Pollution in Rivers and Regulation of Private Water Companies
Baroness Harris of Richmond Excerpts(1 month, 3 weeks ago)
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Baroness Harris of Richmond (LD) [V]
My Lords, I too thank my noble friend Lady Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville for her excellent speech and for securing this important debate. It follows on from the one held in the Chamber on “Water and Sewage Companies: Directors’ Remuneration” on 22 February. I urge your Lordships to read that debate closely.
I will talk about my local river, the River Swale, said to be the fastest-flowing river in England. It is supposed to be watched over by Yorkshire Water. This company was privatised in 1989, at which time it had no debt; that debt is now £6.1 billion. It wants to increase our water bills by 6%. I will speak more about it later. I am indebted to a number of individuals and organisations who have helped me with my research, among them the Save our Swale group, the Rivers Trust’s State of Our Rivers report, the Sustain alliance, Daniel Callaghan, and the Local Government Association, to name but a few.
In Richmond, we are fighting back. In July 2023, the Save Our Swale group was founded by a local resident, Deborah Meara. She held a meeting in our town hall, which was attended by more than 100 people. Microbiologist Keith Thomas addressed the audience, as did Ron Wood from a local angling society; there was also a representative from the Rivers Trust. The meeting was told that the sewage treatment works on the Swale at Richmond had discharged untreated sewage into the river for a total of 1,113,013 hours; that the number of releases was 371; and that the average time per release was 3.8 hours. This was during 2022, which, as your Lordships will recall, was a drought year. Indeed, the standard precipitation index between March and August that year stated that the Swale was severely dry. Dry dumping is illegal.
The Save Our Swale group is applying for designated bathing water status—DBWS—as this is its only way, if it is successful, of forcing the Environment Agency to test the Swale’s water quality regularly. This is not a simple task, especially as Defra has recently changed the criteria yet again to make ultimate success less likely. The application will go in at the end of this year and the end of the bathing water season. A mass of volunteers, a number of whom are scientists—here I must declare an interest as my husband is one of them—will be doing the Environment Agency’s job for it by testing the water quality at various points along the Swale.
This monitoring has been going on at seven sites along the river on a monthly basis since September 2023. The volunteers have found unexpected and as yet unexplained spikes in phosphate levels above what are regarded as safe levels. It is clear that the River Swale is polluted yet neither the Environment Agency, Ofwat or Yorkshire Water appears to be doing much about it. Since the Environment Agency began criminal investigations into non-compliance by water companies back in 2021, we, the public, are no nearer to understanding just what is going on. Can the Minister advise me? Ofwat has also indicated that it has enforcement cases against six water companies, including Yorkshire Water, but those still have not been made public. Perhaps the Minister can tell us what is happening and when we might see some transparency.
Before we left the European Union, we were signed up to the water framework directive. This required member states to have good chemical and ecological status in their waterways by 2027. We were promised huge improvements to our way of life by leaving the EU, so can the Minister tell me where we are on those timescales? Can he also help me on what the Government mean by saying that there is an exemption on this timescale until 2063? The Liberal Democrats put down an amendment to the Environment Bill that would have placed a legal duty on water companies to make improvements. We are also calling for a sewage tax, as we have heard. I quote my noble friend Lady Bakewell:
“This would be a 16% tax on pre-tax profits, providing a £340 million fund to clear up the rivers that have been damaged and to fix the sewerage system”.—[Official Report, 22/2/24; col. 754.]
That may be one solution to this burgeoning problem. We should transform England’s water companies into public benefit companies, abolish Ofwat and put in its place a new regulator with proper teeth to tackle sewage dumping, as we have also heard. I am yet to see where the many improvements the Government say they are making are being demonstrated.
On 22 February, the Minister said:
“The Environment Agency and Ofwat have recently launched the largest ever criminal and civil investigations into water companies’ sewage discharges, and into over 2,200 treatment works, following new data coming to light as a result of increased monitoring”.
It is citizen scientists who are providing data and doing their work for them. Why did it take those agencies so long to see what should have been before their eyes? They have known about these discharges for many years. The Minister went on to say that
“this Government are going further and faster than any before to protect and enhance the health of our rivers and seas. We are holding water companies to account on a scale never seen before”.—[Official Report, 22/2/24; cols. 759-60.]
Of course it has never been seen before; the water companies have been allowed to get away with committing environmental vandalism on a huge scale, all on the Conservatives’ watch.
I fear that this all comes down to a board of directors who are perfectly happy to take huge sums of money, paying out £62 million in dividends in 2022-23 to its parent company—the Kelda Group—to
“cover costs including debt interest”
but going on to say that the money did not go to external shareholders. Who are they kidding? They have paid £1.2 billion in dividends to shareholders over the past 10 years, as we have just heard, while not even carrying out their primary functions of maintaining and investing in sewage infrastructure—improvements that we were promised in 1989. In August 2022, the Yorkshire Post reported that the Yorkshire water bosses paid themselves more than £3 million in bonuses despite leakages running at 283.1 million litres a day. That is absurd. Bonuses should be banned today.
It is said that, in the 7th century, St Paulinus baptised thousands of people in the River Swale. I wonder whether he would have been happy to baptise people in there now as sewage dumping in the Swale continues to be legal until 2050.
Pig Farming
Baroness Harris of Richmond Excerpts(1 year, 10 months ago)
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Baroness Harris of Richmond
That this House takes note of the state of the pig farming industry in England.
The Deputy Speaker (Lord Brougham and Vaux)
My Lords, the noble Baroness will contribute virtually.
Baroness Harris of Richmond (LD) [V]
My Lords, I am extremely grateful to have been given the opportunity to bring before your Lordships once again the state of the pig farming industry in the UK. In January this year, I asked a Question about the terrible situation pig farmers were facing in my county of North Yorkshire. I now know that my concerns apply countrywide, and still nothing has changed.
Let us start with a few statistics. The National Pig Association, to which I am indebted for its excellent briefings, both written and verbal, tells me that the UK pig industry is worth £1.6 billion at the farm gate, £5 billion at retail, and around £14 billion in external sales and export values. I understand that the UK is the world’s 11th biggest pig producer, which is amazing, considering the small size of our country.
In 2020, more than 400,000 tonnes of British pork were exported around the globe to over 40 export markets, in a trade worth £655 million, so pig production, from farm to plate, is a very big and very important part of our national export market. We also rear our pigs to some of the highest welfare standards in the world, so it is no surprise that British pork is in demand across the globe.
However, the industry is suffering an unprecedented crisis. A perfect storm of labour shortages, Covid, Brexit and the Russian invasion of Ukraine has seen pig farmers lose £500 million since October 2020. Many have been losing more than £50 per pig, some have had to cull and dispose of healthy animals, and others have gone out of business altogether. A recent survey undertaken by the NPA revealed that four out of five farmers will not survive another 12 months unless their finances improve.
When the Government finally intervened in October last year, they introduced temporary measures that benefited processors, not farmers. These farmers, through no fault of their own, have borne the brunt of this crisis. It is high time that the Government gave them the direct support they desperately need.
To add insult to injury, the Government are again delaying border checks on goods moving from the EU to the UK. British producers have been subject to quite significant non-tariff costs since January 2021 because of the requirement for export health certificates and lots of other bureaucratic hurdles that British businesses have had to deal with as a direct result of our leaving the EU. This has cost them tens of millions of pounds and left them at a disadvantage. Products from the EU are still allowed to move the other way without checks, though, thus making its pork products cheaper than ours.
This “open border” approach must be an absolute gift to unscrupulous businesses that can see a way to avoid customs duties and taxes, let alone the extremely serious biosecurity problems that could well arise if we inadvertently allow African swine fever, which is now sweeping across Europe, to get here because of our lax practices and lack of checks at borders. That is a terrible prospect because, if this disease reaches our shores, animal movement will immediately be restricted and enormous culls will have to take place. This would have the same devastating effect on pig production as it did on cattle during the awful foot and mouth outbreak some 20 years ago.
Pork is a staple for many UK households. Such an outbreak would be catastrophic for an industry already reeling from labour shortages, specifically in the processing sector. Those have been brought about because of Brexit, when thousands of EU workers in the abattoirs simply went home, believing that they had no future here. They were skilled workers—skilled butchers—whose training takes around 18 months. You simply cannot fill these highly skilled jobs from the domestic workforce overnight or give them to unskilled labour. This issue should have been foreseen a few years ago when we left the EU but, sadly, nothing has been done about it—or, if it has, it is too little too late.
The Government’s temporary pork butcher visas, which were intended to bring in 800 workers, were largely ineffective. They were given only a grudging six-month visa, so very few were taken up. Can the Minister tell me how many of these ungenerous visas were taken up? Can he also tell me why the Government continue to omit skilled butchers from the shortage occupation list, ignoring the advice of the Home Office’s Migration Advisory Committee? There are still an estimated 100,000 vacancies in the industry, so what is being done now, today, to mitigate this looming disaster? Or does the Minister believe that it will be all right because we will import more low-quality, sometimes illegally traded, meat from areas where the African swine fever virus is prevalent? Where are the safety checks at our borders?
Will the Government undertake to follow the example of Scotland, where the authorities use sniffer dogs at ports of entry to detect products of animal origin? This would be a very sensible protection for all of us. The complacency with which this whole industry has been treated is breathtaking. How did we reach a point where farmers had to cull over 60,000 healthy pigs? How can farmers be expected to survive if they are losing more than £50 a pig? How many more farms must go out of business before the Government act?
We know that we must become more self-sufficient in our food production now, following the catastrophic war in Ukraine and its effect on grain prices worldwide, so this is not the way to go about reaching that goal. It might help if the Government revised how they present their annual “Total Income From Farming” statistics, taking out those parts, such as subsidies and other irrelevant income statistics, which they use to puff out their policies.
All pig farmers ask is that they be treated fairly. They continue to have a backlog of around 100,000 pigs on farms across the country and still around 200,000 pigs a week are being produced, mainly for sale to our supermarkets, so it is easy to see the problem. Like any supply chain, if there is a weak link—in this case, an inability to get pigs slaughtered in a timely way—then the remaining pigs must still be fed and cared for, and the bigger they are when they get to slaughter, the more the abattoirs want to be paid for slaughtering and butchering them because, ironically, they say that their contract with the farmer was for a certain weight of animal. It is a perfect storm indeed.
Is there a solution? Well, the producers of pigmeat want the supermarkets to pay a fair price for homegrown pork. Some have already put up their prices a little, and the industry is very grateful to them for that, but others, including some of our largest supermarkets, have done very little, despite having made massive profits during the pandemic. It is time for them to step up and help our pork industry.
Finally, the Government must play their part. The Government Food Strategy, published just this week, states that
“successful domestic production is what gives us national resilience in an uncertain world.”
It is time to see action to match these words. The entire pork supply chain, from supply to retail, needs investigating urgently so that we never see this situation arise again. We need a commitment to improve visa schemes for skilled butchers while rapidly recruiting and training people from here into the profession. Action is needed by Defra and the Home Office because nothing has changed since I asked my Question back in January.
I hope that the Minister can assure me that help is on the way so that we can continue to enjoy fantastic British pork into the future.
Lord Benyon (Con)
Already, the 180 extra inspectors are doing that. We have built our BCPs and will be occupying them in the coming months.
Baroness Harris of Richmond (LD) [V]
My Lords, I thank the Minister for his response, especially on biosecurity, although I did not quite catch all that he said a moment ago when talking about the highest risk imports and border checks, which he says are adequate; we will see.
I am most grateful to all noble Lords who have spoken in this very interesting debate and who have supported my concerns about the pig farming industry. My noble friend Lady Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville and the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman of Ullock, have neatly summed up the contributions of your Lordships, so I will not repeat them. I look forward to continuing discussions on this important subject in the future.
Agriculture Bill
Baroness Harris of Richmond ExcerptsTuesday 28th July 2020
(3 years, 9 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Agriculture Act 2020 View all Agriculture Act 2020 Debates Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: HL Bill 112-VII Seventh marshalled list for Committee - (23 Jul 2020)
Baroness Harris of Richmond (LD) [V]
My Lords, I have heard my county of North Yorkshire mentioned a number of times in Committee and I want to speak particularly to Amendment 271, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Grantchester, because of the fear I have of our having to accept WTO rules as a result of crashing out of the EU without a decent trade deal. Our farmers in North Yorkshire, as elsewhere, will bear a great deal of pain if that happens. The Government made clear manifesto commitments, as we have heard repeatedly throughout the passage of the Bill, not to compromise, inter alia, animal welfare or food standards in any future trade deals, yet they offered no amendments to the Trade Bill, which we will have to rigorously scrutinise when we return to Parliament in September. This Bill is a foretaste of what may well yet happen unless we make sure that this legislation is absolutely watertight.
Our food must maintain the very high standards we have come to expect, ensuring that animal welfare and environmental protection remain at the very heart of our food production. The director of policy for NFU Scotland, Jonnie Hall, said:
“The UK Agriculture Bill is a once-in-a-generation piece of legislation and it must safeguard the sustainability of domestic food production and the integrity of domestic food consumption.”
As we have heard from the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, and others, Waitrose, Aldi, Sainsbury’s, M&S and the Co-op have all now said that they will never sell chlorinated chicken or hormone-treated beef from the US—where, incidentally, 50 million Americans get sick each year from the food they eat. As Sue Davies, head of consumer protection and food policy at Which? said:
“We do not want to import these unacceptably high rates of foodborne illness into our health system”.
Chlorine-washed chicken is barred from the EU because it is used to disguise farming practices that increase the risk of such infections as salmonella and campylobacter. There is also ractopamine, a horrible drug fed to pigs to make them grow fatter, which is banned in the EU and in 160 other countries, including China and Russia; 17-beta estradiol, another growth-promoting hormone, which EU scientists believe is a complete carcinogen; and bovine somatatropine, given to cows in the US to increase milk yields—again, banned in the EU, Canada and Japan on animal welfare grounds as it is associated with increased lameness and mastitis in cattle, which leads, of course, to greater use of antibiotics, as we have heard from the noble Baroness, Lady Hodgson of Abinger, and others, but is used and approved in the US. All these drugs have been banned in the UK, thanks to EU regulations, but they are quite legal on the US factory farms.
More than 1 million people have already signed the NFU petition to promote sustainable models of production and consumption across the world and I end with its concluding sentence, which calls on the UK Government
“to put into law rules that prevent food being imported to the UK which is produced in ways that would be illegal here.”
We must not sell our farmers out to the United States or other countries whose animal welfare and food production standards are so far below our own.
Viscount Trenchard (Con)
My Lords, I repeat my declaration of interests as stated in the register. Since the Government announced the establishment of the Trade and Agriculture Commission on 10 July, under the chairmanship of Tim Smith, formerly chief executive of the Food Standards Agency, I believe that Amendment 270, in the name of my noble friend Lady McIntosh, and Amendment 279, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Curry, are redundant. Besides, there are other problems with both the proposed commissions. My noble friend’s commission would be required to maintain standards at levels
“as high as or higher than”
those which apply now. The rather more detailed Amendment 279 is surely similarly redundant and would undoubtedly shackle UK producers to the restrictive EU regime, although it does contain two important concessions: new subsection (4)(e) recognises that,
“different production systems and regulatory approaches”
may produce equivalence of outcomes; and new subsection (4)(g) acknowledges that import restrictions may be detrimental both to consumer interests and to developing countries.
My noble friend Lady McIntosh just said, in her eloquent speech, that she wishes to retain the level playing field between EU and UK farmers. If she believes that such a level playing field exists, I fear she is mistaken. As I pointed out on Thursday, French livestock farmers benefit from €1 billion in voluntary coupled support every year. This compares with the mere €39 million available to Scottish crofters. I agree with my noble friend that my right honourable friend the Secretary of State was right to confirm that we will not compromise on our high environmental protection, animal welfare and food standards in all our trade negotiations. However, rules that enforce precise standards may be unnecessary or disproportionate. Standards are not two-dimensional: low or high. Outcomes may be similar but reached by very different rule books.
Among the problems with our EU standards is that some introduce distortions to the market without bringing any benefit. In the words of the Prime Minister in his Greenwich speech in February:
“There is no need for a free trade agreement to involve accepting EU rules on competition policy, subsidies, social protection, the environment, or anything similar, any more than the EU should be obliged to accept UK rules”.
The Prime Minister also said:
“But I must say to the America bashers in this country, if there are any, that in doing free trade deals we will be governed by science and not by mumbo-jumbo because the potential is enormous.”
I have heard quite a number of America bashers, including several of my noble friends, express their views during our debates on the Bill. I ask my noble friend the Minister to confirm categorically that we will diverge from EU rules and standards, at least in order to be able to adopt an SPS regime which does not violate the WTO’s rules. The EU is in violation of WTO rules on GMOs and hormone-treated beef. The UK will also be in violation of WTO rules in these and other areas, such as those where we do not have a sector which EU rules protect, such as olive oil.
Amendment 271 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Grantchester, rightly requires the UK to ensure that any new trade agreements will conform to the WTO’s SPS agreement. This allows countries to maintain standards that are stricter than international standards if those standards are justified by science or by a non-discriminatory lower level of acceptable risk that does not selectively target imports. I worry that proposed new subsection 2(b) may conflict with proposed new subsection 2(a) because it would appear to target imports selectively in cases where the exporter’s rules or standards violate the WTO’s SPS rules.
Similarly, Amendment 273 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, Amendment 276 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Hain, and Amendment 278 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Empey, all require, in effect, the Government to import food only from countries which apply hygiene, animal welfare or environmental standards which are equivalent to or exceed those currently allowed in the EU or UK. However, if we were to insist that our trading partners meet our welfare standards, many currently available imported goods would be prohibited from sale in the UK. If we try to restrict our trade negotiators in the ways these amendments would require, we will fail to make good trade agreements with other countries and we will not be able to secure the great benefits that our independent trade policy can deliver in many other areas, such as financial services, digital and data. We would lose the opportunity to improve our domestic regulatory environment and we would render Brexit largely meaningless.
As for Amendment 280 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Bruce of Bennachie, I understand that the Government remain confident that they will successfully negotiate a free trade agreement with the EU prior to the end of the year. This amendment is not appropriate for inclusion in a Bill which sets out new, long-term future arrangements for agriculture.