Trade Bill

Debate between Baroness McIntosh of Pickering and Lord Mann

3rd reading & 3rd reading (Hansard) & 3rd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 18th January 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Mann (Non-Afl) [V]]

My Lords, as we near the end of lengthy deliberations over a long period, during which we have finally managed to leave the European Union, and now have to start to combat, economically, the greatest worldwide pandemic in many centuries—I do not think that is an exaggeration—I want to make a short contribution imploring the Government not to follow a tendency inbuilt in all Governments. When legislation has taken so long to put together and eventually receives Royal Assent, I implore them not to sit back and leave others to do the next stage. We in this country are good at appointing trade envoys to go out across the world but we are not nearly as good at taking the message inwards. If one thing strikes me more than anything else about what is needed with the freedoms that come from leaving the European Union and the complexities of recovering, at some stage, the economy post the Covid pandemic, it is that we will need to engender two things that will not come automatically.

The first is an entrepreneurial spirit. It is easy for politicians to talk about that but, when industrialists, business people and workers have been anchored down for so long with the pandemic and will continue to be in some way for some considerable time, entrepreneurship will not simply emerge quickly from nowhere; it will need encouraging, facilitating and inspiring.

The second thing, as part of that, will be the need for a new social contract, to use an old term in a modern setting, post Brexit. If those who own and work in our businesses are not on the same wavelength, with the same motivations and moving in the same direction, that entrepreneurship will be severely hampered. The innovations will be concepts rather than delivered goods and services that boost our economy. The Government need to decide whether we will be an economy that trades cheap and cheerful or as the best in the world. That choice will be made in the next 18 months and will last for many years to come.

I implore the Government to go inward into our industrial heartlands of the past, taking the message of this Trade Bill about what trade means and re-establishing that social contract—the message that we are all in this together. The UK, with its new freedoms, will prosper and thrive if we do so on the basis of being the best, rather than the cheap and cheerful back end of the industrial world, I hope that Ministers from this department will take the lead in doing that.

[Baroness McIntosh of Pickering (Con) [V]]

My Lords, I pay fulsome tribute to my noble friends Lord Grimstone of Boscobel and Lord Younger of Leckie for their stewardship of the Bill, bringing us to where we are today. I join my noble friends in also paying tribute to my noble friend Lady Fairhead for originating the original Bill, to which I also contributed.

My noble friend has alluded to all those who contributed, and I join him in thanking all the officials who have helped us—notably, his private secretary and the Bill team. I also thank the doorkeepers, the attendants and those in the Printed Paper Office and the Public Bill Office, who have worked exceptionally hard on the Bill. I thank, too, the catering staff, who have ensured that, while we have been meeting in this House, we have been well fed and watered.

My noble friend alluded to the fact that the Bill has changed during its passage in this House before it proceeds to the ping-pong stage. I echo the concerns expressed by the noble Lord, Lord Curry of Kirkharle, that the food standards agencies of the four nations will be asked to advise on human health. There is a concern over how they will report on and feed the human health aspects into the other two reports to which my noble friend referred.

I also extend warm thanks to the Law Society of Scotland, which briefed me at various stages of the Bill to ensure that Scottish concerns—particularly those of the legal profession in Scotland—were heeded.

The noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, referred to “Hamlet”. Obviously that was set in Denmark, with the Prince of Denmark being the main player. I end by thanking my noble friend Lord Grimstone, who has emerged as the swan, with the rest of us being the ugly ducklings. He has had an aura of calm at every stage of the Bill, and I am sure that he has been serenely paddling underneath. I thank him and congratulate him and other noble friends on getting the Bill to this stage today. I look forward to the ping-pong stage to see how the unfinished business, particularly relating to the CRaG procedures and the other domestic legislation and the regulations they put in place, plays out.

Agriculture Bill

Debate between Baroness McIntosh of Pickering and Lord Mann

Committee stage & Committee: 2nd sitting (Hansard) & Committee: 2nd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Thursday 9th July 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness McIntosh of Pickering (Con) [V]]

My Lords, I declare my interests as set out in the register and in particular that I sit on the rural affairs group of the Church of England. I apologise if I failed to mention that on Tuesday. I support Amendments 12, 13 and 62. My comments are more in the form of questions.

We have before us the policy statement. What is its status in relation to the Bill? In responding to this group, will my noble friend the Minister bring us up to date?

On Amendments 12 and 13 regarding educating children, from which budget should that come? I am a great supporter not just of farm visits but of visits of schoolchildren to country shows. When I was at school in Harrogate I had the great good fortune to visit the Great Yorkshire Show. We had a day off for the purpose. Will my noble friend use his good offices to liaise with his counterpart in the Department for Education to ensure that such visits continue? I am a member of the Yorkshire Agricultural Society and know that it is very keen to receive those visits. For the first time the show will be online, like a number of rural shows across North Yorkshire. It is a wonderful opportunity to engage children without them having to leave school or their home. However, I think it should more properly come out of the education budget.

My noble friend Lord Holmes referred to crops under glass, on which our noble friend Lord Taylor of Holbeach is obviously a great expert. Will my noble friend the Minister liaise with BEIS to ensure that, if we are to benefit from energy from waste, we educate the public about its benefits, even though it means using incinerators? In Denmark, Germany and Holland this is not a problem for the public, and we should not hold our farmers and horticulturalists back by a lack of understanding in this regard.

I pay tribute to the work of Fera at Sand Hutton and the Rothamsted institute. Will that type of research fall under the new financial assistance proposed in Clause 1 or should it more properly come from R&D budgets elsewhere? That clarification would be most helpful.

I support Amendment 62 in the name of my noble friend Lady Rock. Diversification lies at the heart of our future farm policy. I hope that my noble friend the Minister will take this opportunity to identify those who can advise our farmers, particularly smallholders and tenants, about the best thing to use.

In supporting Amendment 101, which relates to new entrants, I refer to the policy statement, which points out most helpfully on page 39 that regrettably those farmers

“after the reference period are unlikely to be eligible for delinked payments.”

Will my noble friend do what is set out here by making it easier for farmers who wish to retire to do so and who, by delinking, will free land for new entrants? We have to support new entrants as far as possible. This, together with the expected reductions in rent prices we are told about, should help them to get a foothold in the industry. That links to the amendments I will move later relating to tenancy holdings. This could be very useful. We need a bit of flesh on the bones in the policy statement.

[Lord Mann (Non-Afl) [V]]

My Lords, I speak in support of Amendments 12 and 13, and I endorse what was said by the noble Earl, Lord Devon, and other noble Lords, on the importance of robotics in agriculture. I well remember being involved in this in the 1980s. We were the world leaders in new robotic developments, but of course, constrained by the state subsidy rules of the European Union, we lost out to Japan and the United States, where, in particular, the use of contract compliance with state orders for the military gave them the competitive advantage to protect their fledgling industry.

My appeal to the Government as we leave the European Union is this. In this country, state aid is generally seen as protecting old, dying industries, but, at its essence, it is to protect fledgling industries that need link-ups with universities and the ability to experiment to get products that work to market. In robotics and artificial intelligence, not least in the area of agriculture, our potential is huge. If we were to win that battle, we would be more self-reliant and more competitively advantaged internationally. We should grab those opportunities before it is too late, not least because China is doing the same thing; it is leading the market and getting that market advantage.

At the same time, we should not copy the Chinese model for GM food. One thing that most surprises me about the debate on agriculture in this country is how we have allowed a form of quasi-communism to run it. Look at the role of the supermarkets: every strawberry and carrot must be identical in size and taste. This is specified by supermarket contracts, which farmers struggle to meet and make a profit under. The answer is not to move towards GM food—the ultimate communist dream of every product looking the same and tasting the same—but to go in the opposite direction. Something far more radical than farmers’ markets is needed, although they are a good starting point, conceptually. The whole basis of the tax incentive system for local food needs radically overhauling in his country. The incentives should be for real production, as the farmer sees it taken to the local market, to take out the food miles and to challenge directly this communism of the supermarkets in making everything the same. Again, in leaving the European Union, we have the opportunity to give that incentive to those local markets, and we should be doing so in a very big way.

Finally, I have a comment on trees and forestry. Pit timber used to grow alongside the collieries of this country in a very big way. We failed to learn the lessons of that in our forestry planting. Forestry planting has been seen as the preserve of the rural economy, yet on former coalfield sites we have huge swathes of reclaimed land, once brownfield and often still laid to waste. It would be ideal for reforestation as an industry, exactly as was done for those pit timbers 100 and 150 years ago—the remnants of which still exist. That would also give an amenity to local communities over the next 50 years. We should rethink precisely where our forests are being planted.