it says, in 3A, is:
“It shall be a condition for receipt of financial assistance…that the person in receipt can demonstrate”,
that they abide by all those things.
We want people to feel good about entering these schemes. When a farmer phones up the Government, Natural England or whichever agency is administering the scheme to say, “I am really keen to enter your new agri-environment scheme,” if the first thing that happens is that they say, “Well, we’ll send out an inspector from the Rural Payments Agency with a clipboard to try to find fault and see whether your ear tags are wrong, or there is a trivial problem of that sort that will disqualify you,” it will put people off entering the scheme.
We already have this problem with the cross-compliance regime. I explained on Tuesday that, having wrestled with the cross-compliance regime as a Minister for five years, I can confirm that it is completely dysfunctional. The regulations set out in EU law and the penalty matrix mean that incredibly disproportionate penalties are sometimes applied to farmers that have no bearing whatever to the scale of the breach in question.
We already have problems with, for instance, large arable farms that might have a small pedigree herd of cattle that they keep going as a labour of love. If they have some trivial ear tag problem—an ear tag goes missing and they have not managed to replace it yet—and are unlucky enough to be inspected, they can end up with penalties of £40,000 or £50,000 for such small things. I remember many cases in this area. I remember a farmer who once had a dispute with his neighbour. The neighbour padlocked the gate on the footpath, and the farmer ended up with a £45,000 penalty, such is the nonsense of the existing scheme.
We do not want to replicate that. The danger of accepting the amendment is that a trivial error or mistake on something like an ear tag could lead to somebody’s complete disqualification from entering a scheme, or to an onerous financial penalty that would not fit the breach incurred. Something of this type could be introduced through an SI under the Bill’s provisions, should someone wish to. We should abide by the principle that regulations apply to everyone, that we should not have more inspection on people who enter schemes than those who do not, and that inspection regimes should be consistent and apply to people across the board, whether or not they are in a scheme. For those reasons, the amendment is not appropriate.
The hon. Member for Stroud asked about the Dame Glenys Stacey review. That is now well under way. She is keen to move to what she terms a better, more modern approach to regulation, in which things are better joined up and there is less reliance on an arbitrary rulebook, with people coming around with clipboards and ticking boxes. She wants a more holistic approach to the way we manage compliance on farms and a better understanding of, as I explained on Tuesday, the grey area between incentivising better husbandry and good practice, which can go a long way to achieving environmental and animal welfare outcomes, and accepting that a clear regulatory baseline must be enforced.
We are keen to start moving towards a different culture around regulation that is less about a complex rulebook, which often has lots of unintended consequences and disproportionate penalties, as characterised in our current scheme. We want it to be more about discretion for officers on the ground, whether they be from Natural England, the Rural Payments Agency or the Animal and Plant Health Agency, to exercise judgment in respect of a given farm, and about having a better understanding of the linkage between things that we can incentivise to get better outcomes and the need to adhere to the regulatory baseline.
Jenny Chapman (Darlington) (Lab)
I am interested in what the Minister says, and he makes a fair point. However, my concern is that this scheme needs to be transparent, fair and rigorous in the eyes of taxpayers. As we said on Tuesday, the closeness of these decisions will change, and taxpayers will want to know that their money that goes to this scheme, and so not on policing, health or other important issues, is carefully spent, and that the scheme is robustly inspected and monitored. We need to be careful about where that balance lies.
George Eustice
I understand that. As I said on Tuesday, we accept the “polluter pays” principle. It is important that we have a clear regulatory baseline. At the moment, in areas such as livestock ID, we have a hotch-potch of different regulations that have come from the EU, and there is lots of inconsistency. We have an opportunity as we leave the EU to tidy up the rulebook and to have a clear and consistent regulatory baseline, and to then build on that with financial incentives.
Jenny Chapman
That is a completely wrong analogy. The right analogy is perhaps with the financial support given to parents. If parents do not comply with the rules and the terms of that agreement with the Government, then the finances are removed and they might even find themselves going to prison. It is a completely different situation and it appears to me that the Minister—with the best will in the world—is making this up as he goes along. It is like, “We could do this, we could do that, we might do something else”. I do not get the impression that the Government have properly thought this through.
George Eustice
I disagree; I have thought it through. If the hon. Lady and a future Labour Government want to do precisely what they set out in amendment 84, the right place to do it would be under an affirmative resolution under sections 2 or 3.
George Eustice
That is not our intention at all. Anyone who knows me knows that I am not a big fan of management consultants. I often come across very talented local agronomists who really understand the landscape and the soil type. If we set them free and gave them the opportunity to work in partnership with farmers, the schemes would work far more smoothly than in the central, bureaucratised system that we have now.
Jenny Chapman
The Minister is asking us to believe that a scheme will administer substantial amounts of public money and will be run by some very impressive and worthy organisations—LEPs, national park authorities and the RSPB. Can he point to any other area of public policy or significant Government spending where that kind of approach is permitted?
George Eustice
It is permitted now. The Soil Association can authorise organic farmers, and there are a number of other accreditation bodies.
George Eustice
If someone is accredited as a member of the Soil Association, they are able to claim a top-up to their basic payments scheme. So, yes, there are areas. In terms of clause 2(5), there is already precedent for that in the way that the EU schemes operate—EU regulations create the power for that to happen. We think it is a good model. Engaging people such as the Soil Association in some schemes could be really powerful.
Likewise, if we are to move to a system where we may want to pay farmers who sign up to something like an RSPCA-assured scheme or another scheme, it is important that we have a legal basis to be able to recognise those schemes. They will have to be UKAS accredited—we must have confidence in those schemes. UKAS has existed for many years. The last Labour Government introduced UKAS-accredited schemes in many areas. It is a successful model.
On that basis, I hope I have been able to reassure hon. Members that our intention in clause 2 is to address a concern that the shadow Minister raised earlier in the debate about how we will administer these schemes. I hope, therefore, that having put down this probing amendment, he will withdraw it.
George Eustice
Scotland has no plan for its future agricultural policy. It will be for Scotland to ask us to add a schedule on its behalf or to bring forward its own legislation. A point was raised on Tuesday in a discussion on clause 1 whether we will make available details of how much money had been spent on delivering certain purposes. The answer is that, as well as publishing the recipients of support, this power would also enable us to publish the purposes and the broad intention of what we are delivering with that power.
Jenny Chapman
Representing a constituency in the north-east, I am mindful of the situation of businesses and farms that cross the Scottish border. Will the Minister help the Committee to understand what would happen if Scotland failed to ask for a schedule or do anything between now and exit day? What would be the situation of support for farmers in Scotland in those circumstances?
George Eustice
Scotland has one of three options: it can bring forward its own primary legislation or it could add a schedule. Its content could range from something similar to what Wales has done, which is a full suite of powers, or it could take the approach of Northern Ireland, which is broadly the powers to roll-over the existing scheme and make modifications but not to make changes beyond that. Finally, it could pass legislation or ask us to add a schedule that gave it the power to continue to make payments but nothing else—not even to modify. There is a range of options, but Scotland needs to do something and have primary legislation or its power to make payments will fall down at the end of 2020.
Agriculture Bill (Eighth sitting)
Debate between Baroness Chapman of Darlington and George Eustice(6 years ago)
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Jenny Chapman
That is a good point. If there is any purpose to our being in Committee two days a week for however many weeks is necessary, it is that we want to improve the Bill.
The process we have followed, including our taking evidence, has enabled us to make suggestions, many of which—although not all—came from third-sector organisations, interest groups or the National Farmers Union, for example. We have really gained from their expertise. The Bill will clearly be amended—it will not be the same as it is now by the end of the process—and I genuinely think that we have benefited from that input. Input is welcome, and it ought to be available to the Government if they intend to make substantive changes to any other measures as well.
The only other thing I say to that is that we will come later to amendments that address consultation and how we might better involve other organisations in shaping our future policy. It is important to note that, by using these affirmative or negative procedures, we cut out from the process not only expertise from organisations but most MPs as well. Let us not forget that Members do not just stick their hand up and get on one of those Committees. There are filters that sometimes enable and sometimes prevent Members from exercising the privilege of taking part in the consideration of measures.
There are many reasons to be concerned about the extensive use of regulations to amend the very legislation in which those regulations are contained. I have deep reservations about the overuse of the negative procedure. I hope that the Minister will confirm that his amendments, which are grouped with my amendment 76, have been tabled to address some of those concerns. Although they will not address my concerns about the use of regulations, he might at least assure me that he intends to use the affirmative procedure, rather than the negative.
George Eustice
I will also speak to a large clutch of Government amendment—amendments 2 to 5, 7, 8 and 12 to 14—in this group. To reassure Committee members, most of them are identical, so I can deal with them quite quickly.
I begin by addressing the points raised by the hon. Member for Darlington regarding her amendment 76. The amendments we have tabled will not achieve exactly what she is trying to achieve with her amendment. However, they will achieve something important, which is to establish that the affirmative procedure will be used if consequential amendments need to be made to primary legislation. I will explain that in more detail later. It is a technical point, but having been on certain Committees, she is clearly familiar with it.
George Eustice
I will try to be as brief as possible. Amendment 77 repeats the earlier debate on clause 6, which also proposes a negative resolution. For the same reasons, we believe that a negative resolution is appropriate in this case, because it deals with technical issues and the switching off of certain requirements that currently sit in the scheme to try to improve it, simplify it and remove some of the frustrations that we have at the moment. That should be seen in the context that this is a time-limited scheme anyway, which will expire at the end of the transition.
I note what the hon. Member for Darlington says about the term “simplifying” or “improving”; I know the Lords Committee that looked at this also raised that point. We have not quoted the Agricultural Act 1947 today, but I know many hon. Members like it, so let us look at section 1, which talks about the importance of
“a stable and efficient agricultural industry capable of producing such part of the nation’s food and other agricultural produce”,
as it is deemed “desirable to produce”. Now, if I had drafted a clause along those lines and put it in, everyone would have said, “What does ‘desirable’ mean? What does ‘stable’ mean? What does ‘efficient’ mean?” The truth is that we can have false precision on these things. It is clear what we mean by “simplifying” and “improving”.
We should also view this in the context of subsection (2)(a), which is simply the power to switch off certain provisions altogether. It is very clear in the context of subsection (2) that our preference will be to switch off things altogether where they serve no purpose or we think we can do without them, but where we think they serve some purpose we can simplify and improve them. That is understood.
I should also say that we have to understand that at the moment, the best that Parliament will get on things such as this is an explanatory memorandum, explaining the latest thing that the EU has done to us. Most of these sorts of decisions are made by EU delegated acts. There is literally no democratic input at all on some of those requirements, and often things get made up on the hoof by EU auditors working for the Commission, who create all sorts of new processes that have not been discussed or agreed at any level within the European Union.
This is an approach that I believe is right. To explain the types of things that we want to deal with here, I have to deal as Farming Minister with something called RPA appeals. Every month I get a bundle of cases in my box that are farmers who maybe missed a deadline because something got lost in the post or there was a problem with their application form. The system is hideous; I have spent hundreds and hundreds of hours wrestling with lawyers in our Department to try to find a way of doing what is just and fair and finding in favour of farmers, only to find, all too often, with deep frustration, that EU law does indeed require me to find against them. The system we have in the so-called horizontal regulation is manifestly unjust and unfair, and we must resolve to improve it.
I turn now to the hon. Lady’s amendment 78. She explained her approach in great detail, but let me just say that she rather undermined her own argument by pointing out that DEFRA, without any statutory requirement necessarily to do so, is quite capable of churning out a great many consultations. I can tell her that, more often than not, the conversation I have with our officials is, “Do we really need a consultation on something as small as this?” and the answer is invariably, “Yes, because that is what Cabinet Office guidelines require.”
I do not believe that we need a statutory requirement to have a consultation on this. The only area where we have a statutory requirement for a consultation in the DEFRA field is on issues of food safety, where there is a written statutory requirement always to consult, but that does not stop us consulting. We consult on everything, and if it would give the hon. Lady some reassurance, I can give her an assurance, here on the Floor of the Committee, that we would consult on the changes that we intended to make under clause 9.
I would envisage our having a single strike at improving the system and probably not changing it much beyond that. It is inevitable that we would issue a consultation on all the changes that we would seek to make, and we would try as far as possible to do everything in that one go. It might be the case that there was something we missed and at a later date we might want to do a less formal type of consultation, but I take the opportunity here in this Committee to give the hon. Lady an assurance that we would consult on that first major batch of changes that we would seek to make, but we do not need to be forced to do so by a statutory requirement—as I said, we are quite capable of doing that anyway. I hope on that basis that the hon. Lady will withdraw amendment 77 and we can prepare to adjourn.
Jenny Chapman
I have listened carefully to what the Minister has said on amendment 78 and I accept, I think, what he is trying to say. I think he has tried to assure the Committee that there will be some kind of process put in place, so I will ponder that. I might return to that, but what he said was very helpful. In the interest of consistency, I feel I need to press amendment 77.
Question put, That the amendment be made.
Agriculture Bill (Sixth sitting)
Debate between Baroness Chapman of Darlington and George Eustice(6 years ago)
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Jenny Chapman
In the Minister’s desire to resist our amendment, he keeps referring to the clause, saying that he could do this and it is possible to do that already, and therefore our amendment is not necessary. He does not seem to want to have his boss’s hands tied—his boss to be told that he ought to do something or that he needs to do something. I just want to know why that is.
George Eustice
As a Government, we have set out our approach and what we intend to do with these powers. We have already published some policy papers alongside this Bill, which address many of those issues. The Secretary of State has talked about public access to the countryside and the role of farms in educating children, so we have set out clearly in the policy documents that accompany the Bill what we intend to do with these powers. Come the next election, I am sure that the Opposition will have manifesto commitments that will set out their approach and what they intend to do with the powers.
Another issue was raised by a number of hon. Members: that, fundamentally, the decisions about public health and healthy eating are very much around consumer understanding, consumer knowledge and consumer choice. That is why Public Health England has the “Eatwell” plate that it promotes. We have obviously already implemented the first chapter of the childhood obesity plan. We have introduced a levy on sugary soft drinks. We are currently working on the sort of second chapter of the childhood obesity plan.
We take the issue very seriously. Work on it is led by the Department of Health; it is very high up on that Department’s agenda. It is for the Department of Health to lead on and for us to support, and it goes outside the scope of this particular Bill, which is very much about schemes to support farming, the farmed landscape and our environment.
I will give a final example about sugar, which was raised by some Members. When quotas on sugar beet production were removed, some people said, “Shouldn’t we keep sugar beet quotas? That would be a way of restricting the growing of things that we think are bad for public health.” However, the reality is that the most powerful thing was the introduction of a levy on soft drinks; the value of the sugar that goes into a soft drink is actually tiny, and messing around with the price of sugar is not what delivers the outcome. What delivers the outcome is a levy on sugary drinks that drives policies of reformulation, and that is why the levy has been a success.
We know that some of these measures to try to mess with the supply side of the chain are actually blunt instruments when it comes to delivering public health outcomes.
Jenny Chapman
I note that that is because we are in a customs union. That is my point: we have those high standards now, and I want to ensure that we have them in the future, and I do not see any way of doing it other than putting it on the face of a Bill—I accept that it does not need to be this Bill, but we need to know that this will happen.
George Eustice
On a point of clarity, my right hon. Friend the Member for Scarborough and Whitby is right that we have border inspection posts around the UK. They are a port of entry currently for the EU, and when we leave the EU they will still be a port of entry, with all the broader inspection facilities we need, for countries outside the EU.
Jenny Chapman
That very much depends on the terms on which we leave the EU. Whatever those terms are we need to be absolutely clear about our standards on animal welfare, food safety and all the rest of it. If we are not, there is scope for these very high standards of which we are all proud to be watered down in some way. That is the sole motivation behind the amendment. It is not intended to ridicule the Government, or to try to show that we care more about animals than Government Members do or any of that. It is about making sure that, in the future, the UK maintains its position as a world leader on these issues.
George Eustice
I will begin with amendment 75, as the other two amendment both pertain to animal welfare. This amendment effectively says that people have to abide by retained EU law before they can be eligible for any assistance. Retained EU law is coming across through the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018. It will apply to everyone, whether or not they are in a scheme. We do not believe the amendment adds anything or is necessary, as retained EU law will become UK law and will be enforceable as such to everyone. The important thing about the new schemes from our point of view are the conditions attached to them. We deal with that very differently, in clause 3, which we will no doubt debate later and which has all sorts of provisions for checking, enforcing and monitoring. It requires provisions for the keeping of records and allows us to impose penalties, establish appeals processes and refer powers of entry, for instance. Clause 3 sets out clear enforcement powers and the ability to set conditions on access to such schemes, which in our view is the right way to approach this.
There is also a technical problem with amendment 75. The hon. Member for Bristol East at least said that everybody should abide by the legislative baseline, whether that be retained EU law or any other domestic legislation. The problem I have with the amendment is that it treats retained EU law as if it were the only law that matters. It is mute on other national law. If we were to require people to abide by the law—which they might believe they would be required to do anyway—why would we require them to abide only by retained EU law, rather than any other class of law? To me, that does not make much sense.
Jenny Chapman
We do not want it to be retained EU law; we want it to be primary UK law. That is our point, because we think that has a different status to retained EU law.
George Eustice
The provisions that I am reading are very much around EU law and retained EU law, but I take the hon. Lady’s point that she may have intended the measure to be broader.
There is a third point, however. We are clear that we accept some of these principles. We will provide for a new environmental body to police them. We have already said that we are committed to those principles coming across. There is a difficulty, however, in the practice of a scheme where financial incentives are being paid. It is not always black and white. For instance, the “polluter pays” principle sounds great in theory, but what if there is a diffuse pollution incident somewhere in a water catchment that might involve small contributions from a number of farms that are difficult to locate? It is not always easy to just say, “We need regulation,” or, “We need enforcement,” on this farm or that farm.
In recent years we have successfully paid farmers to support them in investing to improve slurry infrastructure. We have had a successful scheme in the past two years to pay farmers to put lids on slurry stores, so that they can reduce ammonia emissions, for instance. If we are serious about tackling complex environmental issues such as diffuse pollution, we have to be willing to venture beyond what can be achieved with a blunt regulatory instrument and instead be willing to have financial incentives, rewards and grants to support good practice. A requirement to abide by the “polluter pays” principle will often be used, as in this case, by people who want to sit on their hands and not spend money. If we are serious about doing payment for public goods properly, we must be willing to exercise judgment and to support schemes that may fall into the grey area between what would normally be covered by regulation and what would be covered by an environmental purpose.
Amendment 74 relates to animal sentience, on which we have already published draft legislation. The Government are absolutely committed to making the necessary changes to UK law to ensure that animal sentience is recognised. This country has always been a leader in the field. In 1875, we were the first country in the world to pass legislation to regulate slaughterhouses. The Protection of Animals Act followed in 1911, and in 1933 we updated a lot of our regulation, particularly of slaughterhouses. The Animal Welfare Act 2006 recognises animal sentience. We would never have passed any of that legislation if we did not believe that animals were sentient beings. That is beyond question; both sides of the House and all Governments have believed it for at least 140 years. We are committed to introducing a Bill to recognise animal sentience.
George Eustice
My right hon. Friend makes an important point. I am conscious that on animal welfare and in the agri-environment schemes, a lot of farmers have already done a huge amount of work, and it is important to recognise that and to continue to reward them for that. The baseline, such as it is, should be anchored somewhere around the regulatory baseline. Even then, I do not think we should have a hard and fast rule, for the reasons I have explained on issues such as investment in slurry management. In this innovative new field of animal welfare, there are grey areas, and it is not always right to have a hard and fast rule.
The hon. Member for Bristol East mentioned the issue of cross-compliance. The conditionality on new schemes is provided for in clause 3. If somebody enters a new scheme and is in breach of it in some way, there are provisions for financial penalties and for the powers that we would need to be able to do that.
Having been farming Minister for five years, and having wrestled with cross-compliance, I am not a great fan of how it works in practice. It is a rather dysfunctional system. There is literally nothing—bar one thing—in cross-compliance that is not already in our domestic law. All the requirements on ear tagging, animal health and animal welfare, or the issues around TB testing and good environmental condition for land, are already requirements in our national law. All that cross-compliance really gives us is a sort of easy and rather unjust way to claw penalties out of farmers without really giving them a chance for a fair hearing in court. In my view, it is not a very satisfactory system. We would need some sort of system of fixed penalty notices in future, so that there are ready remedies for minor breaches, but we could design something far better. Cross-compliance will remain in the legacy scheme that we will come on to debate, but we will have the opportunity to modify and improve it and to remove some of the rather unnecessary administrative burdens that can get in the way.
I hope that I have managed to persuade hon. Members that the Government remain absolutely committed to amendment 74 animal sentience, but we believe it should be in another Bill. We have already published draft legislation. On amendment 75, retained EU law will already be binding on anyone, whether or not they are in a scheme. I hope that the hon. Member for Bristol East will not press amendment 71, as it would be counterproductive to the cause that I know she believes in very strongly.
Jenny Chapman
I am not surprised by any of the Minister’s comments. His attempt to reassure the Committee on EU retained law and SIs was not particularly effective. As we said at great length during the passage of the withdrawal Act, the ability to amend the Act is of deep concern to us. We think it is far better that the provisions should be in the Bill now, so that everyone can see exactly where we are. We are not happy with the approach that the Government have taken, and not just in these areas but in many others.
The Minister invited me to look to clause 3 for reassurance. Again, we come back to the powers that have been given to the Secretary of State, which are so wide-ranging. Although there are suggestions in the Bill about what those powers may be used for, the lack of precision is astonishing. Clause 3(2) states that “under subsection (1)” the Secretary of State
“may (among other things) include provision”.
It is extraordinary that the Government are attempting to proceed in this manner and expect the Opposition to go along with it. We are just not going to do that.
I might not be minded to press the amendment to a Division today, but I do not want the Committee to interpret that as demonstrating any kind of satisfaction on our part; it absolutely does not. We intend to return to these issues, which is one of the reasons why we will not press the amendment today. That might increase our chances of being able to return to the issues, which are fundamental to why we think the Bill is so flawed. I take the point about linking the issues to financial assistance. There might be something in that, although taxpayers want to know the principles by which their hard-earned cash will be spent in this area. I do not think that the Minister has responded adequately to our concerns. I expect that in the other place, and on Report, we will go over those issues again.
As for amendment 74 and the promised new Bill, we want and need to see the Bill, not just assurances that it is on its way. The Secretary of State said, “I want this to happen because I too am a sentient being.”
George Eustice
I do not agree. Subsection (2) is very clear. It gives us the power to
“give financial assistance for or in connection with the purpose of starting, or improving the productivity of, an agricultural, horticultural...activity.”
It could not be clearer. It gives us the power to invest in the way that I have described.
Jenny Chapman
This is problematic. I do not think the Minister knows how to answer his own questions about how best to support farmers. Clause 2(2) says:
“Financial assistance may be given subject to such conditions as the Secretary of State considers appropriate.”
I do not know how much wider we could get, and my hon. Friend the Member for Ipswich is worried about its being too narrow. That is the problem with the Bill.
George Eustice
I do not accept that criticism of the Bill. We have discussed many times the romantic attachment of some hon. Members to the 1947 Act. Let me just read from it again. It describes Ministers being able to do things that they deem “expedient”. We have a concern about giving the Government and Ministers power to get things done, but that is what has been missing in our time in the European Union. We should embrace the fact that we are now able to get things done as a country.
My final point on food security is that, if we look at the evidence, the sectors that contribute the most to our self-sufficiency as a nation are the ones that are unsubsidised, not those that are subsidised. We are 96% self-sufficient in carrots, which is traditionally an unsubsidised sector for which the current single farm payment is irrelevant. We are 92% self-sufficient in cabbages and 95% self-sufficient in peas. We have seen a big increase of 15% in the production of vegetables since 2010 and a 50% increase in top fruit and soft fruit production. The unsubsidised sectors have been the most innovative and have done most to contribute to our self-sufficiency.
I turn to amendment 89, which is in the name of my hon. Friend the Member for Ludlow and is supported by my hon. Friend the Member for Gordon. It seeks to limit the eligibility for financial assistance across the board to people who are in farming or food production. I understand the intention behind the amendment. The concern, if I could caricature it, is that in future a Government may just give all the money to green non-governmental organisations, which will buy a large fleet of Land Rovers and employ a large army of regional officers to go around chivvying farmers to do things differently. That is not our intention at all.
We have been very clear that we envisage a future where there will be an environmental land management contract principally with the farmer or the landowner. There is a very important reason for that. We cannot deliver any of the public good benefits unless the landowner or the occupier of the land—the tenant—are fully on board and fully signed up to do so. That is why virtually every one of the paragraphs of clause 1(1) refer to the farmland or the farmed environment and managing land in such a way as to promote the environment. To do that, the landowner or the tenant has to be the main recipient of that funding and the person with whom we have the contractual arrangement.
What we do not want to do is rule out the scope for there to be, for instance, some lower level facilitation work to get regional level co-ordination, which a group such as the RSPB or the Wildlife Trusts might engage with. There could be a role to design schemes to have some facilitation funding, as we do now under the EU schemes, for some of those third-sector organisations. In some national parks or areas of outstanding natural beauty, we might find that there is a collective body that could do that in partnership with farmers.
While we cannot accept this particular amendment, I understand the concern of my hon. Friend the Member for Ludlow. With the policy papers that we have launched, I can reassure him that we absolutely intend that it will be farmers, landowners and tenants who receive the lion’s share of these funds. They might choose to subcontract certain responsibilities and tasks to third-sector organisations, but if we want to ensure that there is delivery, our relationship must be with that landowner or land occupier.
Agriculture Bill (Fifth sitting)
Debate between Baroness Chapman of Darlington and George Eustice(6 years ago)
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Jenny Chapman
I am not completely convinced by the Minister’s response. Mitigating is about lessening the impact of climate change. It is not about preventing it. We are trying to reduce emissions and the impact on climate change of agriculture and horticulture. They are different things. It is not true that the only difference is the length of the sentence.
George Eustice
On the terminology, we are not talking about mitigating the consequences of climate change. The subsection is very clearly about mitigating climate change itself. Any action that is taken to reduce carbon emissions and the emission of other greenhouse gases—ammonia is a very important one in agriculture—would be mitigating climate change. The subsection also includes the phrase “adapting to climate change” in recognition of the fact that, as Gilles Deprez pointed out in the evidence session, we are already living with the consequences. For instance, we recognise that we tend to have more floods, so we may need schemes to manage the implications of that. “Mitigating climate change” means what it says. It can include any actions that reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Jenny Chapman
That is not right. Mitigating does not mean that. It means to lessen the severity or the impact of something. What the Minister is doing in the clause is very different to what we seek to achieve. The definition of “mitigating” matters.