Groceries Code Adjudicator Bill [Lords]

Debate between Baroness McIntosh of Pickering and Ian Paisley

Monday 19th November 2012 Commons Chamber

[Miss Anne McIntosh (Thirsk and Malton) (Con)]

It is a great pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Edinburgh South (Ian Murray). I should like to congratulate the Under-Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, my hon. Friend the Member for East Dunbartonshire (Jo Swinson), on starting this Second Reading debate so eloquently. I want to make some comments as the representative of growers and farmers in Thirsk, Malton and Filey, and I want to share with the House the evidence that the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Select Committee has heard on these matters.

I welcome the Bill’s Second Reading. I have some common ground with the hon. Member for Edinburgh South on these issues, but probably more with my hon. Friend the Minister. I also have common ground and differences with the hon. Member for West Bromwich West (Mr Bailey), who chairs the Business, Innovation and Skills Select Committee.

We should perhaps pause for a moment to consider the marketplace in which some of the growers we hope will benefit from the Bill are operating. They tend to be very small producers of each vegetable or form of produce, and they are often small in number. There is absolutely no comparison with the size, volume and financial weight of supermarkets.

I welcome the fact that we have reached Second Reading and I welcome the useful amendments made in the other place, but there has been a long gestation period from the Competition Commission report of 2008. I would like to record the thanks of the DEFRA Committee to those who gave written evidence and, more specifically, oral evidence in the context of our brief inquiry. We shared our conclusions with the Business, Innovation and Skills Committee. Some of the points we made have been adopted, but it is worth repeating them today.

We welcome the fact that an adjudicator is going to be established, and we believe that the adjudicator should have the power to accept complaints from indirect as well as direct suppliers. Will the Minister confirm that suppliers will have the ability to make anonymous complaints, which we believe will be fundamental to the success of the groceries code adjudicator?

In a limited market—in Lincolnshire, for example, and other parts of the country—where there are very few leek growers, if one of them wished to make a complaint against a particular supermarket, it would be too easy for the supermarket to identify that particular grower. It is therefore vital that the grower has the safety of knowing that an anonymous complaint can be made to the adjudicator—either directly or, as forcefully expressed by our Committee, through an indirect route via the National Farmers Union, the Country Land and Business Association or the Tenant Farmers Association. They are membership organisations that will represent the individual grower, who will then be able to make a case, safe from persecution and safe from the possibility of having the contract terminated at an early stage.

[Ian Paisley]

The hon. Lady makes a vital point. If a potato processor or person producing potatoes in Northern Ireland were to make that sort of complaint, it would in effect be one of three people, so a middle way of getting the complaint through must be found.

[Miss McIntosh]

The hon. Gentleman reaffirms my point very eloquently. He would probably share my view—and I hope that Ministers and shadow Ministers will grasp it—that the security of tenure of some of these growers is absolutely shocking. That is in stark contrast to—albeit another woeful situation—what happens in the dairy industry. A cheese producer in my area contacted me to say that some of the milk supplies for cheese production—a liquid production that we are so good at in this country—are being threatened. The growers that I believe will benefit more directly and more specifically than dairy farmers and others sometimes have only three months’ security of tenure or certainty of contract—not even a year. I do not know—perhaps the Minister can help me—whether the Bill will address this disparity between producers of, for example, milk and potatoes, and others. With the groceries code adjudicator, will these producers and growers gain greater security of contract than the three months or less than a year that they have at present?

Let me explain what I believe to be the sticking point. I hope I heard the hon. Member for Edinburgh South correctly as I think he said he would favour the power to have proactive investigations. I believe that that is vital. I should declare my interest—I know that what I say here will not go further than this Chamber, but I also know that if someone wants to tell a secret, this is the best place in which to share it. I served for six months—in 1978, I am afraid to say—in what is now called DG Competition but was then the Directorate General for Competition, dealing with investigations of complaints brought directly to the European Commission. I understand that the Competition Commission is based on the same philosophy, as it were, as DG Competition.

I should like to know what good reason the Government could have for not introducing a power for the groceries code adjudicator to launch a proactive investigation. It could be based on evidence received by word of mouth, or on material in trade journals. Journalists working in the specialist press often hear things at conferences to which others are not privy.

Common Agricultural Policy

Debate between Baroness McIntosh of Pickering and Ian Paisley

Thursday 8th March 2012 Westminster Hall

[Miss McIntosh]

The evidence we received was very clear in that regard: as long as there is a level of farm support across the European Union—and in other parts of the international community—farmers subscribe to decisions being taken within the European Union, so that there is a proverbial level playing field. That is something I have sought most of my professional life. I do not know if we have reached it yet.

I want to say a few words about direct payments. In the Committee’s view, direct payments should be retained—the evidence was very powerful in this regard—up to 2020. They should not be abolished until business conditions in agriculture improve, because UK farms are highly dependent on direct payments—currently the single farm payment as introduced in 2005. Without them, more than 50% of farmers would be unprofitable. I dare say that many of those would probably be in my uplands in Thirsk, Malton and Filey. The evidence we received indicated that UK livestock production would fall significantly as a result of such an approach although, interestingly, it would have only a negligible effect on crop production. The Committee is concerned about the implications for food security and for landscapes, and the rural livelihoods that depend on farming.

[Ian Paisley (North Antrim) (DUP)]

I thank the hon. Lady for giving way in this very important debate. Does she accept—and has the Committee reflected on—the issue regarding the fair distribution of the amounts between pillar one and pillar two? Does the Committee recognise that there must be a fair distribution, which should not be at the expense of one pillar over the other?

Fisheries

Debate between Baroness McIntosh of Pickering and Ian Paisley

Tuesday 15th November 2011 Commons Chamber

[Ian Paisley (North Antrim) (DUP)]

I welcome this timely debate. It is important that we set out some red lines before the December Council meeting so that the Minister is emboldened to make representations there on behalf of our industry, which is very important to coastal towns and villages around the entire United Kingdom.

In October there was a significant displacement of the scallop fishing effort from the Irish sea on to the north Antrim coast because British scallop dredgers had exhausted their area VII effort pot of 2011. That effort pot was agreed in the late 1990s under what was called the western waters regime. Uptake of it has accelerated because a growing number of vessels have diversified into the scallop fishery to escape restrictions introduced in other fisheries, such as the long-term cod recovery plan and the western channel sole recovery plan. Also, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs is considering recommendations for a chain of marine-protected areas, which would have to be mirrored by the Minister’s colleagues in the devolved Administrations. That could create further displacement.

It is easy to become confused by all these issues, and I do not envy the Minister’s responsibilities in having to deal with what is a huge range of very complex and interconnected areas. Yet, as I heard when I was chairman of our agriculture Committee in Northern Ireland, and as I regularly hear from my colleagues in Parliament and fishermen across the country, there is concern about how the common fisheries policy operates, and people are saying, “Enough is enough.”

The Minister’s website carries a colourful photograph of a fishing boat he saw on his travels. On the vessel’s side there is a picture of a Tasmanian devil, which is represented as a trawler skipper who is being questioned by a fisheries officer. He asks the skipper, “What are you landing today?” The skipper replies, “One box of whiting and six boxes of paperwork.” [Laughter.] We laugh, but we know that our fishing fleet is hampered by red tape and paperwork, and that that paperwork comes from one place and one place only: Brussels. We need to recognise that enough is enough; this has got to stop. We hope the Minister will be emboldened to stand up against the weight of EU bureaucracy that has been created.

[Miss McIntosh]

I am carefully following the hon. Gentleman’s remarks and I welcome much of what he says. Does he not accept that if we were to introduce a UK register, which I believe the Minister is minded to do, that would cut through a lot of the bureaucracy and we would find out who is fishing in UK waters?

[Ian Paisley]

That is an interesting proposal, and I shall be interested to hear the Minister’s response; I see that he is writing a note as he wishes to respond to it.

Do we really believe that a solution to the problems of paperwork or discards will be delivered by a commissioner who, in my view, is led by media hype, and by a Commission that, together with the other EU institutions, clearly wishes to exert even more influence over member states?