Agriculture Bill

Lord Addington Excerpts

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

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, we are having a very long and complicated discussion on a Bill that is a framework. It is long and complicated because it is a framework. We basically have a series of good intentions here—and good intentions are the road to hell. If we do not get some clarification during the Bill’s passage, noble Lords will have a very busy time voting. I think the Minister knows that and he might want to have a chat with the person who drafted the Bill. Clause 1(1) goes up to paragraph (j); agriculture is first mentioned at paragraph (i).

The Bill talks about how we are to deliver all these wonderful things for the environment. How will we do that? The delivery system is potentially there: it is those who farm and work the land at the moment. They do not know, or are unsure, how they will be supported. British agriculture has needed support from the state, either multinationally or by the nation itself, to make itself productive since about 1870. It was called the great agricultural depression, when the steam engine opened up the prairie and the pampas to production. We have been in decline since then. We cannot compete. It is historically proven. There is a lovely document in the House of Commons Library that shows this.

How will we make sure that the farmer is there to deliver the public good for public money? We must make sure that they know what they are doing. Farmers are currently concentrated on food production. That is what they do, that is what they have been trained to do and that is the culture. To move away from that, they will need the support and encouragement of the state, and a degree of certainty. At the moment, that is not there.

We have another ritual dance when a Minister says, “I’m not going to do that”, but it is not in the legislation. We then come back to the Minister and say, “Yes, but you won’t be there for ever, although you have a wonderful attitude and we know you wouldn’t do it yourself.” It has always been true and it has always been there. We need something in the Bill that defines what we will do here and how the farmer should be supported.

To put it bluntly, we have had many sets of briefing come in. The NFU states the worries and problems of food producers. We should be able to carry on doing this; that is what we do. Then I got one from the Ramblers’ Association that says: if we are supposed to be providing access to the countryside as a public good, why do we not make sure that we pay landowners to make sure that there are public paths to be used, with all the public health advantages et cetera? If the farmer is there and told that they will be supported, that might just work. We might get gates and solid paths around the edge of the fields. If we do not know what is going on, we will not get interaction from the farming community and those who work the land. We have to try to build that trust and give it a firm basis. The fact that a Minister thinks that it is a good idea and will not change it will not help, very often.

Ministers generally last a couple of years in post and civil servants about the same length of time, but planning on this has to be decades long to really get it going. Will the Minister bear in mind, when amendments are moved during the passage of the Bill, that that is the sort of encouragement we will need to make sure that our delivery system, the farming community, is much more compliant?