Agriculture Bill

Baroness Worthington Excerpts

2nd reading & 2nd reading (Hansard) & 2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 10th June 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Worthington (CB) [V]]

My Lords, I am very grateful to be able to participate in this important Second Reading debate on the Agriculture Bill and I thank the Minister for introducing the Bill. I would like to take a moment to echo comments from other noble Lords about the inability of our colleagues to participate in this Second Reading debate and to echo the hope there will be no further curtailment of debate around the Bill and the scrutinising of this important framework legislation. It represents a once in a generation opportunity to set a new framework for how we reward farmers and how we manage our land and food systems.

Time is short, as many people have commented. I want to address my comments to the issue of climate change and the ability of this Bill to help us to make some significant strides forward in how we domestically address this issue and by setting world-class policy standards for other countries to adopt and take on. This is the promise of the ELM that the Bill introduces—that we will be shifting from a system focused on public money to support production and move it towards supporting public good. I fully support the Government’s intentions here and, as others have mentioned, I would like to see more detail about the definitions of what ELM will cover and how it will operate.

The principle is a good one and, unlike many sectors of the economy where we are seeking to address climate change, there is often a large debate about how we can price in externalities of climate change—how we can add costs of greenhouse gas pollution to a sector which is currently not paying them. Here, with agriculture, we have the opportunity to redeploy public money that has already been allocated, so it is a fantastic opportunity to align our need to keep land productive, to support farmers, to increase our food security and to improve our balance of trade, and at the same time address climate change.

There is a need for us to explore where there is that great overlap between productive land and high-carbon land. I think it was the noble Viscount, Lord Ridley, who pointed out there are different camps when it comes to how we should use our land. We should be trying to direct our public money towards those uses of land which achieve a triple bottom line: rural development and jobs, high-carbon stocks on our land, and increased food security. I think that points us towards investment in the whole system of agro-ecology, where we are producing food and maintaining high biodiversity standards on our lands. Those are the sorts of areas we can explore in Committee and hope to get more flesh on the bones of this important framework legislation.

In the time remaining I want to touch on the context of this Bill being passed with so much uncertainty, both in relation to the trade deal we are expecting with the EU and other potential trade agreements with countries such as the US. It does feel as if we need to be writing some clear legal standards into this legislation to enable to us to conduct those negotiations from a position of strength and not have the potential rolling-back of high environmental standards. In a sense, we need to ensure we can erect a green wall around our own high environmental standards and have those standards upheld for the benefit of the environment and for our rural communities.

The other issue I am concerned about is the shift away from the payment systems we have today; we will lose the stick, as it were, of cross-compliance, where if farmers receive a payment, they are required to adhere to certain environmental standards through cross-compliance. That will be removed, and I am concerned about potential backsliding and who will oversee any potential loss of environment benefit. We have to see a net gain in environmental terms from the Bill and we should be seeking to put in place clear measurements and enforcement mechanisms to make sure that we deliver the things we are expecting from the public money we will continue to spend in this area. I thank noble Lords and look forward to Committee.