Draft Agriculture (Miscellaneous Amendments) (EU Exit) Regulations 2019

Debate between Chris Bryant and Rushanara Ali

Monday 21st October 2019 General Committees

[Chris Bryant]

My right hon. Friend tempts me to tell the story about my donkey, called Dusty, who died. It is a very sad story, but I am not going to tell it—nor that of the one-eyed sheepdog called Nelson.

It is always very tempting, when a Minister describes legislation as technical, to start worrying, and to ask him questions such as, “In regulation 6(2)(b)(v), what does proposed new point (f)(cc) mean?” But I am not going to do that, because I am sure that the Minister is right that, in large measure, this is entirely technical. As the hon. Member for Windsor said, in all honesty there is a lot of such legislation that we have to put in place to ensure that things will be in a good place.

I will, however, ask about regulation 3 and the provisions on eggs being imported into the UK. Why do we have to have a specific element on that in the legislation? One of my farmers who came to see me recently, along with other members of the Welsh National Farmers Union, was very keen to point out one of his big anxieties. He is a chicken farmer who produces eggs. A key part of his business model every year is deciding how many chicks to import from France, I think from Portugal, and from Spain. He has some anxieties about quite what route the Government are going down. He is not sure whether to import large or small numbers. It depends on whether he will be able to sell his chickens and eggs later next year. I should be grateful if the Minister would explain.

[Rushanara Ali (Bethnal Green and Bow) (Lab)]

I am curious about my hon. Friend’s farm and the donkey, but that is for another time. He raises an important point about the impact on the lives of farmers. There is a broader concern, related to impact assessments, costs, consequences for people, and disruption. The Government have made a habit of turning up to Committees without an impact assessment. “Without an impact assessment” should be replaced with “with wishful thinking”, frankly, because we are being expected to make decisions and judgments without evidence or analysis. The same has happened with the Government’s deal, and the failure to provide an analysis of the impact of the deal on the wider economy and the country, including for the Treasury Committee. It would be helpful for the Minister to give an assurance that the Government will not keep doing this.

[Chris Bryant]

Perhaps I should have stopped my speech before giving way; my hon. Friend could have made a speech of her own. I shall not, at this moment, be as ungenerous as she has been, if that is all right with her. The major concern about farming in my constituency has been to do with lamb. I do not really want to go down this route, but if we were to leave the European Union without a deal, there would be a problem in relation to tariffs on lamb; 50% of Welsh lamb goes to England, and 45% of it goes elsewhere in the European Union. We have always found it difficult to sell lamb in countries such as the United States of America, but I do not think that is really addressed in the regulations. I would love to tease that point out from the Government. However, the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster has been clear in Parliament on several occasions that one of the toughest issues for Welsh agriculture would be lamb. I think that that is generally already accepted by the Government, and it is one of the things that we all know we shall have to address if there is some kind of political catastrophic failure.

Acquired Brain Injury

Debate between Chris Bryant and Rushanara Ali

Thursday 9th May 2019 Commons Chamber

[Rushanara Ali (Bethnal Green and Bow) (Lab)]

A great friend of mine suffered a brain aneurysm, and she may not have survived were it not for the Royal London Hospital and its support. My hon. Friend makes a good point about the need for that wider specialism in other hospitals and for transition support to provide much-needed rehabilitation.

[Chris Bryant]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. If there is one thing that I have learnt from my experience of melanoma this year—incidentally, the thing on the back of my head is not a brain injury; I am still getting over the melanoma being cut out—it is that I, as the patient, wanted to go to the real expert, and I would travel as far as I needed to do that. Sometimes in politics it is easy to join the bandwagon when people say, “No, everything’s got to be intensely local,” but the decision on major trauma centres was a brave one taken by this Government. The Conservatives are not a party that I support, but it was the right decision for saving people’s lives. We can now save people’s quality of life as well.

The APPG also called for proper return-to-school plans for every child with acquired brain injury, training for teachers, prison officers and benefits assessors, and proper protocols shared across all sports for concussion in sport.

The effects of a brain injury can be profound. Some sufferers have severely impaired physical mobility, and there can be major behavioural challenges. I have heard of patients losing all sense of inhibition, suddenly becoming tactless, using crude and abusive language, divulging private information and becoming impulsive, irritable and aggressive; or, on the opposite side, completely passive, unresponsive and lacking initiative. Others become obsessive, repeatedly checking their possessions or becoming profoundly self-centred.