Agriculture

Geoffrey Clifton-Brown Excerpts

Monday 13th May 2024 Commons Chamber

[Sir Mark Spencer]

I thank all hon. Members who have contributed to today’s debate. I also thank the Secretary of State for being in his place to demonstrate his support. Two former Secretaries of State turned up in the Chamber to offer their support, and I pay tribute to my right hon. Friends the Members for Suffolk Coastal (Dr Coffey), and for Camborne and Redruth (George Eustice), for their measured contributions to today’s debate.

As we have said, it is vital that we continue to gradually move away from untargeted subsidies, as planned. Such payments have inhibited productivity improvements, and are fundamentally unjust. Our farmers deserve better. Applying reductions to delinked payments means that we can fund our other farming schemes. Our new schemes are designed to support farmers to be profitable and resilient, while delivering improved environmental outcomes and supporting sustainable food production.

In January, we announced the biggest upgrade to our farming scheme since leaving the EU. We will be adding up to 50 new actions for which farmers can be paid on their farms, which means that there will be more choice than ever for our farmers, and our increased payment rates ensure that they will be rewarded fairly under our environmental land management schemes. There are a wide range of schemes, grants and advice that farmers can access right now, and I encourage farmers to take advantage of these offers, which will support their businesses in both their profitability and their environmental footprint. For example, our new schemes are providing support to farmers to help them reduce costly artificial imports and increase their productivity.

Food production is, and always will be, the primary purpose of farming, but delinked payments are not about food production. Instead, we are investing in our new schemes, which support farmers to produce food sustainably alongside improving the environment. The vast majority of land in the sustainable farming incentive continues to produce food. The Government take food security very seriously.

[Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown (The Cotswolds) (Con)]

I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for giving way, and I apologise to the House for not being present at the opening stages of this debate; I was in the Public Accounts Committee. I also declare my interest as a working farmer. Does he agree that there is a danger in this system that if farmers’ incomes get squeezed, it is the infrastructure that is likely to suffer? Will he make sure that there are sufficient incentives in the new scheme for farmers to invest in infrastructure—in cattle barns, in grain stores and in drainage? These sorts of things are likely to suffer and therefore productivity could also suffer.

[Sir Mark Spencer]

I am grateful for that intervention. That is why we are offering grant schemes for such infrastructure projects. For example, there will be grant schemes to improve on slurry infrastructure, on calf housing and on beef housing, to make sure that we not only invest in that infrastructure, but do it in a way that is sensitive to our environmental and animal welfare footprints. That is exactly what we are trying to achieve. While I am talking about infrastructure, it is also vital to the rural economy that we support things such as local abattoirs to ensure that they are there for the future. We have introduced the abattoir support scheme for those small abattoirs, to make sure that that infrastructure is in place to support the farming network as we move forward.

The Government take food security very seriously. Underlining our commitment to improving food security, at the National Farmers Union conference this year the Prime Minister announced the introduction of the annual food security index. This underpins the three-yearly UK food security report. Applications under our 2023 sustainable farming incentive already cover over 2 million hectares of land. The scheme has already had a higher uptake than in the first few years of countryside stewardship and is on track to achieve a higher uptake than the first year of environmental stewardship. We know that 81% of farmers that took part in research rated the existing sustainable farming incentive offer positively, which is an increase from 51% at a similar point in the pilot. This shows that we are listening to farmers and making improvements to the scheme so that it works on the ground for those individual farmers. We are making even more improvements in our 2024 offer.

Turning to some of the comments, it is worth noting that there is consensus in the House that this is the right thing to do. There was some criticism, and some political points were made by the Opposition, which is entirely their right, but this Conservative Government are backing our farmers, improving food security and protecting the environment. Let us take a moment to look at what is happening in Wales. The Leader of the Opposition was clear that the Welsh Labour Government were a blueprint for what they would do in the UK if they got into power, but if Welsh Labour’s approach was applied to England, an estimated 20,000 farms would be forced out of business. That would be a complete catastrophe for the rural economy and for farming in England and would detrimentally affect food security in the UK. In Wales, Labour politicians have suggested that farmers hit by TB should simply go out of business. We on this side of the House will never turn our back on farmers that face those challenges. We will always be there to support them and make sure that we back them. Following that blueprint would take us back to square one. This instrument is essential so that we can fund our schemes that support farmers to be resilient and sustainable over the long term, and I commend it to the House.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That the draft Agriculture (Delinked Payments) (Reductions) (England) Regulations 2024, which were laid before this House on 16 April, be approved.

Food Security and Farming

Geoffrey Clifton-Brown Excerpts

Wednesday 19th April 2023 Westminster Hall

[Wendy Morton (Aldridge-Brownhills) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered food security and farming.

I thank the Minister and my hon. Friends who are present for joining me for this rather short debate. We will cover as much ground as possible. It is a little disappointing that there is no Opposition spokesperson, and a distinct lack of people on the Opposition Benches. Why does food security matter? There is a war in Ukraine, the breadbasket of Europe. There is global inflation. There are global supply chain challenges, and climate change. There is the challenge of rising prices and the cost of living. We all need food; it is a basic need. So as I said, I am very disappointed that no one from the Opposition is present.

In this place, energy security rightly is firmly on the agenda, and the Government are taking action, but I believe that we must take food security equally seriously. Food security has many dimensions, including availability, affordability, nutrition, the state of global agriculture, logistics and food safety. The journey from farm to fork has never been more complex than it can be today.

[Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown (The Cotswolds) (Con)]

I congratulate my right hon. Friend on securing this very important debate, short though it is. With food inflation at 18%—which hits poor people particularly hard, because staple foods are going up the most, not luxury foods—does she agree that it makes no sense to take grade 1 and 2 land out of production here, only to fly in food from all around the world, increasing the carbon footprint?

[Wendy Morton]

My hon. Friend makes a really important point, which I will touch on a little later.

Much of the journey from farm to fork is unknown to our constituents until they see gaps on the shelves of their local supermarket, or read of shortages in the media. Overall, we produce 61% of all the food that we need in the UK, a figure that has been broadly stable for the past 20 years. The food strategy commits to keeping it at the same level in the future. I acknowledge that the work that the Government are doing is putting significant investment into the food system, but I will challenge my good friend the Minister, who knows more about food and farming than many in this place, by saying that investment and innovation are great, but they can take time. We need to be addressing the challenge and delivering today.

The first UK food security report was published in December 2021, but I am sure that we would all agree that much has changed significantly since then, following the Russian invasion of Ukraine and global energy and inflation pressures. As my hon. Friend the Member for The Cotswolds (Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown) alluded to, today’s figures report that food inflation is running at 19%. Many of us, when we go into our local supermarket or shop, often see that reflected in the basics that we buy, whether that is bread, milk, butter or whatever.

National Food Strategy and Food Security

Geoffrey Clifton-Brown Excerpts

Thursday 27th October 2022 Commons Chamber

[Kerry McCarthy]

Yes; Henry Dimbleby suggests that that 5% should come out of production. However he does not dictate that that should be anywhere that, perhaps, does not have certain productivity levels or does not do this or that. That brings me neatly to my concluding point.

[Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown (The Cotswolds) (Con)]

Will the hon. Member give way?

[Kerry McCarthy]

I think that the hon. Gentleman will make a speech, so I will let him make his comments then.

This is where the environmental land management scheme comes in, which is a sophisticated approach and not a blunt tool. It is about looking at everything taking place on the land, including what is being done to support nature and biodiversity. I would think that the farmland mentioned by the right hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr Carmichael) would very much come under those criteria; I hope so. My final question to the Minister is: where are we now with ELMS? Farmers are desperately seeking certainty on it. Will he confirm that the public money for public goods approach will still underpin support for our food and farming system?

--- Later in debate ---

[Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown (The Cotswolds) (Con)]

I am grateful to have caught your eye in this important debate, Madam Deputy Speaker. May I say how delighted I am to see the Minister of State, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, my right hon. Friend the Member for Sherwood (Mark Spencer) back on the Front Bench? That is great news, because he really does know a great deal about the subject.

I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Tatton (Esther McVey) on opening the debate. I look forward to being invited to have some of her excellent chickpea soup, preferably garnished with some excellent Tatton beef. I also congratulate the hon. Member for Bristol East (Kerry McCarthy). Having spent years disagreeing with her in rural debates, I agreed with nearly everything she said. On chickpeas, I hope that she agrees that one of the great challenges for British agriculture is to produce more pulses and a greater variety of them. That is absolutely possible with new varieties.

The national food strategy is an important milestone, and Henry Dimbleby was an important contributor. This week, as hon. Members have said, the price of staple foods including bread, tea, potatoes and vegetable oil has absolutely soared. Data from the Office for National Statistics collected thousands of prices from items available on supermarket websites, and food price inflation is staggering. When we look at the percentage changes in the prices of the lowest-cost products between September 2021 and 2022 we see that vegetable oil is up by 65%, pasta by 59.9%, tea by 46%, bread by 37%, and milk by 29.4%. These price increases are huge, making the weekly shop for many people simply unaffordable. The differences in price seem to be starkest in the case of food staples as opposed to luxury items: for example, the price of orange juice is actually down by 8.9%, while the price of wine has increased by only 2%. The impact on food staples will be catastrophic for those living on the breadline, who are already having to budget tightly to feed their families each week.

Food and energy prices are highly regressive, causing more of those on low incomes to pay much more as a percentage of their budgets than those higher up the income scale. Increasing food prices will soon become as big a problem as the increase in energy prices, to which much more attention has been paid in the House and elsewhere. As has already been said, 18% of all households have experienced food insecurity in the last month.

Supermarkets should be doing more to compete with each other and try to hold prices down, even if it has an impact on their profits. After all, that is what they are dictating to their suppliers—often small suppliers, some of whom will not survive this latest bout of cost and food inflation. The country’s largest supermarket, Tesco, has taken steps to ease the costs for its customers. Despite falls in profits, it is freezing prices on more than 1,000 products, while at the same time increasing the hourly rate of pay in its stores to £10.98 to help its workers.

While costs in supermarkets are soaring, the increased costs of fertiliser and feed, exacerbated by Russia’s war in Ukraine, will cause a crisis for some farmers who will undoubtedly cease to trade. The cost of potatoes in the supermarkets has recently been hiked by 13.2%, whereas farmers have seen only a 5% rise this year. I know that the hon. Member for Bristol East will disapprove, but British Sugar is to increase its wholesale sugar price by 40% by the end of the month, while sugar beet farmers have seen a substantive increase of only 30% this year, which is the first increase in three years. All this is happening in an environment where the price of fertiliser—the main cost to farmers—has increased by 300% in the last 18 months.

DEFRA urgently needs to discuss this matter with the supermarkets. They should not be raising their prices for customers by more than the increase for their suppliers, and they certainly ought not to be increasing shareholders’ profits on the back of the poorest in the country. In short, they should be exercising restraint for a short period to get us over this financial crisis. They should also continue the policy that some began during covid, and buy British wherever possible.

It is important for the Government to continue with their environmental land management scheme re-evaluation to see whether taking land out of food production for environmental schemes such as tree-planting and rewilding balances with the need to maintain the land to grow food sustainably, and to protect our own food security. In the current circumstances, in which the cost of food is so high and the poorest in our society —as has already been said—are having to rely on food banks to feed themselves, it is our duty to ensure that we can produce as much of our own food as possible to meet demand.

[David Rutley (Macclesfield) (Con)]

My hon. Friend is making a powerful case, because he knows a great deal about this subject—as does my right hon. Friend the Minister. Does he agree that, given the challenges we are facing, it is right to start focusing on tackling food waste? I recently met representatives of a potato business in my constituency, E. Park & Sons, and Sodexo, one of one its major clients. That focus will not just help them and their bottom line, but ensure that food is more available in these difficult times.

[Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown]

My hon. Friend has raised a point that is important in two respects: it applies not only to the food retailers and processors but to individuals in their homes, where far too much food waste goes on.

As an island nation, we should not be over-reliant on imports or the global market with the shocks that can come with that, the most recent case being the war in Ukraine. In the 1980s, our self-sufficiency in food was 75%; it has now fallen to only 60%. We need to encourage as much food production in this country as possible, so that more of the food we eat is grown in this country to keep prices at a sustainable level. Since August 2021, imports of food and live animals have increased rapidly, while exports have barely moved.

I fully recognise that environmental schemes such as tree-planting and soil improvement schemes to prevent our rivers from being polluted will help to slow climate change and improve our natural environment. However, it is also the case that as global temperatures warm, vast swathes of countries near the equator will inevitably produce less food, which means that temperate countries such as ours will have to produce more to feed the world.

Environmental and animal welfare issues are often forgotten. Either animals are having to be transported for long distances to be slaughtered, or environmental damage is caused by shipping or, worse still, flying food for vast distances across the world. The way to improve the situation is to ensure that animals are slaughtered as humanely as possible close to the farm where they are kept, and to ensure that all food around the world is consumed as close as possible to the point of production whenever that is practicable.

Let me say this sincerely to my right hon. Friend the Minister: we need to be very careful about taking land out of production. It makes no sense for a 2,000-acre good-quality arable farm in Essex which was formerly growing wheat, barley, rape and field beans to be encouraged to put all its land down to grass under the countryside stewardship scheme. Let me also say to the hon. Member for Bristol East that while I fully accept that we should be taking some of our poorest land out of production for environmental schemes, we should be very careful about taking our best land—particularly grade 1 and 2 land, in the old parlance that was used when I was training —out of production for non-food-producing schemes.

No one is keener on improving and protecting the natural environment than I am. Those of us who are lucky enough to live in the Cotswolds are eager to protect its natural beauty, and I pay tribute to my Cotswolds farmers for not only producing some of the best lamb in the country but participating fully in environmental schemes to improve biodiversity. On the other hand, everyone in the world is reliant, wherever possible, on a good supply of food at a reasonable price. If we are to reduce the amount of food that we import and have a long-term sustainable food policy, we must do more to grow and process our own food. That will help to bring down the cost of our basic food staples, helping individuals and families to shop for food without fear of what it will cost. I imagine that so many are unable to do that at present. Equally, we in the UK have the most beautiful countryside and rivers in the world, in which we need to be careful to preserve our biodiversity.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Minister of State, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Mark Spencer)]

I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Tatton (Esther McVey) and the hon. Member for Bristol East (Kerry McCarthy) on securing this important debate, and I thank the Backbench Business Committee for allowing the time for it.

We are fortunate in the United Kingdom to have a highly resilient food supply chain that is built on strong domestic production and imports via sustainable trade routes, but it is worth acknowledging that food security has become a very hot topic politically. When I was elected in 2010, I highlighted food security as a very important topic in my maiden speech. It is not new to me; it is something I have been worrying about and concentrating on for most of my political career.

But we can meet these challenges. Domestic production figures have been very stable for most of this century. We produce 61% of all the food we need and 74% of that which we can grow in the UK. Those figures have changed little over the past 20 years. When food products cannot be produced here, or at least not on a year-round basis, British consumers have access to them through international trade. That supplements domestic production and ensures that any disruption from risks such as adverse weather or disease does not affect the overall security of the UK’s supply chain. I acknowledge that, as many Members have said, educating our consumers on what is seasonal and what is grown in the UK is a very healthy thing to do.

Across the UK, 465,000 people are employed in food and non-alcoholic drink manufacturing. We are proud to have a collaborative relationship with the industry, which allows us to respond to disruption effectively, as demonstrated in the response to the unprecedented disruption to supply chains during the covid-19 pandemic. DEFRA monitors food supply and will continue to do so over the autumn and winter period. We work closely with the industry to keep abreast of supply and price trends, which will be particularly important in the run-up to Christmas.

We recognise that rising food prices are a big challenge for household budgets. The latest figures for year-on-year food and drink prices show an annual rate of inflation of 14.6% in the year to September 2022, up from 13.1% in August 2022. While we remain confident in sectors being able to continue to deliver products to consumers, my Department continues to work to identify further options that will help businesses to reduce costs and pass on those savings to consumers.

The Government have committed £37 billion of support to households with the cost of living. That includes an additional £500 million to help with the cost of household essentials, bringing total funding for that support to £1.5 billion. In England, this is in the form of an extension to the household support fund, running from 1 October 2022 to 31 March 2023.

We must be prepared for the future. That is why we published the Government’s food strategy in June, setting out our plan to transform our food system, and I have a copy of it here. The hon. Member for Cambridge (Daniel Zeichner) said we had not given any thought to that; I hope he has had an opportunity to read the Government’s food strategy, to which the hon. Member for Bristol East referred. The strategy puts food security right at the heart of the Government’s vision for the food sector. It sets out our ambition to boost food production in key sectors and to create jobs, with a focus on skills and innovations, ensuring that those are spread across the whole country. Our aim is to broadly maintain the current level of food we produce domestically and boost production in sectors where there are the biggest opportunities. Setting this commitment demonstrates that we recognise the critical importance of domestic food production and the role it plays in our food security.

As the Prime Minister said only this week, at the heart of this Government’s mandate is our manifesto, which includes our commitment to protect the environment. The Government are introducing three environmental land management schemes that reward environmental benefits: the sustainable farming incentive, local nature recovery and landscape recovery.

Our farming reforms are designed to support farmers to produce food sustainably and productively, and to deliver the environmental improvements from which we will all benefit. I assure the House that boosting food production and strengthening resilience go hand in hand with sustainability—we can do all those things. We can make sure that we increase biodiversity, we can improve the environment and we can continue to keep ourselves well fed in the UK.

Although our food supply chains remain strong, some specific commodities have been affected by the invasion of Ukraine, especially sunflower oil. The Government are supporting industry to manage those challenges. For example, DEFRA worked closely with the Food Standards Agency to adopt a pragmatic approach to the enforcement of labelling rules, so that certain alternative oils could be used in place of sunflower oil without requiring changes to the labels. DEFRA will continue to engage with the seafood sector, including the fish and chip shop industry, to monitor the impacts and to encourage the adoption of alternative sources of supply, which will be of great importance to the right hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr Carmichael).

The food strategy announced our intention to publish the land use framework, to which several hon. Members referred. We will set out our land use change principles to ensure that food security is balanced alongside climate, environment and infrastructure outcomes. We are seeking to deliver as much as we can with our limited supply of land to meet the full range of Government commitments through multifunctional landscapes.

We also need to recognise that the production of food and the support of our farmers have an impact on those landscapes. It is no coincidence that the beautiful stone walls in North Yorkshire, which tourists enjoy going to see, are there to keep sheep in. If we remove the sheep—

[Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown]

And the Cotswolds.

[Mark Spencer]

And the Cotswolds, I hear an interested hon. Member say from a sedentary position. Similarly, it is worth recognising that the beautiful rolling moors of Exmoor and Dartmoor look as they do only because of the food that is produced and the sheep that graze on them.

The food strategy also sets out the significant investments that are already being made across the food system, including more than £120 million of joint funding with UK Research and Innovation in food systems research and innovation; £100 million in the seafood fund; £270 million across the farming innovation programme; and £11 million to support new research to drive improvements in understanding the relationship between food and health. That is vital; agritech and investment in new technologies will help us on the way.

We are taking steps to accelerate innovation by creating a new, simpler regulatory regime to allow researchers and breeders to unlock the benefits of technologies. My right hon. Friend the Member for Tatton talked about her constituent who is producing an awfully large number of tomatoes—I forget how many.

--- Later in debate ---

[Esther McVey]

Yes.

[Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown]

On a point of order, Mr Deputy Speaker. I hesitate to correct my right hon. Friend the Member for Tatton (Esther McVey), but she referred to my old constituency of Cirencester and Tewkesbury. It is of course now The Cotswolds.

[Mr Deputy Speaker]

Wonderful—two corrections for Hansard.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House recognises that food security is a major concern to the British public and that the impact of the covid-19 pandemic, the cost of living crisis and the conflict in Ukraine has made UK food security more important than ever before; further recognises the strain on the farming sector due to rising farming and energy costs; supports the Government’s ambition to produce a National Food Strategy white paper and recognises the urgent need for its publication; notes that the UK food system needs to become more sustainable; and calls on the Government to recognise and promote alternative proteins in the National Food Strategy, invest in homegrown opportunities for food innovation, back British businesses and help future-proof British farming.

Sewage Discharges

Geoffrey Clifton-Brown Excerpts

Wednesday 12th October 2022 Westminster Hall

[Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown (The Cotswolds) (Con)]

I have public sewage discharge meetings concerning my rivers. I get the water companies, the Environment Agency, the district council and the county council together, and we take verbatim minutes and agree action points. One of the key things we heard in the last meeting was that British water bills are among the lowest in Europe. If we wish to clean up our rivers, there is therefore scope to increase our water bills. The Environment Act 2021 was a wonderful piece of legislation introduced by the Government, and let us make it work. We have already heard about monitoring above and below discharges so we can see where the problem is. Publish the data so the Government get the plans and send them off to Ofwat, which can allow more investment to stop storm discharges. The worst discharges do not occur during storms, however; they happen most of the time.

The other half of this problem is farmers, and I declare my interest as a farmer. Under environment land management schemes, we have new soil quality plans to stop farmers using fertiliser in unsuitable conditions, when nitrates and phosphates run off into water. Over the 30 years for which I have been a Member of Parliament, our precious limestone rivers in the Cotswolds have become more opaque, and there are more weeds in those rivers. Our plans under the Environment Act and under the sewage reduction plan over the next 25 years, costing £56 billion, need to be sped up. That is what our constituents demand.

The only other ask I make of the Minister is to give the Environment Agency enough resources not only to police discharges, but to make prosecutions quicker and easier. That is what we need so that polluters, whoever they are, know they will be caught out and stopped. The public are demanding it and Members of Parliament, who are here in such numbers, are demanding it. We must get on and get these plans into action more quickly.

Animal Welfare (Sentience) Bill [Lords]

Geoffrey Clifton-Brown Excerpts

Report stage
Monday 14th March 2022 Commons Chamber

While we will vote for the Bill, it feels like a missed opportunity. It is clear that, while the Government talk a lot about the great work they say they are doing on animal welfare, the reality is they need to be more comprehensive, and they need to go much further and much faster. This Bill may well be a start, but it cannot be the end.

[Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown (The Cotswolds) (Con)]

I will speak to amendment 2, in my name and those of 30-odd colleagues.

The problem with the Bill is that it goes beyond the commitment made by Ministers to recognise animal sentience in British law in the same way that it is recognised in European Union law. My amendment is designed to ensure that the safeguards of the EU law are duplicated in British law. Currently, those safeguards are not in the Bill, as was the original ask of the animal welfare lobby.

It seems to me that we should have a bit of equivalence here. If this committee is set up by statute, its remit should also be defined by statute. I therefore ask the Government seriously to consider accepting my amendment as a sensible, fairly minor, but nevertheless important amendment to the remit of the committee, which recognises local customs,

“religious rites, cultural traditions and regional heritage”.

That seems to me a perfectly reasonable thing to do. With these few words, I strongly urge my hon. Friend the Minister to see whether she cannot, on behalf of the Government, accept my amendment.

[Tim Farron (Westmorland and Lonsdale) (LD)]

I will speak in favour of new clause 5, which would ensure an annual report including,

“the number of sentient animals killed or injured”,

as a result of pollution, a description of water companies’ actions to protect animals and an assessment of the impact of Government policy on those two things. I will also speak briefly in favour of new clause 6, which we do not intend to push to a vote, which would establish an annual report into the ways the Government have taken into account animal sentience when establishing new trade deals.

Turning to new clause 5, Cumbria contains two national parks, the Yorkshire Dales and the Lake District, the latter being a world heritage site. The richness of our biodiversity throughout Cumbria is of great importance, not least in our rivers and lakes, whose ecology is of global significance as home to countless species. Yet Government policy threatens that diversity and damages animal welfare. In 2020, across the United Kingdom, water companies were permitted to dump raw sewage into our waterways on 400,000 occasions for a total of 3.l million hours, at enormous cost to the lives of aquatic and semi-aquatic sentient animals. At the River Lune near Sedbergh, we saw the longest discharge in the country lasting for 8,490 hours. At Derwentwater, a discharge of 8,275 hours took place. Is it any wonder that only 14 % of Britain’s rivers are classed as being in a “good” state?

The Government’s Environment Act 2021 acknowledges the problem and sets an ambition to reduce the pollution in our rivers caused by the dumping of raw sewage. Of course, as we all know, the Government had to be dragged kicking and screaming by Opposition Members, their own Back Benchers and members of another place to even do that.

--- Later in debate ---

[Neil Parish (Tiverton and Honiton) (Con)]

It is a great pleasure to speak in the debate. It has been interesting to listen to hon. Members on both sides. I would argue that the Government have probably got the Bill about right, for the simple reason that Opposition Members are saying that it does not go far enough and Conservative Members are perhaps saying that it goes plenty far enough.

This legislation is better than the previous version because it will not be taken to judicial review. In about 2018, the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee looked at the Bill as it was then and rightly decided, having taken legal advice and advice from others, that many of the actions that could take place could be judicial-reviewed and land up in the courts. There could have been a situation where much of our animal welfare was judged in the courts, rather than here in Parliament. Instead, it creates a committee that is put in place by the Secretary of State and then has to present a report to them. He or she will then make a decision about which route the Government will take on animal welfare. I believe that that is the right situation.

I support the amendment in the name of my hon. Friend the Member for The Cotswolds (Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown). We have argued many times in this Chamber, and I even argued in the European Parliament, that European legislation often had no flexibility about it. On this occasion, of course, it did have flexibility when bringing animal welfare legislation forward. As we brought legislation over as a result of Brexit, however, we did not include those clauses, which is why we are in this predicament. I have real sympathy for the Minister because she is dealing with an interesting situation: she is trying to balance the needs of animal welfare with the perceived needs of animal rights. That is the issue.

It is interesting that, in tonight’s debate, we have talked all about DEFRA. Much of it is about DEFRA, but we must remember that the Animal Sentience Committee will deal with the whole of Government. So when someone is building a bypass or building houses, the effect of all those issues on sentience will be considered. I admit that I am still interested to know how the committee will deal with all that. How will the Secretary of State for Transport or the Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities deal with it? It will have a big job to do.

If the committee is set up in the right way with the right people on it, so that they can make a judgment about what is right in practical terms for animal welfare, it can work, but it is very much about how it is set up, who the chair is and who the members are. We must ensure that we have a balance of opinions so that, with the right methods of building, we can build our roads and our homes and we can carry on farming in our traditional ways.

[Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown]

To the point that my hon. Friend has rightly made about the cross-cutting nature of the Bill across Government Departments, I quite like that. For example, the Department for Education might educate people on how to look after pets properly. There are many useful areas where the Bill could have a role.

--- Later in debate ---

[Jim Shannon]

It is a joy to follow the hon. Member for Penrith and The Border (Dr Hudson). He set out comprehensively what he hopes the Bill will achieve. He also outlined some things that need to be done, but on which we are perhaps not there yet. I put that on the record. I am pleased, as I always am, to see the Minister for Farming, Fisheries and Food, the hon. Member for Banbury (Victoria Prentis) in her place. I know that both she and the Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, the hon. Member for Bury St Edmunds (Jo Churchill) will respond to our concerns.

The Minister for Farming, Fisheries and Food has responded to a number of debates I have attended on puppy smuggling, an issue I feel incredibly strongly about. The steps the Government are taking tonight will be very helpful in tackling that issue. The intention is clearly to tighten the requirements of the pet travel scheme to tackle this very cruel trade. The hon. Gentleman and others referred to increasing the age at which a puppy can enter the country, as well as banning the importation of dogs with cropped ears and heavily pregnant dogs. Those measures are vital. However, I am aware that the Dogs Trust is calling on the Government and the Minister to introduce visual checks to ensure that that good work will not be in vain, and to put a stop to puppy smuggling once and for all. I seek reassurance from the Minister that the Bill will achieve that. I hope we can achieve that, but if we cannot, what will be done to ensure that it can be stopped and to ensure that the Bill contains the correct protocol for carrying out the law?

In conversations I have had with the Minister, through debates in Westminster Hall and in this Chamber, one of my concerns has been about working alongside the Republic of Ireland and its legislation. Northern Ireland, of course, has a border with the Republic of Ireland, so it is important to get that right in relation to puppy smuggling. In the past, the Minister has reassured me on that point. Perhaps she could confirm that on the record.

Northern Ireland has led the way on microchipping dogs and cats. Indeed, in Northern Ireland we are doing many things on animal sentience. Dogs are more than a cosmetic piece for show, whenever you go somewhere. Dogs have always been incredibly important to me—all my life, I have always had a dog. I see dogs mostly as hunting dogs. I am very pleased to be a fully involved member of the sporting community, as are many Conservative Members. In particular, I commend the hon. Member for The Cotswolds (Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown) for the hard work he has done with the Minister to deal with some of tonight’s issues. It is good to see that in place.

[Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown]

I am very grateful to the hon. Gentleman for giving way. I use this intervention to inform the House that my constituent has brought 55 different databases to produce one horse database, with all the biological markings of horses on it. He is working—and I am working with him—with senior civil servants in DEFRA to produce a similar database for dogs and cats. As a further refinement, there are some rogues out there who remove microchips from dogs and put in a substitute microchip. I am working with the police to put the DNA that forces like my own collect into the database so that we can see when microchips have been removed and replaced.

[Jim Shannon]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for that intervention, and he is right in what he says. A lot of dogs have been stolen during the covid period and having microchips in place was one method of trying to find out where they had ended up. He has referred to one methodology to make sure we can improve the system, which is what he is committed to. I hope that tonight we can see more of that improvement happening.

This legislation is mostly UK-based and England-based. Like the hon. Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale (Tim Farron), and indeed the Minister, I am keen to see steps in the right direction on water quality. I very much welcome the stance we have taken in this House on fur and foie gras. Like others, I seek the Minister’s assurance that we have a duty to prevent the importation of fur and foie gras. Will she confirm whether that is something that could rightly be achieved in this Bill? If it is not, what forthcoming legislation could address it? I, for one, agree with the comments on this of the hon. Members for Bristol East (Kerry McCarthy) and for Pontypridd (Alex Davies-Jones), among others. I am probably a plain eater, but the general public out there are probably very much opposed to those two things.

The hon. Member for Penrith and The Border referred to the issue of food quality, and it is important to have that in place.

--- Later in debate ---

[Jo Churchill]

I would make two points. First, the hon. Member is presupposing that there will not be members of those devolved authorities on the committee. If people hold the most appropriate expertise, they may be there as a full member, or they may be co-opted in to look at a particular area of reference. There are other mechanisms that we always use in this place to hold the Minister to account. The Minister is bound to report to this place within three months of parliamentary sitting time. All the mechanisms will be in place, as well as those behind the scenes where we talk to devolved Ministers and so on, to make sure that things are raised in the appropriate way.

Amendment 2, which is in the name of my hon. Friend the Member for The Cotswolds (Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown), would require the committee’s recommendations to respect religious rights, cultural traditions and regional heritage. We have heard the strength of feeling on this matter both here and in the other place, and I assure him that we have listened and decided to support the amendment.

[Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown]

I thank my hon. Friend for her careful consideration of my amendment. I think it is a sensible, proportionate amendment that will allow a committee with limited resources to focus on those really egregious areas where animal sentience is being abused, and not run into some of the less important areas. I thank her for accepting the amendment, and I thank all my hon. Friends who supported and signed it.

[Mr Jonathan Djanogly (Huntingdon) (Con)]

rose—

Environmental Land Management Scheme: Food Production

Geoffrey Clifton-Brown Excerpts

Tuesday 1st February 2022 Westminster Hall

[Geraint Davies (in the Chair)]

Before we begin, I remind hon. Members to observe social distancing and to wear masks. I call Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown to move the motion.

[Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown (The Cotswolds) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered food production and the Environmental Land Management Scheme.

I begin by drawing attention to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests: I am an arable farmer. It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Davies. I am delighted to have been able to secure this debate today on food production and the environmental land management scheme. I thank the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs; the Minister for Farming, Fisheries and Food, my hon. Friend the Member for Banbury (Victoria Prentis), who is here today; and the Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, my hon. Friend the Member for Taunton Deane (Rebecca Pow), for addressing us at the highly successful launch of the UK agriculture partnership at the Royal Agricultural University in the heart of my constituency last Thursday.

As more and more land is taken out of food production for environmental schemes, we face the dangerous consequences of becoming reliant on importing larger and larger amounts of food. In short, this debate is all about putting the “F” back into DEFRA. Food should be at the heart of ELMS policy and should be classed as a public good with public money under the scheme. I am aware of the 2021 UK food security report, but it is largely full of dry facts and we are looking for some policy to underpin it.

This is a timely debate because the Public Accounts Committee, of which I am deputy Chair, carried out a detailed inquiry into ELMS and published a report on its findings at the beginning of the year. Now that we have left the European Union, we have a once-in-a-lifetime chance to completely replace our agricultural support system with an ambitious post-Brexit agricultural policy that supports the Government’s ambitious 25-year environmental plan.

Our environmental policy should be joined up with agricultural policy that encourages sustainable food production here at home. Alongside sustainability, we need to help the agricultural sector’s competitiveness and resilience in the macroeconomic, trade and regulatory context. At the heart of ELMS are the changes to the mechanism for distributing funding—that was previously done via direct common agricultural policy payments—to a system that will launch fully in 2024, where farmers will be encouraged towards environmental and productivity improvements.

The Government have stated that all the objectives of ELMS will be delivered for just £2 billion. During our hearing last October, the Public Accounts Committee pointed out that that was a highly ambitious target. As we all know, there are three key elements to the project: the sustainable farming initiative for all farmers to be paid to manage their land in even more environmentally friendly ways; local nature recovery, for more complex and collaborative projects; and landscape recovery, for large-scale projects such as afforestation, rewilding and re-wetted peat.

However, there are clear structural and timetabling issues in ELMS implementation, because details are still not as comprehensive as we would expect by this stage in the scheme. It is not apparent what the aims, objectives or metrics are for supporting more than £2 billion of public funding, whether the schemes will provide good value for money, or how they will help in achieving the Government’s 25-year environmental plan and net zero by 2050. Some farmers are concerned about the practicality of implementing schemes on time. Because of the natural cycle of animals and plants, such schemes can take two years or more to implement, and that is why timely information from DEFRA is so vital.

The Government trialled the first phase of the ELMS programmes with the SFI pilot last year, from which they will draw information before they begin the scheme properly this year. In December, the Government produced a policy paper on how they will expand the scheme over the next few years, but that information is too late for farmers to change their plans. What is clear is that the scheme will require a huge amount of land. For example, the Committee on Climate Change has a target for 30,000 to 50,000 hectares of forestry to be planted every year between 2024 and 2050—an enormous amount of land.

[Mr Richard Holden (North West Durham) (Con)]

I thank my hon. Friend for securing the debate. One concern that my farmers in North West Durham have, especially as they look to diversify and specialise in their production, is that forestry has to be only part of the solution; it cannot be a replacement for food production. As with gas and heating recently, food security will be so important in the future.

[Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend. He could have rewritten my speech; if he is able to stay for the end—I know that he has other engagements—he will hear me say almost exactly that.

At our PAC hearing, top officials from DEFRA were certain that ELMS would promote increased efficiency on the remaining land that is not going into environmental schemes, but they were not able to tell the Committee how much more food would need to be imported as a result.

In 1984, the UK’s self-sufficiency in food was 78%, but by 2019 it was down to 64%, according to National Farmers Union data. However, according to Government statistics, just 55% of the food consumed in the UK was supplied by the UK—this being the result of subtracting UK exports from domestic production. In 2019, we imported £11.5 billion-worth of fruit and veg and exported just £1.3 billion, and we imported £6.6 billion-worth of meat and exported just £2.1 billion. From a balance of trade point of view, it is critical that we reverse that trend, bolster our home production and find opportunities to export more of our excellent, high-quality British food.

[Neil Parish (Tiverton and Honiton) (Con)]

The Department for International Trade, along with DEFRA and the Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board, could do a real trade drive to get experts across the world to promote great British food. At the moment, we are not getting our act together fast enough.

[Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown]

I could not agree more with my hon. Friend, the excellent Chair of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee. He is 100% right: there are a lot of opportunities all over the world for us to export our produce.

As an island nation, it is vital that we are able to feed our population. Considering that we have such a temperate climate, which is well suited to agriculture, we have all the means to increase our self-sufficiency. There is also an argument that we have a moral duty to maintain our food security. With a growing global population leading to increased food demand, alongside climate change, which will have a disproportionate impact on certain countries, it is imperative that we ensure that our own needs are met, rather than being more reliant on other countries around the world.

[Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)]

I entirely agree with what the hon. Member is saying about the need to improve our food security, grow far more in this country and consume it here as well. However, does he agree that the Government’s current policy of pursuing trade deals around the world completely undermines that? It seems as though the whole policy is based on trying to reduce support for farmers in this country and chase cheap food imports from elsewhere.

[Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown]

I am delighted to have the support of the hon. Lady. Given the number of times that we have debated in Bristol and been at odds, to have her support is somewhat amazing. I was on a programme the other day agreeing with the right hon. Member for Hackney North and Stoke Newington (Ms Abbott) as well, and I have never agreed with her before, either. The Whips must be getting worried that I might defect soon.

Even for a global trading nation—this goes to the heart of the point made by the hon. Member for Bristol East (Kerry McCarthy)—shocks can expose real fragilities in any reliance on imports. The current severe spike in energy price is a result of an increasing reliance on imports; we became vulnerable to the global squeeze on energy and gas supplies last year, and going into this year. With technical and geopolitical issues impacting on supply across Europe, we have been hit hard for a number of reasons, including our storage capacity, which is one of the lowest in Europe, and our demand, which is among the highest.

Imports will always play a critical role in our food system, but I say to the Minister that the Government must take our own self-sufficiency more seriously. It is stagnating, and the public will not thank us if there is ever a world food shortage, prices rocket and supermarket shelves are emptied of certain commodities. Although the nation is encouraged to be healthier and eat more fruit and veg, our domestic production of those products falls below our potential. We are only 18% self-sufficient in fruit, 55% in vegetables and 71% in potatoes. The figures for veg and potatoes have fallen by 16% in the past 20 years, despite the sector demonstrating sustained investment. The entire economy is aiming to build back better and greener from the covid-19 pandemic. British farming can be central to that green recovery. We have a golden opportunity to place food security fairly at the centre of our food system and become a global leader in sustainable, high-quality food production.

The Government have a crucial role to play. Food security should be at the heart of Government policy, and there needs to be an annual system of reporting to Parliament to ensure that we do not allow our domestic food production to diminish. UK farmers are best placed to implement many of these environmental schemes, while at the same time maintaining the countryside to the high standard that the public have come to accept. I do not think the public are going to welcome the look of countryside that is going to waste growing brambles and shrubs. It feels highly counterintuitive to have such high environmental standards here that food production becomes unprofitable enough that we need to import more.

Not only does physically importing food produce greenhouse gases, but by relying on farmers from the rest of the world to produce food for us in the UK, we are simply exporting our environmental problems and responsibility to other countries with lower plant and animal standards. The public place real value on high standards of animal welfare, environmental protection and the climate ambition of British farmers. We cannot guarantee or enforce those high standards on farmers from other countries around the world. It would be morally unjustifiable for a UK farmer to be put at a competitive disadvantage by imported food with lower standards—a point made by the hon. Member for Bristol East.

The innovation I have seen from UK farmers throughout my lifetime, working towards ambitious environmental goals, has been incredible. The NFU has been working with its stakeholders to outline the policy mechanism for agriculture to reach net zero by 2040, which is a critical goal. I believe that the best way to reach our environmental targets is by supporting British farmers, not by making food production an unsustainable economic model.

The second of the key issues in the report from the National Audit Office—a highly respected institution—on which the Public Accounts Committee inquiry majored is that, without subsidies, most farms in England make an average profit of just £22,800 a year, after labour costs and investment, and a third of all farms would not make any profit at all. That makes the sector pretty financially vulnerable. For small and tenanted farms operating on wafer-thin margins, there is a real fear that many will go out of business. The consequence would simply be that the average size of farms would increase and the environmental benefits they provide would be lost. ELMS should provide advice and funding to help those small farmers diversify.

The future farming programme for England, which will replace the direct payments with a new scheme based on public money for public goods, will see small farms have their direct payments reduced from December 2021, and 50% will be lost by 2025. There is a real concern that some of the ELMS options will be completely unprofitable, given the amounts available, and too complicated; and that many farmers will simply not take them up, especially if they do not have the administrative capacity to negotiate the complicated bureaucracy. That could mean that only large institutional landowners, such as the National Trust or the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, benefit from these Government schemes. It would be quite wrong if such landowners received a bigger and bigger share of the agricultural subsidy cake when they provide less and less food each year. ELMS should have a part to play in protecting small, tenanted farms and upland farmers—I class small farms as less than 100 acres—alongside their significant environmental aims.

The final problem I would like to take up with the Minister is the average age of farmers, which is currently 59. My own farming situation has been discussed here; my farm is in north Norfolk, in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for North Norfolk (Duncan Baker). I am delighted to see him here today and I have issued an invitation to him to come and visit my farm. I know from my own farming situation that my son, who is in his thirties, is much more adaptable than I am to new technology, which would have two key effects of increasing productivity and innovation. ELMS should have a structural element to help young people who wish to enter agriculture, particularly those who are leaving education, because agriculture tends to be a highly risky, capital-intensive business, combined with very low returns.

DEFRA is providing money to councils, landowners and county farm estates via the new entrant support scheme, to support young people joining the sector with access to land, infrastructure and support for successful and innovative businesses. My own farming business, to which I have referred, provides an opportunity for three different businesses to get on to the farming ladder. Chris is my long-term farming contractor; Ben runs a successful outdoor pig-breeding business; and we are currently discussing an arrangement with a lady who has a rotating ewe flock of sheep, to graze our increasingly over-wintered green cover crops. Existing farmers could do more to help young people into agricultural employment and business.

All in all, if farmers are to survive, they must produce better returns, either from increased productivity, Government subsidies or increased prices from the market. Otherwise, many will simply not survive. The consequence will be that the average farm size increases, employment in agriculture falls and social cohesion in rural areas is lost. The Government are formulating a new policy on ELMS, and we need to see much more detail before it is launched in 2024. I appreciate that a lot more was published at the beginning of the year, but I still do not get the full sense of where the Government’s aims for ELMS really are.

As I have said, we cannot become over-reliant on other countries to fulfil our food needs. We have the means to produce food here in more sustainable and smarter ways, but to do that we must support farmers across the country, and not make the industry so unprofitable that only the largest farms survive. The Government should be much more ambitious with their aim of producing food in the UK. Well over 60% of the food we eat should be produced by UK farmers. That would well and truly put the “F” back in DEFRA.

[Geraint Davies (in the Chair)]

I call the Member behind the green mask.

--- Later in debate ---

[Victoria Prentis]

Fair enough. This is an important issue, and the clever statisticians are always reluctant for Government to commit to an absolute figure. That is not because of any theological argument, but because we cannot stop people eating, for example, rice or bananas, and nor do we want to. The important measure to look at is food that can be produced here.

[Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown]

Will the Minister give way?

[Victoria Prentis]

I will not, because I want to give my hon. Friend time at the end of the debate.

The figure at the moment is about 74% and that seems about right. I am committed to buying local, buying sustainable and promoting buying British wherever possible. It is important that we keep a close eye on our food security and our ratios. As hon. Members know, we are changing the way we support farmers and moving away from area-based payments. It is clear that there are worries about how this will affect food production levels, but many of the sectors where we have the greatest self-sufficiency are those that were not traditionally subsidised. We are close to 100%, for example, in poultry, eggs, carrots and swedes, and for many of those successful sectors, direct payments have never really been part of the business model.

There is no reason why we cannot produce the food we need while accommodating some land use change. We know that there is not a direct correlation between the amount of land farmed and the output. For example, around 60% of our output comes from just 30% of our land, farmed by just 8% of farmers. Delivering our environmental targets will inevitably require some land use change in some places, but we need to look at that in a wider context. We have 9.3 million hectares of farmland in England, so we are looking only at a small proportion being taken out of production. I associate myself with what has been said about carbon capture in permanent grassland and I commend my hon. Friend the Member for St Ives (Derek Thomas), who made some important comments about restorative agriculture.

In the last 20 years, the appreciation of the scale of the challenge we face on issues such as biodiversity loss and climate change has grown. Those challenges mean we must act now to establish a new system of rewards. That is why the Government have chosen not to remove the farming budget, but to repurpose it. The amount of money available is the same and I expect the number of farmers to broadly be the same in the future, though some of those farmers may be farming in a different way to the way in which they farm now. We are designing our new schemes in partnership with farmers, and to that end it was good to hear from my hon. Friend the Member for The Cotswolds, my hon. Friend the Member for Tiverton and Honiton, the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) and my hon. Friend the Member for South Dorset (Richard Drax). It is always good to hear strong farming voices in this House.

We want to support the choices that individual farmers make on their own holdings. Farmers will be free to choose which elements of our new policies work for them. Some people may decide to embrace them extensively, but for others the schemes may be a smaller part of their business model.

I have spent the best part of 25 years in different roles in Whitehall, and I have never seen iterative policy making quite like this. We are doing it over a seven-year period, in close conjunction with the industry. Today, we have about 4,000 farmers actively testing things for the new schemes. I accept, and indeed embrace, some of the criticisms made in the PAC report about the beginnings of the policy. We will be responding to that report formally next month.

I agree that regular, annual impact assessments are a useful and positive part of the development of these policies. In many ways, I have enjoyed the cut and thrust of this debate. It is important that these policies are not set in stone. We are developing them in conjunction with farmers, as we make progress.

I know this is a time of huge change for farmers, but it has been good to see how many have embraced that change. The Chair of the Select Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Tiverton and Honiton, wants carrots, and I would gently say that one of the most useful carrots this year has been the extensive take-up of the countryside stewardship scheme. We have seen a 40% increase in applications, including, I should add, from my own farm. We are encouraging farmers to join that scheme as an interim, while we roll out the new scheme.

As a carrot, we have announced a 30% increase in countryside stewardship payment rates, which I hope will act as a bridge to our new schemes. Using the future farming resilience fund, we are supporting farmers through the transition. The fund awards grants to organisations that are trusted in the farming community, to help farmers work through how the policies affect them individually.

Tenant farmers are a vital part of our farming industry. For DEFRA’s agricultural reforms to succeed, tenant farmers must be able to fully engage in these schemes. On Friday, I was pleased to see my Secretary of State announce an independent tenancy working group, chaired by Baroness Rock, who has long been a champion of this sector, and dedicated to looking at ways to ensure our new schemes really work for tenant farmers. In passing, I should say that BPS has not always worked for tenant farmers and may have been one of the reasons why rents have been artificially inflated. We want to ensure these new schemes work.

This is a period of change and it is understandable that there is worry, but there is also great opportunity ahead. One year into a seven-year transition, it is clear that there is much agreement in the House with the principle of the policy. There is also agreement that food and food security are at the heart of everything we do. I look forward to working with Members on both sides of the House and with our 86,000 or so farmers to make sure we get the roll-out of the policy right.

[Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown]

I thank my hon. Friend the Minister for that encouraging winding-up speech. What I would like to see is substance on her words, which is a much bigger challenge and something our farming constituents in the Cotswolds and elsewhere really want to see. They face a situation where BPS is being cut by 50% over the next two or three years. They are worried not about how they are going to get to the end of it in seven years but about how they are going to survive the next year, two years or three years. That is the real worry out there.

On the substance of what my hon. Friend said, I challenged her in my speech to have an annual report to farmers on food sustainability, not a three-year report, because three years is too long. If we leave it three years, and it takes another three years to rectify the problem, that is six years gone, which is too long.

I welcome the initiatives for tenant farmers. One thing that has come out of this debate is the fragility of farming, particularly in England. I repeat the figure I gave earlier: £22,800 is the average farming profitability in England without subsidy. That means that in some areas a third of the sector does not make any profit at all without subsidy. In some parts of the sector, particularly at the small end, which I define as under 100 acres, the tenant farmers, the small owner-occupier farmers and the hill farmers are extremely vulnerable, and we need to consider them very carefully.

All in all, I have never known such unanimity as in this debate. I hope the Minister takes it back and translates it into real policy so that the farmers really know what they are supposed to be aiming at.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House has considered food production and the Environmental Land Management Scheme.

Animal Welfare (Sentience) Bill [Lords]

Geoffrey Clifton-Brown Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 18th January 2022 Commons Chamber

[George Eustice]

I think this matter was dealt with extensively by my noble Friend, Lord Benyon. The key thing is that an adverse effect can mean a failure to make a change or consider a change that would have a positive impact on the welfare of animals, so I do not share any concerns about that expression.

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Neil Parish) for his Committee’s work in scrutinising our proposals.

The Bill proposes four things. First, it establishes an Animal Sentience Committee, whose members the Secretary of State will appoint on the basis of expertise and experience. Secondly, it tasks that committee with scrutinising Ministers’ policy formation and the implementation of decisions. In each instance, it will publish a report containing its views on whether Ministers have had all due regard to the welfare needs of animals as sentient beings.

Thirdly, Ministers will be held to account through a duty to respond to the committee’s reports by means of a written statement to Parliament, and Parliament must receive such responses within three months. Finally, the wording of the Bill offers recognition that non-human vertebrates—that is, animals with a spine—and additionally decapod crustaceans, such as lobsters, and cephalopod molluscs, such as octopuses, are sentient. That means they are capable of experiencing pain or suffering. The Bill contains a delegated power for Ministers to add by regulation other species to the definition of animals. That is to be used if there is good scientific evidence that those particular species are sentient.

[Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown (The Cotswolds) (Con)]

Can my right hon. Friend confirm whether the Bill as drafted contains birds?

[George Eustice]

The Bill does include birds, since they are vertebrates, and it includes fish, since they are vertebrates. I point out that those particular animals have been recognised in our law as sentient since at least 1911.

I want to be clear about what the Bill does and does not do. While its aim is to improve the policy and decision-making processes of Government, the committee’s reports will not bind Ministers to any particular course of action. Ministers will remain free to determine the right balance between animal welfare and other important considerations.

Devolved matters are also excluded from the Bill’s provisions. The Scottish Government have their own counterpart to the Animal Sentience Committee already, while Wales and Northern Ireland have the powers to establish equivalent bodies, should they wish to do so.

It is also important to understand that the Bill tasks the Animal Sentience Committee with scrutinising the process by which Ministers arrive at policy decisions. It is not there to tell Ministers what decisions they should make or to critique those decisions. Instead, it is there to provide technical assessments of how well a given Department obtained and assessed relevant evidence on the animal welfare effects of the policy in question.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown (The Cotswolds) (Con)]

Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker, for the opportunity to catch your eye in this important but short debate, on a short and, in my view, unnecessary Bill. Of course we can all accept that animals can suffer and therefore we are obliged to ensure that we maintain our high standards of welfare. That animals can experience pain and suffering has been implicit in British animal law, as my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State so rightly laid out, since 1835 when Parliament passed the landmark Cruelty to Animals Act. However, the lack of definition in this Bill or use of science to decide whether an animal is sentient is concerning; it even lacks a definition of what sentience means. It is concerning that we should be passing a Bill with such a lack of detail.

There is a huge rural community in this country that is passionate about wildlife and eager to protect the environment and their activities. The Angling Trust and the British Association for Shooting and Conservation—I declare an interest; it is the secretariat for the all-party group on animal welfare and environment which I chair—represent more than 3 million fishing and shooting enthusiasts in the UK. The Bill could deliver another weapon into the hands of litigious animal rights groups that could damage both Government and those who live and work with animals.

Shooting, conservation and angling are highly important for the UK economy. Shooting contributes about £2 billion to GDP and supports the equivalent of 74,000 full-time jobs. Angling is estimated to be worth £4 billion to the UK economy and responsible for upwards of 40,000 jobs.

We need to make sure that the Animal Sentience Committee set up by the Bill does not have any unforeseen or perverse consequences, and that the Bill is not introduced simply as a public relations exercise to meet the demands of activist groups and the tabloids. A sentience committee does not require legislation. It could have been established by the Secretary of State at any time. He has already told us that the members will be Secretary of State appointments, but that covers a multitude of types of people who might be appointed. Perhaps the Minister could give us a little more idea of the type of people who will be appointed to the committee.

According to clause 2(1), the scope of the Bill encompasses:

“When any government policy is being or has been formulated or implemented”.

In other words, it gives huge breadth of remit to the committee. So what will be the committee’s resources in terms of funds and secretariat? Would it not be more sensible to limit its remit to the areas currently covered by the European law on sentience, on which my party’s manifesto said we would legislate?

Will the new committee by statute confuse who advises Ministers on animal welfare when the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs already has an Animal Welfare Committee with a wide remit covering all animals, but not by statute? Will the new sentience committee, which is implemented by statute, be superior to the Animal Welfare Committee, which was established decades ago and works perfectly well? Or will it be a sub-committee of the Animal Welfare Committee? If so, will the Animal Welfare Committee be required to approve its reports before publication? What will be the difference between the remit of the two committees?

There is no requirement in the Bill for the committee to consider the public interest or the legislative or administrative provisions and customs of the UK relating in particular to religious rites, cultural traditions and regional heritage. In a meat-eating society where vertebrate animals are farmed and hunted for food, and used in scientific and medical research under strict legal limits, the fact that the committee is not required to consider the public interest could lead to a conflict between activist groups and the Government.

Will the Minister therefore balance the requirement to have “all due regard” to animal welfare with a requirement to have regard to the public interest? Can the Minister give an assurance that the medical, scientific, farming, fishing and shooting interests will be represented? This is crucial, because otherwise it is going to breed a great deal of resentment in the rural communities.

There are other ways of recognising sentience in legislation. We could have followed New Zealand’s example and amended the Animal Welfare Act 2006 merely to include sentience. That is all that needed to happen.

Policy and legislation should always be science and evidence-based. It is extraordinary that there is no definition of sentience in the Bill. Even though 80% of the respondents to the Government consultation supported the inclusion of a definition, it still is not there. Instead, clause 5(2) says that the Secretary of State

“may by regulations … bring invertebrates of any description within the meaning of “animal” for the purposes of this Act”.

But there is no requirement to show scientific proof that non-vertebrates are sentient. Philosophers and scientists have been arguing for centuries about which non-vertebrate animals are sentient and what that actually means, and here we have a Bill that does not clarify that debate.

The Bill originated in demands for sentience to be explicitly written into law after Brexit, but it does not contain the safeguards within the EU law on sentience. EU law on sentience is limited and balanced. It applies to agriculture, fisheries, transport, the internal market, research and technological and space policies. Member states—this is a particular part of European law—are required to have

“full regard to the welfare requirements of animals, while respecting the legislative or administrative provisions and customs of the Member States relating in particular to religious rites, cultural traditions and regional heritage.”

I will try to get an amendment included in the Bill—I hope that the Government will support the amendment, which I will table shortly—stating that “the recommendations by the committee must respect the legislative or administrative provisions and customs relating in particular to religious rights, cultural traditions and regional heritage”. I say tactfully to my right hon. Friend that, as that is the wording in European law, I hope very much that he might consider such an amendment, so that we can at least focus the committee’s work, instead of it having the very wide-ranging remit that it now has.

Will the Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, the hon. Member for Bury St Edmunds (Jo Churchill), give us an assurance that nothing in the Bill will have an impact on activities conducted with all regard to animal welfare within the law? Does she believe, as some do, that sentience confers rights and, if so, what rights are conferred?

In conclusion, clarity, clarity, clarity is required on animal welfare advice in government. I am talking about the composition and remit of the committee, the balance between the public interest and sentience, and assurances that legal activities, such as research, farming and country sports, will not be damaged by the Bill. I say to the Secretary of State and the Minister: please could we have an answer to that final question when the Minister sums up?

--- Later in debate ---

[Sir Bill Wiggin]

It is difficult for me to answer that, because I am a member of the ELMS pilot scheme, so I am deeply involved in the formation of ELMS. What I would say is that public money for public goods is the right way forward, with carbon captured in the soil and a corresponding payment made to farmers so that we can balance up the subsidy deficit that British farmers will face compared with their European competitors. At the end of the day I do not believe in subsidy for anything other than agriculture, and we subsidise only in order that our goods are competitive globally—if do not pay our farmers enough, our produce will not compete internationally and our farmers will be at a huge disadvantage.

[Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown]

My hon. Friend alluded to the fact that the committee’s work will be retrospective. Any citizen could suggest to the committee that the Government should change policy in a certain area. The committee would then look into that and make a recommendation to the Minister. That is a real gift to lobbying groups to achieve what they want, and the Government would be under difficulty to withhold it.

[Sir Bill Wiggin]

As always, my hon. Friend is absolutely right.

The real shame about this legislation is that here we are at Second Reading and every single colleague on both sides of the House has thought of better things for the Government to deal with, whether it is ELMS, as suggested by the hon. Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale (Tim Farron), or any of the other suggestions I have heard from Opposition Members. This Bill is a waste of time; it is utterly unnecessary and therefore wrong. We should not pass Bills that state the obvious and that are hostages to fortune, we should not create more quangos, we should not vote for unnecessary legislation —and we certainly should not vote for this Bill.

--- Later in debate ---

[Jo Churchill]

I thank the hon. Gentleman, but I gently point out that there are plenty of other devices for ensuring plenty of parliamentary time. I am sure that we will unpick that in Committee.

Ministers will remain responsible for balancing animal welfare against other important matters of public interest. We are and will remain fully accountable to Parliament for that. My hon. Friend the Member for Huntingdon spent some time asking whether the Bill increases the risk of judicial review, and it has been carefully considered and worded to ensure there are only two areas in which we could instigate grounds for judicial review if Ministers fail to fulfil them: by not appointing a committee or by not bringing forward a report in a timely fashion.

I was also asked how the Animal Sentience Committee differs from the Animal Welfare Committee. The latter offers substantive expert advice, whereas the former is a scrutinising body—that is the essential difference. The Animal Sentience Committee is there to give another line of evidence and to help Ministers make decisions, but policy decisions are and will remain a matter for Ministers, for which they are accountable to this House.

Ministers are under no legal obligation to follow the committee’s recommendations. However, there is no point in having a committee that brings forward evidence unless we take it seriously. As I say, it will be balanced in the round to make sure competing interests such as the rural economy or a particular enjoyment, angling or whatever—all those things that are good for people’s mental wellbeing—are considered when we make our decisions.

The key point about the terms of reference is that the Animal Sentience Committee will be classified as an expert committee. It will be funded from within DEFRA’s existing budget and supported by a small secretariat. This will not run and run and be an unsupported Government quango, as suggested by my hon. Friend the Member for North Herefordshire. The Bill is drafted to keep sentience at the forefront of policy making and implementation, in line with its statutory functions.

Wide-ranging points were made by colleagues, which flowed into medical research and respect for people’s religious needs. The Bill is tight, and the reason it is a small, tight Bill is that it is important that we are aware that it does not change existing legislation. The committee does not make value judgments.

Hon. Members asked about the inclusion of decapod crustaceans, crabs, lobsters, molluscs, octopus and squid. I want to be absolutely clear about the reasoning behind the effects of that decision. At every point, it is about respecting and recognising animal sentience, and being scientifically led.

[Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown]

I sense the Minister is coming to a conclusion, but she has not answered one of my questions about the composition of the committee. Will she give an assurance that it will take into account rural and agricultural interests?

[Jo Churchill]

As I represent the constituency that I do, my hon. Friend will be pleased to hear that I will give him that assurance. The Opposition made the point that breadth of expertise is extremely important in order to have confidence in this Committee.

British Meat and Dairy Products

Geoffrey Clifton-Brown Excerpts

Wednesday 28th April 2021 Westminster Hall

[Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown (The Cotswolds) (Con) [V]]

It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Ghani. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for North Devon (Selaine Saxby) on securing this timely debate during Great British Beef Week. I draw attention to my declaration in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests, as one of the few practising farmers in the House.

The Cotswolds has one of the most sensitive landscapes in the country and I have always proudly championed British agriculture. As a farmer who grew up on my mother’s dairy farm, I know from first-hand experience how the UK produces some of the highest quality food produce of anywhere in the world, with exceptional animal welfare and environmental standards.

As Britain secures new trade deals, we have the opportunity to promote that high-quality meat and dairy produce across the world, produced by our innovative, environmentally friendly farmers. After 40 years of the European Union’s common agricultural policy, we can now pursue new trading relationships. It is an amazing opportunity to shape the future of our farming, promote our interests and meet the needs and ambitions of British consumers in the 21st century.

In 2020, meat and dairy products combined accounted for 2.2% of UK goods exports and 3.1% of all UK goods imports. The current trade deficit is found in all categories, apart from mutton and lamb, which has a trade surplus of £0.1 billion. We now import roughly 50% of all that we eat, down from 65% when I was a student. The UK is about 85% self-sufficient in dairy production and beef, but 98% self-sufficient when it comes to lamb. We need to work to a point where it is not just lamb that is in surplus, but where we are near self-sufficient in many more sectors.

What is the difference between our lamb and beef sectors? It could partly be better marketing of beef, which is usually a more expensive option in the supermarket. The deficit is something we want to change with our new trading arrangements. Beef exports from the UK last year came to £382 million, with growing markets in Hong Kong, Singapore, Peru and Canada. There is also growing demand in China for British pork, and in France for high-quality lamb produced in the Cotswolds.

British agriculture needs to increase and diversify its exports as much as it can in new international markets, after heavily relying on Europe. There is no reason why British food manufacturers cannot be innovative enough to create a wider range of products using British produce. That is especially the case for dairy-based products that are heavily imported, such as yoghurt and prepared desserts. That is unnecessary when we have such a strong dairy sector.

I urge farmers to take advantage of growing global markets. The Department for International Trade is launching a new mentoring programme, providing expert advice on trading internationally. Farmers in the UK are leading the world in finding innovative farming methods to farm in climate-change friendly ways, with the NFU pledging an ambitious net zero target by 2040.

The UK beef industry is one of the most sustainable in the world, with an extensive grass-based grazing system—not a cause of deforestation as in other countries, as my hon. Friend the Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Neil Parish) said. The Committee on Climate Change found that the UK beef industry emits around half the greenhouse gases compared with the global average.

As my hon. Friend the Member for North Devon said, there are 278 million dairy cows worldwide. If they were all managed as efficiently as UK dairy cows are, we could shrink that number to 76 million and still produce the same amount of milk throughout the world. Around 70% of the British herd is on grass, and 65% of UK farmland produces some of the most productive grass in the world. That protects the character and identity of the countryside and generates an important income for rural communities. In the Cotswolds, which I have the privilege to represent, the distinctive, attractive landscape would not be the same without the raising of livestock, including the production of high-quality lamb, much of which could be exported.

Here in the UK, there is nothing better for the environmentally-conscious consumer who wants a balanced diet than to buy British. Not only does buying fresh local produce reduce greenhouse emissions from transporting produce; in addition the produce will be sourced from farms with sustainability at the heart of their practices. It is good to see some retailers increasingly championing UK products. I know, because I did a lot of the shopping during the lockdown, that Waitrose and Aldi have led the way on supporting British farmers throughout the pandemic. I hope that other supermarket chains will be encouraged to follow their example.

In conclusion, farmers can now set their ambitions well beyond the UK into exciting new markets. As they expand, they will have our full support in doing so.

Environment Bill

Geoffrey Clifton-Brown Excerpts

Report stage & Report stage: House of Commons
Tuesday 26th January 2021 Commons Chamber

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

The four-minute limit is now imposed again for all further Back-Bench contributions.

[Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown (The Cotswolds) (Con) [V]]

I will speak to my amendment 4. The precautionary principle is a whole new way for the Government to legislate on environmental matters which can be applied to a huge range of environmental principles. It could be used in the extreme—for example, to introduce policies such as stopping people from driving motor cars on the basis that they damage the environment. In an increasingly legislative field, my amendment is so important in ensuring that the Government can clearly define the purposes for use of the precautionary principle, beyond those in the mere principles statements outlined in clauses 16 to 18.

The Minister said in a letter to me this morning: “I can confirm that Ministers of the Crown are only required to have due regard to the policy statement when making policy by virtue of clause 18(1). The environmental principles duty is not designed to apply to individual decisions or other public bodies.” In other words, the statement of principles is pretty nearly toothless.

My amendment would clearly constrain when and where the precautionary principle can be used. I ask the Minister, when she sums up, to go further than just going into the principles; I ask her to include some of my amendment in the Bill. A particularly important part is subsection (3C), which says:

“The precautionary principle should only apply in response to risks that are…more than hypothetical in nature; and…serious and irreversible.”

I cannot see any reason at all why that should not be in the Bill. If the Minister is not inclined to include it, I hope that their lordships will pick it up when the Bill goes to the House of Lords.

The precautionary principle is not consistently applied to different activity; it is frequently used to constrain certain activities where any impacts are deemed to be unacceptable. For example, Natural England is currently seeking to restrict game shooting around European protected sites. Due to evidence of damage in only five—a mere 1.5% of all sites—it wants to introduce a licensing system.

In summing up, can the Minister please bear in mind all the constraints that are in my amendments? Otherwise, this principle could well become oppressive to people’s freedom in the future, and we may well rue the day that we put the provision in the Bill. I am looking to the Minister to tell me why some or all of my constraints cannot be included in the Bill, because that is where they should be. The statement of principles, as written in the Bill, is pretty nearly toothless, and the precautionary principle gives the Minister, or any future Minister, a huge overwhelming power, which we may well live to regret.

Agriculture Bill

Geoffrey Clifton-Brown Excerpts

Consideration of Lords amendments & Ping Pong & Ping Pong: House of Commons
Monday 12th October 2020 Commons Chamber

[Sir Edward Leigh (Gainsborough) (Con)]

Will the Minister give way?

[Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown (The Cotswolds) (Con)]

Will the Minister give way?

[Victoria Prentis]

If I may, I will make a tiny bit of progress, otherwise we really will be here for another 100 hours.

The purpose behind Lords amendment 1 is to demonstrate the connections between this Bill and the Environment Bill. I am pleased to say that these connections very much exist already. Environmental improvement plans will already definitely be taken into account when determining the strategic priorities that sit within the multi-annual financial assistance plans in clause 4.

It is lovely to see the Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, my hon. Friend the Member for Taunton Deane (Rebecca Pow), in her place. She and I work very closely together. Ours is a very united Department, and we view farmers and environmentalists as often very much one and the same. Our future farming policies will be a key mechanism for delivering the goals set out in the 25-year environment plan, but we can take the steps we need to improve biodiversity only if the majority of farmers are firmly on side.

On Lords amendment 9, I would like to reassure the House that work is already taking place in this sphere. We have already commissioned an independent review of the food sector, led by Henry Dimbleby, and his interim report was released in July. We take his recommendations very seriously. We have made a firm commitment to publish a food White Paper within six months of his final report, which is expected next spring. This could well lead to a report sooner than is actually proposed in the amendment.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown]

Will the Minister give way?

[Victoria Prentis]

I will not just at the moment, but I will later.

I am afraid to say that, despite the considerable thought that has gone into the amendments, we have not yet found a magic form of words that will address all the concerns and avoid undesirable side effects. In asking the House to reject the amendments, I will set out the set of solutions, both legislative and non-legislative, that I hope will allay the fears that Members have expressed. In my view, this range of measures, and constant vigilance on the part of Government and, indeed, consumers, are of more use than warm words in primary legislation.

I will start by reiterating that, alongside my colleagues on this side of the House, I stood on a clear manifesto commitment that in all our trade negotiations we will not compromise on our high environmental protection, animal welfare or food standards. As I have said many times, our current import standards are enshrined in existing legislation.

They include a ban on importing beef produced using artificial growth hormones and poultry that has been washed with chlorine. The European Union (Withdrawal Agreement) Act 2020 carries across those existing standards on environmental protections, animal welfare, animal and plant health and food safety. Any changes to that legislation would need to be brought before Parliament.

It falls to our independent food regulators, the Food Standards Agency and Food Standards Scotland, to ensure that all food imports into the UK are safe and meet the relevant UK product rules and regulations. The FSA’s risk analysis process is rigorous, completely independent of Government and based on robust scientific evidence, along with other legitimate factors such as wider consumer interests and the impact on the environment, animal welfare and food security.

--- Later in debate ---

[Victoria Prentis]

Yes, those in the Department for International Trade stood on the manifesto that my hon. Friend and I were also proud to stand on. We are absolutely committed to high standards.

[Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown]

rose—

[Victoria Prentis]

I promised to give way to my hon. Friend, and I forgot.

[Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown]

My hon. Friend has helpfully set out the very high standards that any imports will be required to meet coming into this country. Therefore, is there any reason why this House should not be given proper opportunity to scrutinise any free trade agreements before they are signed, so that we can ensure that those agreements do not enable produce to come into this country that is lower than those standards?

[Victoria Prentis]

If my hon. Friend can contain himself, I will get on very shortly to a long section of my speech that details how Parliament will be able to scrutinise future trade agreements. It is important, and I think that we do do that, but I will set that out very shortly.

--- Later in debate ---

[Caroline Lucas]

Until the last speech, I was going to say how lovely it was to feel a common view coming from the Government and Opposition Benches. Let me just say why I think the last speaker was wrong. He said that if we adopted Lords amendment 16, for example, we would be imposing standards on developing countries that they could not reach. In fact, the EU has all sorts of arrangements with poorer countries precisely to be able to support them in improving their standards. There is nothing here that would inflict inappropriate standards on some of the poorest countries. The hon. Gentleman also said that our standards are safe, but they are not safe if they are going to be undermined by cheaper imports that do not meet those same standards. That is tantamount to handing a knife to our farmers and asking them to cut their own throats. It is not a sensible strategy.

I want to speak to some of the amendments from the other place and particularly to Lords amendment 9, on the national food strategy. The amendment stipulates what that strategy should contain, including things such as the sustainability of food production and consumption, improving dietary health, reducing obesity, minimising food waste, ensuring that public procurement supports a shift towards sustainable farming, and so on. It is significant that cross-party support for the amendment in the other place was strong.

The letter the Minister sent to MPs last week explained that the Government object to amendment 9 because it would

“impose arbitrary timetable requirements for objectives the Government has already committed to fulfil”.

I hope she will forgive us, but we want to see that commitment in the Bill. We have seen already in the debate that we do not trust vague commitments, and certainly not vague commitments that do not even have a timetable to them, given that, as I said earlier, the Environment Bill is already 200 days late.

Lords amendment 11 is about protecting people from the adverse health impacts of pesticide use. It addresses what crop pesticides are currently permitted in the localities of homes and schools, as well as the exposures, the risks and the acute and chronic adverse health impacts for rural residents. It does not specify the distance required between pesticide use and nearby public space—that is for secondary legislation—but I can tell the Minister that we had a lot of support from the Clerks in both Houses in the drafting of the amendment, and we are convinced that it is an effective amendment to protect human health. It is very significant that Lord Randall, who is a former environment adviser to the former Prime Minister herself, has said how vital the amendment is.

Recent events have revealed that the precautionary principle is one of the most important scientific principles we have, and we should be implementing it here. It does not substitute for the overall shift that we need to see towards agro-ecology, but it would do something to protect rural residents who look out of their windows right now and see farmers in protective equipment in their tractor cabs, protected from the impacts of the crops they are spraying, while those rural residents have no protection whatever. We should be standing up for them and protecting them, and that is what the amendment would do.

The Lords amendment on the climate emergency is vital. It would require the Secretary of State to have regard not just to the UK’s net zero target of 2050, but to the Paris climate agreement and the critical importance of acting now to drive a steep reduction in emissions by 2030. Right now, the Government are showing their world-beating ability to set long-term targets on climate change at the same time as demonstrating a world-beating ability to utterly fail to accompany them with either the policies or the funding required to deliver them. That amendment would put that right.

Finally, as others have said, it was laid down in the Government’s manifesto that they would maintain standards, yet when they are put to the test, they fail again and again. Those standards should not be put on the altar of a trade deal with the US and sacrificed; they should be implemented. That is what the Government promised in their manifesto, and that is what they should deliver.

[Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown]

After that rant, I am very pleased to take part in this debate. I have to commend my hon. Friend the Member for Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk (John Lamont), because I think he gave one of the most outstanding speeches I have heard in this House.

I start by drawing attention to my declaration of interest as a farmer. I have lived with this subject for some 67 years of my life—my father was a farmer. I have a passion for the countryside, I have a passion for British farmers producing high-quality goods, and I have a passion for British farmers managing the British countryside in the way that it is, and that is the way the public want to see it continue to be managed. The Bill gives us an ideal opportunity, through the way we are going to purchase public goods, to continue to raise the standards of British agriculture.

I have been in this House for 29 years. I have not seen a single free trade agreement negotiated by the EU that has damaged British farming standards, and I do not believe that will happen in the future. I have listened to every word that my hon. Friend the Minister has correctly said from the Front Bench. What we do not want to do is jeopardise the 29 or so roll-over free trade agreements from the EU by passing legislation in this House tonight that would do such a thing.

While being passionate about maintaining high standards, I do not think that Lords amendments 12 and 16 are the way to do it. The way to do it, as was so rightly said by my hon. Friend the Member for Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk, is through variable tariffs that make clear to our trading partners that if they do not adhere to our high standards, we will raise the tariffs on their goods. That is the way to do it.

The second way to do it is to beef up the Trade and Agriculture Commission. I say to my hon. Friend the Minister that the Government can do that unilaterally without any legislation. They can simply renew the term of the Trade and Agriculture Commission, and I urge her to have serious talks with the Department for International Trade to see whether that can be done. It does not need to be put in the Bill. We do not need amendments to the Bill. We might need to look at it in the Trade Bill if the Government are not sympathetic to my arguments, but that is a different matter for a different day, and I might well support amendments of that sort if I do not see progress.

There are lots of things I do welcome in the Bill, and my hon. Friend the Minister has been right to mention them, particularly Government amendment 2, which relates to multi-annual assistance plans for farmers. That is absolutely vital for how we will support our farmers in the 21st century. We want them to be producing more of the food that our British consumers eat. While I have been in this House, I have seen more and more goods imported into this country, whereas if our farmers could start to produce more, all those imports—things such as yoghurt and cheese—could be replaced with goods produced in this country. If we keep up our high standards, we will continue to export more and more to other countries. Recently, we have seen our pork and milk powder go to China and my excellent Cotswold lambs go to France. There is a huge opportunity around the world if we keep our standards up. That is the way we need to go: not dumbing everything down, but keeping standards up.

I am delighted that some of my ideas on food security are in amendments 5 and 6 and will be included in the Bill. That is important and gives our farmers the stimulus to produce more of the high-quality food we want to eat. One thing that the coronavirus lockdown taught us was that the supermarkets, such as Waitrose and even Lidl, that went out of their way to promote British food did best and are now prospering in a way that they had not previously.

The Government should not accept amendments 12 and 16, but they should act through tariffs.