Environment Bill

Debate between Earl of Caithness and Lord Whitty

Committee stage
Monday 28th June 2021 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Caithness (Con)]

My Lords, when the office of environmental protection was mooted, I hoped it would be on the same basis as the Climate Change Committee, and be totally independent of government. When that was not the case, I hoped that the structure of the Bill would be that advocated by the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, and that that part of the Bill should be within the remit of the Climate Change Committee, which is sufficiently independent.

I remember when I was a Minister, and that was many blue moons ago now, being quite irritated at times by the interference of Brussels. We had perhaps some of the best civil servants in the whole of the EU then; my advice was excellent, and I thought that what we were doing was right. But on reflection, perhaps we were not that right. I remember I once lost a Division and went to the Leader, the late Lord Whitelaw, and said to him, “Willie, I’m terribly sorry, I lost that amendment”. He looked at me and said, “Malcolm, perhaps they were right”. Perhaps the Government are wrong on this occasion. As I see it, the problem is that Defra will remain judge and jury, and there is a route for disaster.

I shall give two examples. One example is the water authorities, which I helped to privatise in the mid-1980s. My friend, the late Lord Ridley of Liddesdale, made a revolutionary change in policy by taking control of pollution away from the water authorities and handing it to the National Rivers Authority. The water authorities were outraged, but it was right. What went wrong was that the NRA was amalgamated into the Environment Agency, and the money for the Environment Agency was reduced so that the controller of the polluting companies did not exercise the brake that was needed. We talked about that a couple of days ago.

The other government department that is a classic example of judge and jury is the Forestry Commission. I know that my noble friend on the Front Bench agrees that the Forestry Commission has been an utter disaster for this country. It has cost the taxpayer a huge amount of money and planted the wrong trees in the wrong places with the wrong policy. I hope that that is beginning to change. I have been banging on in this House on that for more than 50 years, but at long last I am being proved right.

I would really like the OEP to be seen to be independent. Not only does it have to be independent, which it is not under the Bill—as the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope of Craighead, said, the schedule is not strong enough—it has to be seen to be independent. My noble friend Lord Cormack was right: this is better done by negotiation. The Government will get defeated on Report on this, but it would be far better if we got an amendment that we could all sign up to, because that would send a message to everybody who will be affected by the Bill—which is the whole of the country—that there is unanimity in Parliament that that is the right way forward. At the moment, as I said to my noble friend when he was kind enough to have a meeting with me, I am unhappy with the OEP. I am not quite certain what the right amendment is, but I know that there is one out there if we all make an effort to get it right.

[Lord Whitty (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, there has been near unanimity in condemnation of what is currently in the schedule to deliver a really independent body of the kind we want. As the noble Lord, Lord Cameron, said in a formidable opening address on the group, we want to create the same degree of fear, almost, in public bodies that the possibility of the European Commission intervening and fining this country provided before Brexit. What is envisaged in the Bill goes nowhere near that.

Frankly, we know that there are precedents for what happens to so-called independent bodies. I had expected to speak after my noble friend Lady Young and just before my noble friend Lord Rooker. It is instructive that one was the chief executive of the Environment Agency and the other the chair of the Food Standards Agency. When the Environment Agency was first set up in the 1990s, to which the noble Earl, Lord Caithness, just referred, there was a lot of talk about independence, but in fact it became part of the Defra family. Its independence was limited by successive Governments over the whole of that period. Under the coalition Government, it was restricted from briefing parliamentarians or engaging in anything that amounted to a campaign in the eyes of the then Government. Subsequently, of course, its funding has been seriously cut. The Environment Agency is doing an effective job on limited resources, but it is not independent of government.

The other example is the Food Standards Agency. The FSA is a non-departmental body, but as soon as it started straying into areas of interest to the Department of Health on diet, health advice and well-being, those functions were taken off it and ploughed back into the Department of Health. It was right to take it out of its origins in MAFF, but in practice it was never completely independent of government, much though the efforts of my noble friend Lord Rooker and others tried to make it so.

We want a truly independent body on the environment to face up to the immense challenge of climate change and biodiversity diminution. This is not it. I agreed with pretty much every word that the noble Lord, Lord Cameron, said. I do not entirely agree with his amendment—like others, I prefer the amendment in the name of my noble friend Lady Jones of Whitchurch—but, as recent speakers said, the Government really do need to take notice of the overwhelming view of the Committee that this will not do. To be truly independent, the OEP needs not just a formal position and designation as a non-departmental body; it needs powers, which are insufficient in the Bill; it needs provision for how its composition is established, which is not fully in this Bill; and it needs powers of enforcement, which we will consider later in Committee and which are, at the moment, clearly completely inadequate to the task.

This is the central part of the Bill. The Government have to think again. If they can come up with a better proposition then let us seriously consider it, but what is in the Bill at the moment is not adequate. None of us believes that it is, and I doubt whether the Government themselves—and the Minister in particular, if I may say so—really believe that it is. Let us think again and try to get something better before the Bill completes its course.

Agriculture Bill

Debate between Earl of Caithness and Lord Whitty

Report stage & Report: 2nd sitting (Hansard) & Report: 2nd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Thursday 17th September 2020 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Caithness (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for bringing forward his amendments on this issue. I would still prefer the reporting to be annual, but he has made a move towards us, and I will not dispute his suggestion of three years.

My noble friend Lord Dundee made some interesting and useful points about animal feeds and the damage caused when growing them in other countries, particularly in Brazil, as we have seen recently on television in the Attenborough programme. It is a matter of concern.

More generally, I am concerned about getting too detailed about food security. We must remember that a great many British farmers rely on exports, and if we are restrictive on our imports, it is going to be very easy for other countries to be restrictive on our exports. As the situation stands, I fear the EU could be extremely difficult about our lamb and beef exports in the not-too-distant future. That would have a profound effect on farming, and it is something my noble friend will have to be aware of. Overall, we are not doing too badly on producing our own food. We import an awful lot we do not need for our own diet, but we are lucky to be rich enough to afford it.

[Lord Whitty (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, I added my name to Amendment 53, of the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, in this group because it relates to food insecurity. The point I want to make today, when shortly we are to debate the whole of the food strategy with the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, is that the issue of food insecurity for our poorest households—but not exclusively poor households—is a whole food chain issue. That is why I was a bit disturbed on Tuesday, when it was suggested that this Bill was about the agriculture sector’s relationship with government and government subsidy or support to deliver public goods, expressed primarily in terms of farming’s relationships to the environment, the countryside, biodiversity in the countryside, animal welfare and, perhaps, the wider rural economy.

Those are all vital issues, but arguably the biggest public good is the contribution to the delivery of a safe, accessible and healthy diet to our population. That involves the relationships of farmers not just with the Government or the environment but the whole apparatus of the food chain with which farming trades. Together, they need to deliver an effective food strategy to improve our population’s diet, drastically reduce obesity and other food-related disorders and make healthy food available to all at affordable prices. Food insecurity exacerbates poverty and disease and explains, in large part, the escalating dependence on food banks. That is why we need a national food strategy.

Like others, I served on the Select Committee chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Krebs. The work of that committee, together with that of Henry Dimbleby’s food commission, will hopefully form the basis of that new government strategy. But it will if society recognises the crisis of unhealthy diet is an important one we are all facing, which has to be addressed, in part, through the relationship between farming and the other key players in the food chain.

Much of the regulation on food focuses on farmers, who are generally small businesses, and final outlets—restaurants, cafés, food shops and takeaways—which are also, largely, small businesses. But the nature of the food chain—the economics of it and, to some extent, its whole regulatory structure—is determined by the substantial companies in the middle of the journey from farm to fork, such as processors, wholesalers and supermarkets. These sectors are highly oligopolistic, but their decisions affect the price and standards to which farmers produce, as well as the tastes of consumers and the price and availability of food. They influence via their advertising budgets and their store displays in a way that affects price, diet and the availability of healthy food. These industries spend 20 times more on advertising highly processed food and confectionery than they do on fresh fruit and vegetables. Farmers and consumers need fairer, more balanced, greener contracts as we trade throughout the food chain.

Agriculture Bill

Debate between Earl of Caithness and Lord Whitty

Committee stage & Committee: 3rd sitting (Hansard) & Committee: 3rd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 14th July 2020 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Caithness (Con) [V]]

My Lords, first, I thank those responsible for the speakers’ lists for heeding my words and those of the noble Lord, Lord Greaves. The present speakers’ list is in a much better shape and leads to better debate than was the case previously.

I have put my name to Amendment 70. I think that the words “have regard to” in Clause 1(4) weaken the importance of producing good, healthy food. I hope that my noble friend the Minister will agree that they should be deleted, and I congratulate my noble friend Lady McIntosh on sponsoring this amendment. I was happy to sign up to it.

All noble Lords have been speaking about food security. I hope that every single one of your Lordships participating in today’s debate has read the recently published report of the Food, Poverty, Health and the Environment Committee entitled Hungry for Change: Fixing the Failures in Food. The report goes into the subject in some depth, covering many of the points raised in this evening’s debate.

I would like to make one point about growing healthy food. It sounds as though our farmers do not grow healthy food at the moment. I think that, in the present circumstances of the CAP, our farmers grow very healthy food but it is the food industry that turns it into ultra-processed food, and that is the poison that contaminates our diets. Rather than just concentrating on farmers, the food industry has to be looked at as a whole.

We make a number of recommendations in our report Hungry for Change, and I hope that the Minister will respond positively to them in due course. Food security covers a vast number of departments. We talked to three different ministries during our deliberations, which were somewhat hampered by the Covid pandemic, but it is clear that this is a whole-government rather than just a Defra problem.

Given what everybody else has said, I can now terminate my remarks, but I hope that my noble friend will agree to Amendment 70.

[Lord Whitty (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, I added my name to Amendment 35, which was so comprehensively moved by the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh, and I did so for one simple reason: it explicitly recognises that a key part of the output of farming must be its effect on human health. It is somewhat strange that Clause 1, which lists all the ways in which public money can be spent to support the output of farming—the improvement of land, water, woodlands, the environment, natural heritage, the countering of environmental threats, the welfare of livestock, the health of plants, plant and livestock conservation and so on—contains no mention of human beings.

The biggest impact of farming, both in its production methods and in what it produces, is on human beings. I was provoked, to some extent, to add my name to the amendment of the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh, because I received advice on pesticides when I was tabling a different amendment that comes much later on in this Bill. Some of the issues relating to this have already been referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Wigley, and the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, in the earlier debate today. However, I asked that this amendment be headed “human health”, and I was told that this was beyond the scope of the Bill. It must not be. I have amended that amendment to conform, obviously, but human health is central to this Bill.

It is not just the potentially negative effects of some farming processes; it is much more positively the effect of the produce of farming on the balance of our diets and nutrition, and the way it gets to the public. Like the noble Earl, Lord Caithness, the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, and others, I was a member of the Select Committee under the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, which produced its report very recently. That report spells out that farming has to be seen as part of the totality of the food chain, and one of its principal impacts is its being directly or indirectly responsible for the health and nutrition of our population.

As the noble Earl, Lord Caithness, has just said, much of the responsibility here lies with the big processors, the wholesalers and the retailers, which both specify and advertise food that is quite often not so healthy. However, the responsibility also lies on farmers and government policy towards farming. The Krebs report makes quite a wide range of recommendations that relate to this, and the Bill does not fully reflect that priority because the availability, quality, pricing, convenience and affordability of nutritious food is vital to turning around the declining quality of our diets, which is causing such things as our obesity being the worst in Europe and examples of malnutrition and so forth in our population—mostly, but by no means exclusively, among the least well-off families.

Good food is a public good. This Bill needs to reflect that. A more plant-based diet is a health benefit. More domestic production of fresh fruit and veg is a key part of any strategy for healthier food. Hence I—and I think the whole of the Krebs committee—would wish to see, in Clause 1, a reference to health and diet as a public good derived from the output and methods of farming, and therefore worthy of our support. Therefore, I support Amendment 35, to which I have added my name, and Amendment 36 in the name of my noble friend Lady Jones of Whitchurch, which refers explicitly to healthy food.

Infrastructure Bill [HL]

Debate between Earl of Caithness and Lord Whitty

Monday 10th November 2014 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Caithness]

My Lords, it is clear now. Industry does not need further clarity. It works.

[Lord Whitty (Lab)]

My Lords, those who oppose these amendments are missing the point. The amendments may well be in the wrong place; they may well be too wide. I did not intervene in the previous debate because I thought that it was becoming far too polarised. Public opinion on the issue of fracking is polarised, but public opinion is not polarised in relation to the protection of our national parks and our areas of outstanding natural beauty. Unless the Government in some way recognise within the overall approach to fracking that there are certain sites which have to be protected—whatever provision exists elsewhere in terms of general planning law and so forth—the outcry against fracking will grow rather than be reduced.

The Government should at least have the grace to recognise that that is a reality. In terms of public acceptability of fracking, protection of our protected areas is an important element which needs to be in the regulations and in the Bill. Whether the amendments in the name of the noble Baroness are technically in the right place or not, the politics and the PR for fracking need to make that point. If they do not, the 25% of people who fundamentally oppose fracking will grow in number. The Government have the opportunity to ensure that that does not happen. I hope that, if not now then in the process of this Bill through the Commons, the Government will put that right.

Energy Bill

Debate between Earl of Caithness and Lord Whitty

Thursday 25th July 2013 Grand Committee

[Lord Whitty]

My Lords, the noble Lords, Lord Jenkin and Lord Roper, have raised an interesting point. I was going to support the amendment, at least in principle, but for rather wider reasons than those that the noble Lord, Lord Roper, advanced or, indeed, some of the points that the noble Lord, Lord Deben, made. The arguments are sometimes between one group of environmentalists and another and they are sometimes between one vested interest and another. We have been through the same cycle or swing on liquid biofuels. I am not sure where the pendulum will end up on that—there has been a significant intervention, which I was partly involved with in my previous capacity in government.

This is a difficult issue. The amendment asks the Secretary of State, first, to look at it carefully and, secondly, to ensure that the users of biomass as a feedstock have obligations to consider the nature of the supply chain and how far it saves carbon. Even in the best of circumstances, biomass in the broadest sense—it covers a multitude of very different forms of feedstock, from food and farm waste to bespoke forestries that are grown for this purpose on the other side of the world—is, even conceptually, a rather long form of sustainability. You chop down one tree and another one grows, so that in 50 years’ time you have replaced the first one. That is not necessarily the same as some forms of feedstock where the carbon content is low or nil immediately. With biomass, there is a carbon emission. It is therefore important that, in this whole approach, we look at what form of biomass we are using, where it has been sourced from and what it displaces—I had not thought of the softwood argument or the straw argument, although I seem vaguely to remember a similar case not so long ago.

As for displacement on a global scale, I was also thinking about growing bespoke crops in ground that would otherwise be for food, whether in the third world or whether sugar beet, for example, in the UK. It is a big question. At the moment, there is no requirement either on the Government or the regulators and counterparties to look at that aspect. There is also no obligation on the generator proposing a biomass project to look at these issues. The amendment at least gets us into that important discussion.

On some of the figures that the Government have produced—I am not quite sure in which context—we have looked at the early, phase 1 proposals for green energy, of which there is in total 18 gigawatts. Some 5.3 gigawatts comes from six projects for biomass conversions—from fossil fuels to biomass in part or in whole—and another 0.6 gigawatts comes from biomass CHP projects. Therefore, a third of what is currently being proposed upfront regarding all the technologies is biomass. It is much larger than onshore wind in this context, so this will be an important issue. Money is being invested in it and expectations are being raised as to how it will perform. Therefore, what appears to be a simple and modest amendment in the names of the noble Lords, Lord Jenkin and Lord Roper, opens up a wide field. We will not resolve this issue today and we may not even resolve it in the course of the Bill. However, the department, those who enforce the regulations and those who propose biomass projects will have to explain in rather more detail how they are sourcing this, what the effects of sourcing it will be and what the effect on carbon emissions will be. If something like this amendment were accepted by the Government, we would at least get into that discussion. I do not suppose that the Minister will accept the amendment, but it would be helpful if she would at least indicate that the department needs to take another look at this.

[The Earl of Caithness]

The more we look into this subject, the more complicated it gets. We should take seriously the points raised by the noble Lord, Lord Whitty. He mentioned converting land that is suitable for food crops to other uses. We know that in Brazil maize and corn are being used as fuel for cars. I wrote to Drax when I noted that it was converting three of its stations to biofuel production. Sub-Committee D was looking at energy at the time . The staff at Drax were very bullish and said, “This is a wonderful thing. It is all being grown overseas. It is all reputable and is being monitored very carefully. It will all come over in ships and everybody is going to be very happy”. Another point which has not been mentioned is that the amendment refers to “woody biomass” and if you take land out of agricultural production and convert it to timber production, that is a long-term and expensive operation. My noble friend Lord Deben mentioned straw, which is an annual crop but, as regards the sort of material that we are talking about, you are talking of a crop that could well be harvested in 40 to 60 years’ time. Intervening in such a market leads to complications. I am very glad that I am not the Minister who has to deal with this issue as it would cause me all sorts of nightmares, which just shows how very difficult this whole area is.

Energy Bill

Debate between Earl of Caithness and Lord Whitty

Tuesday 2nd July 2013 Grand Committee

[The Earl of Caithness]

My Lords, I have no financial interest to declare. I suppose my interest to declare is that I now look out on 11 different wind farms that have been erected in the past six years. I do not believe that any of your Lordships has that either dubious pleasure or distinct disenjoyment that I have.

Like the noble Lords, Lord Cameron of Dillington and Lord Whitty, I had the privilege of serving on the House of Lords sub-committee that reported on energy last year. In the report, No Country is an Energy Island, we looked at the energy market within the EU. It is not just Britain that faces a problem; it is the whole of the EU, where a vast amount of money has to be spent. We came to the conclusion that,

“a clear and credible EU energy and climate change policy … is a pre-requisite for attracting”,

the necessary investment. However, what was absolutely clear in the evidence that we took was that every prognostication about the energy market made 10 years ago or even five years ago was already totally out of date and out of the window. It seemed clear to me that the one thing that was likely to happen was that our report was also going to be out of date pretty quickly.

I take the example of shale gas. So much more information about shale gas has come into the public domain than we had when we produced our report. As the noble Viscount, Lord Ridley, said, the potential supply is wildly in excess of any of the figures that we were given. It seemed to me at the time, and it is reinforced now, that our Government need to have the flexibility but also the drive to take action quickly when the opportunities come.

The evidence that we got on renewables and on targets for renewables was very mixed. Mr Atherton told us that setting the target in 2006—the UK signed up to it—locked us into immature, technically uncertain and expensive technologies. That is a concern that we ought to bear in mind. If there are new technologies that are going to produce decarbonisation, perhaps at a slower rate than some of the purists would like, that is something we should not ignore. It is something that this country stands to benefit from. If we have the unique geological structures under our ground that are perhaps more exploitable than we thought at the time we wrote our report—and I guess that our report would be very different now; I wonder whether the noble Lords, Lord Whitty and Lord Cameron, agree with me on that—I do not think that we ought to obstruct our Government from taking those opportunities.

I turn to what the noble Lord, Lord Stephen, said about investment and jobs. There has been a huge investment, but I have not seen any of the jobs come to Caithness for all those wind farms that I look out on. Some £10.7 billion has been spent in this country on wind farms, but as little as £2.1 billion actually came to the benefit of the UK. What I do not understand is why agreeing a target now rather than in two years’ time is going to change that situation. I do not have any evidence that firms are going to come to the UK specifically because we have a decarbonisation date fixed in 2014 rather than in 2016. Indeed, it was on that point that the noble Lord, Lord Cameron of Dillington, was absolutely right. It is a question of two years. If in that time we are hopefully going to agree the fifth climate change package in the EU, is it worth pre-empting that—at potentially a huge cost—or is it worth waiting for that to be agreed and then setting a figure after that, which the Bill provides for?

My firm belief is that we should wait and we should use the potential that has been given to us by geology to explore whether shale gas can come to our aid. If we can produce cheaper energy, it is going to lead to one of the greatest revolutions of growth in this country, which will be of huge benefit not just to us but to the whole of Europe. For those reasons, tempting as it is to tick my green credentials and support the noble Lord, Lord Oxburgh, I think that we would be heading down the wrong track.

[Lord Whitty]

My Lords, the noble Earl has presented a view of the report that he and I were both party to, as indeed was the noble Lord, Lord Cameron—and I think that I saw the noble Lord, Lord Maclennan, come in just now. Does he not agree that the major conclusion of that report was that, whatever the technology, what industry requires in order to invest the sums of money that are needed in European energy is greater regulatory and policy certainty? Part of that must surely be to establish the trajectory of the decarbonisation pattern that Europe and the UK are embarked on.

There is now more evidence that we have more of shale gas than perhaps we thought a few months ago. Whether it is extractable at commercial prices and over what timescale is as yet unclear. But the point about shale gas is twofold. First, shale gas can help to contribute towards faster decarbonisation if it displaces coal and oil, but not if it delays the adoption of nuclear or renewable technologies. Again, it depends on the framework in which we are operating. The second thing that the report suggested and emphasised strongly, as I am sure the noble Earl will agree, was that shale gas plus carbon capture and storage could be a major contributor to decarbonisation. If we do not get carbon capture and storage into the 2020s, we have no chance of reaching that target, but shale gas is not necessarily the enemy of that target and could indeed be supported by it.

[The Earl of Caithness]

My Lords, with regard to the first question that the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, posed to me, yes, of course, I agree with him. I read out the sentence from paragraph 40 of our report. It was one of our conclusions that certainty was a pre-requisite for the investors. My question to my noble friend and the Committee was: is a delay of two years going to make that amount of difference when we have an EU target for 2028-32 to agree within a short timeframe ahead of us?

With regard to carbon capture and storage, I did not want to go down that track. I totally agree with the noble Lord but, again, we have limited evidence about it to date. I wish that there was much more that we could report to the Committee about the tests for carbon capture and storage. There are still some people who say that, despite what is going on at the moment, it will never become a commercial issue. With regard to nuclear, of course, having lived next door to Dounreay—as has my noble friend Lord Maclennan of Rogart—I regret the closure of that research centre. Dounreay had the potential to have got us out of the hole we appear to be about to fall into.

Public Bodies Bill [HL]

Debate between Earl of Caithness and Lord Whitty

Wednesday 23rd March 2011 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Caithness]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Clark, induces me to get to my feet, if only to correct him. He made that lovely, sweeping statement that all those on this side of the House are landowners and farmers, particularly those who spoke on 1 December. If I may correct him, I am not a landowner and I am not a farmer. I was a land agent. I acted for farmers, I acted for landowners, I acted for tenants and I acted for farm workers. Therefore I have no interest to declare and I do not fall into the category in which he sought to portray me.

We are all extremely grateful to see my noble friend Lady Byford back in her place and active again. She adds a great deal of common sense and a huge amount of knowledge to our debates on farming and the environment. I thought what she said was very soundly based, as indeed was what the noble Lord, Lord Cameron, said in Committee. I listened with care to what the noble Baroness, Lady Quin, said. I found nothing new from what she said in Committee, although she did praise the strength of the arguments for those supporting her amendments in Committee. I would only praise the strength of the arguments against.

[Lord Whitty]

My Lords, I apologise to noble Lords that, because the House has made such good progress today, I was not present at the beginning of the debate. However, as my name is attached to the amendment, perhaps I may touch on two issues, neither of which has been mentioned since I have been in the Chamber. If either has already been mentioned, I apologise.

The first point follows on from what my noble friend Lord Clark has just said. The structure that the Agricultural Wages Board sets does recognise skills throughout this sector. The fact that many workers in many parts of the country are paid more than the legal minimum does not take away the need to have that structure. The requirements of agriculture are becoming more and more sophisticated at one end, but less and less sophisticated at another. At the higher end, those skills need to be rewarded. The structure provided by the AWB allowed individual farmers and farm enterprises to base their actual wages on a similar structure.

The noble Lord, Lord Henley, will know by now that every farmer you meet will tell you that every cost saving that he makes is immediately recouped by the supermarkets. One of my fears in this is that, once it is known that there is a reduction in the legal minimum, which sets a floor above which voluntary payments by employers stretch to quite high levels for some workers, the supermarkets and the big processors will say, “Your labour costs need to go down by the same degree as the legal minimum goes down”—that is, in proportion to the difference between the wages board minimum and the statutory minimum wage. For the total bill, that is an enormous amount of money and therefore a saving to the supermarkets. I know that the Government intend to address other pressures that the supermarkets put on the agricultural sector, but this will be one more excuse for them to lean on farmers to reduce their prices and therefore to reduce their wages. If the noble Lord wishes to start that process, there will be real dangers, and the skilled force will begin to disappear.

At the other end of the labour force, a lot of agricultural labour, and particularly seasonal labour, depends on migrant labour and is operated by a set of gangmasters. There is nothing wrong with labour providers, provided that they obey the rules. But one of the main ways in which the exploitation by some gangmasters of the workforce is identified is that they are not meeting the legal minimum set out in the Agricultural Wages Board regulations. Once that is seen—and it is a relatively simple thing to establish—all sorts of other abuses over conditions of health and safety, immigration status and tax and national insurance become apparent. As a result, the Gangmasters Licensing Authority has been able to clean up a lot of that end. It has been a very important way in which the authority can do so. If we remove that clear legal minimum, I fear that it is one less lever for us to clean up the supply of labour in what has been, in some parts, a very exploited sector.

There are all sorts of reasons why, historically, there is an attachment on this side of the House and in the Labour movement as a whole to the Agricultural Wages Board. I am a Dorset man myself these days, so I come from a great Tolpuddle tradition, but I am not simply relying on history. I am relying on the effect that the removal of this one remaining legal-minimum, sector-specific wage will have on the quality and quantity of the workforce in agriculture and how it is treated. In the end, if that happens it will be to the detriment of agriculture as well.

Public Bodies Bill [HL]

Debate between Earl of Caithness and Lord Whitty

Wednesday 1st December 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Whitty]

My Lords, I agree with the general thrust of the approach by the noble Lord, Lord Greaves. I am certainly not arguing for the status quo, although this body has helped to solve a number of acute cases for individual retired farm workers, farmers who desperately need the accommodation to attract further labour and local authorities faced with the housing crunch to which my noble friend Lord Clark referred, so it has been a useful institution. The demand is diminishing, but it is important that we know what will replace this body.

I will make an additional point to the Minister because it goes to the heart of the way in which we are dealing with the Bill. In Schedule 1—and the same will apply to some extent to other schedules—each body has a particular situation to deal with and the Government appear to envisage different consequences of the abolition of those bodies. It is important that this House knows what is in the Government’s mind to replace what has hitherto been an important, if diminishing, function. It is important that we have this in writing, not simply as a reply in the debate. Some of us argued for a Select Committee procedure that would have allowed that to happen away from the Floor of the House, if necessary, and on a different basis of consideration. In this, as in so many other areas, we need to know the total picture. I make a plea to the noble Lords, Lord Henley and Lord Taylor, that as we go through the stages of this Bill, and it looks as though it will be quite a lengthy process, they provide us with that kind of information so that we can have a more rational debate. I make the point on this institution because it is one about which I do not disagree with the Government, but we need to know in all cases what is intended to replace these bodies.

[The Earl of Caithness]

My Lords, like the noble Lord, Lord Clark of Windermere, I remember the 1976 Bill coming through Parliament. I was on the Benches that he is sitting on now. I thought it was a bad Bill then, and it has remained a bad Act, in particular with regard to ADHACs. The noble Lord, Lord Greaves, said that this body is necessary. If it had been necessary, it would have been compulsory to have consulted an ADHAC. As it is, it is a purely voluntary agreement that an ADHAC can be used for consultation with the housing authority if necessary. The vast majority of cases are dealt with directly with the local housing association, so “necessary” was not the right word to use in this instance.

The noble Lord, Lord Greaves, said that there are 40 to 50 cases a year. I question that. My information is that the number is almost in single figures now. Sixteen ADHACs have some 10 cases a year in total. That means that half of them are not doing anything at all. It is high time we got rid of them, and I thoroughly support my noble friend in this. Could I just ask him whether, when we come to the follow-up legislation, he will propose to get rid of all 16 ADHACs at once, rather than one by one?