Agriculture Bill

Debate between Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb and Lord Holmes of Richmond

Committee stage & Committee: 6th sitting (Hansard) & Committee: 6th sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Thursday 23rd July 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb [V]]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendments 248, 250, 251, 252, 254 and 266 in my name, some of which are supported by my noble friend Lord Holmes. I will speak also to Amendment 256 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh of Pickering.

Agricultural products, especially animal products, should all be raised to and maintained at the highest possible standards. While the Government prefer to leave so much to consumer choice, good and informative product labelling on foods is absolutely essential. People deserve to have reliable information about the food they are eating that is rigorously tested and independently verified, and there should also be appropriate fines for misleading labelling.

Too much greenwashing and misleading information is put out by big companies and trade bodies, which trick consumers into thinking that things are healthier, happier or fairer than they actually are. This needs to be sorted out so that truly great producers thrive without false competition.

[Lord Holmes of Richmond [V]]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendments 250, 251 and 252 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, and Amendment 253 in my name.

As the noble Baroness said, there is tremendous and as yet largely untapped potential in labelling, not least in the use of QR codes. With technological advances, such codes contain so much information and have such positive uses for producers, consumers and indeed everybody in the chain. This takes me to the purpose behind my Amendment 253. It is in the marketing section of the Bill but is about more than that. It is about what we can do in agriculture and horticulture for all the products in this Bill, and speaks to products way beyond it in terms of the digital opportunity to drive efficiency and information for all in the chain.

When I speak of digitisation, I do not mean what is all too often the case, where a form gets put on to a database and that is called a digital transformation. That is doing nothing different; it is merely taking something on paper and putting it into electronic form. We need to consider what data is required, whether on welfare, provenance, ingredients, or the type of soil where the product was grown. What do we need, how can we then best collect it and at what stage of the production or supply chain can it be best provided?

Amendment 253 relates specifically to VI-1 forms for wine products to give a specific example but also to underscore the point that this is about all agricultural and horticultural produce. Indeed, it is about all goods and services. It could not have more resonance for the autumn and winter that we are about to go into. Currently, wines coming into the UK from Europe do not have to go through the VI-1 process or have lab tests. Given that 55% of the wine coming into this country comes from Europe, come 1 January, this is absolutely what will be required.

I am grateful for the background notes from the Wine and Spirit Trade Association, which makes these points extremely clearly. It should be noted that the British wine trade is worth some £19 billion and provides 130,000 jobs. In fact, wine is the UK’s sixth-biggest export in the food and drink classification. We are a world hub for wine import and export. With this amendment, rather than just going for a form that would impose extreme levels of friction on the process, we have the opportunity for a digital solution: digital passports for wine coming into the country, leaving it and going anywhere in the world.