Brexit: Agriculture and Farm Animal Welfare (European Union Committee Report)

Earl of Sandwich Excerpts

Tuesday 17th October 2017 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Sandwich (CB)]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, and his committee have given the country an honest picture of the sorry prospects for agriculture in relation to Brexit. We have heard some splendid contributions. I congratulate my noble friend Lord Vaux on his very pertinent speech.

My interest in the register refers to income that our small west Dorset estate receives from the EU, chiefly under environmental stewardship schemes. I am also well aware of the plight of small and marginal farmers in the West Country, some of whom are our friends and neighbours.

The NFU reminds us that,

“farming is the bedrock of our largest manufacturing sector, food and drink processing. This is worth £108 billion per annum and employs 3.9 million people”.

Our whole nation owes a debt to farmers and farmworkers for our food supply and the care of our environment. Generation after generation of farmers have looked after these two essential elements in our lives: what we eat and the countryside we enjoy. And yet we are allowing the most vulnerable to go slowly down into the mud.

This must not go on. As the noble Baroness, Lady Miller, has already mentioned, we are already losing small farms day after day. One-third of all holdings under 20 were lost in just one decade, 2005-15, according to the CPRE quoting Defra. With Brexit looming, the prospects are not very bright.

The sort of vision laid out recently by Neil Parish MP in his CLA interview concerns me, because he should know. He mentions that struggling farmers and tenants on marginal land are expected to be the casualties of any future system, but he offers little comfort to them. He talks instead of,

“bigger ... and more competitive farms”,

in the future and sees competitive farming moving,

“towards more of a grant-based system”.

Payments, he says, must go to those who are “actually farming”.

The sub-committee wants the Government to clarify their intentions as soon as possible, as any reductions will have a significant impact on agriculture, as everybody has made clear. Equally, it says, farmers themselves will have to make a strong case and perhaps lobby Parliament to maintain support at the same, or similar, levels beyond the end of this Parliament.

One key point in the report was made by the First Minister of Wales, who said in evidence that the loss of subsidies would,

“put our producers at a competitive disadvantage”,

compared to other member states unless similar levels of support are put in by the Government. This is such an obvious fact that it stares us in the face and demands an answer.

The report also warns that leaving the EU will create,

“significant uncertainty for the … agri-food sector”.

If UK and EU standards begin to differ after Brexit, there is a risk for producers of substantial non-tariff barriers being in their way.

The section on movement of goods in the new customs White Paper conjures up the prospect of huge inland customs offices behind every port, with all the attendant queues and delays. How do the Government think that this could ever be an improvement on today’s traffic to and from the EU? How will farmers and food exporters be affected by the transition to WTO requirements? It seems, from all accounts, adversely.

In their response to the report, the Government admit that EU tariffs in the agriculture sector are higher and more complex than in other sectors and say that they are,

“carefully assessing the potential impact”.

Well, they should hurry. There is not much time.

The NFU has long grappled with the issue of better regulation. This is not an easy subject when you think of those complicated IACS forms and their successors. How can farmers or anyone expect to receive grants without completing these massive documents? Whatever the outcome of Brexit, I cannot see this as an EU problem; it is a UK disease just as much, so let us try to cure ourselves of it. We will all agree with Neil Parish that we want something that delivers payments on time and does not get messed up by computers. The NFU states that,

“farmers have had their fair experience of bad regulation and the NFU has … long campaigned for reform. This does not reflect an opposition to regulation per se, but rather a desire to see the details of design and implementation improved”.

Delays in Defra, hearings and appeals are another thing: I have myself waited two years and still have no reply. Then there are all the EU directives on clean water, nitrates, crop protection, animal welfare and so on. Are we going to reinvent all these? How will we trade with Europe if we are not aware of the latest standards of health and hygiene? Do our EU committees continue to monitor legislation, or will they be disbanded? These are serious questions and the exasperating fact is that this Government are still not in a position to answer them.

The latest “no deal” drama, designed perhaps to hurry the negotiations, is going to postpone these decisions even longer. In the end, surely we will have to accommodate the EU in roughly the way we do already, or else find ourselves on the end of fines and litigation. If an amendment to the Bill brings us back to the drawing board, I shall not be sorry.

Finally, on migration, which has been mentioned by many speakers, it seems obvious that many farmers and market gardeners who depend on seasonal migrant labour will find it impossible to carry on after Brexit—my noble and learned friend and others have mentioned this. The Government say in their response that they have announced their intention,

“to commission advice from the Migration Advisory Committee to better understand the reliance on EU migrant workers across the economy”.

As the report says:

“The entire food supply chain will be adversely affected”.


When will the MAC give this advice? Do we not know enough already to realise that these seasonal workers from Europe are either not going to come at all, or they are going in due course to be denied visas and deprived of any services normally due to them? They will go underground or disappear into the black market, and who is going to cope with that: accident and emergency?