Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Bill

Baroness Donaghy Excerpts

Wednesday 20th March 2013 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Donaghy]

My Lords, it is extremely regrettable that the confusion about the failure to move Amendment 3 meant that attention was distracted from the moving of this amendment. I have sympathy for my noble friend Lord Whitty: he nobly stood in quickly but that distracted attention from the seriousness of the subject matter.

The Minister will know that I raised this issue of impact assessments in Committee. We had already had two different impact assessments. I thought that was rather worrying, although we got a bit of an explanation as to why it happened. I want to take this slightly wider than just the issue of the impact assessment. My concern is what happens after the Agricultural Wages Board disappears. I am not as optimistic as the noble Earl, Lord Cathcart, that some paternalistic system handed down by the NFU will be an adequate substitute for an equal system—perhaps a joint industrial system. Wearing my hat as former chair of ACAS, I think it important that there is equality of status between farmers and farm workers when it comes to discussing conditions of service and, more importantly, training. That was one of the things that the Agricultural Wages Board did and, incidentally, that was strongly supported by the NFU. It is regrettable that these issues have not been dealt with.

I am not talking about a standard impact assessment. We all have our doubts sometimes about the reliability of those. I mean sitting down and talking about what the future will be. What can we do as Members of this Parliament to ensure that there is an equality of consideration between those who work in the farm industry and those who own the farms? It is quite wrong in this day and age to stand up and say that we can rely on the representatives of the farm owners to give us the statistics. That is not the age we live in.

[Lord Curry of Kirkharle]

My Lords, I have huge respect for the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, and I thoroughly enjoyed working with him when he was a Minister in Defra. I admire his tenacity as far as the Agricultural Wages Board is concerned. I do not want to rehearse the arguments we went over when discussing this issue a couple of weeks ago but I will comment on the proposed amendment. I declare an interest as a farmer in Northumberland but I am not a landowner. I also chair the Better Regulation Executive.

I want to deal with the process of the impact assessment. The Regulatory Policy Committee, the RPC, scrutinises all impact assessments as submitted and scrutinised this one. It is required to present the range of possible outcomes as a consequence of a decision such as this—I commented on this during my speech in Committee. It has to look at the worst-case scenario, which is that over time wages fall to the national minimum wage. The point I made in the debate was that that is absolutely unlikely to happen because of the demand there is for agricultural workers. The differential in wages that exists now, as referred to earlier, will continue and may widen because once you remove the Agricultural Wages Board the market will itself respond. In my view, farm employees will then be even better off.