Agriculture Bill

Lord Berkeley Excerpts

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

[Lord Berkeley (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, I am grateful for the opportunity to speak in this debate. The nearest I can come to making a declaration of interest is that I live on the Isles of Scilly next to a farm which grows all kinds of vegetables and fruit, and which has pigs, cows and chickens. That farm is really suffering at the moment because of Brexit and transport costs, and the farmer has had to kill most of the pigs and chickens. That is just one example of the problems, mentioned by many noble Lords, of bringing forward this Bill at the same time as the coronavirus pandemic and Brexit. I support the key tests proposed by my noble friend Lord Grantchester regarding safe and traceable food, support for jobs, investment in research, and high standards. The Bill needs to deliver those.

On jobs, many noble Lords spoke about the need to improve skills for agricultural workers, but I believe that our immigration policy is putting the ongoing viability of many farmers at risk. Noble Lords will have read that several flights of workers from Bulgaria and Romania came in a month or so ago. None of them had social distancing on the plane. They were all exempt from the 14-day quarantine period, because there are no workers in this country. I enjoyed reading about the equivalent problem in Germany, where the chairman of their fruit and vegetable pickers association said that Germans are no longer the right shape to bend down and pick vegetables. I do not know what we will do, but the Government must set up some kind of long-term arrangement to ensure that there is a proper supply of seasonal workers in the sector and make them welcome.

On finance, I would welcome any scheme for agriculture that gives more support to local farmers and hill farmers, particularly those who have sheep. There is a double whammy here: I understand that in six months’ time, according to Professor Fiona Smith from the University of Warwick, if we do not get agreement on Brexit there will be a 51% duty on the export of sheepmeat to the European Union. How will farmers deal with this? It might be that the sheep can be exported elsewhere, but we ought to know a bit more about these things at this stage, with only six months before Brexit happens. The House needs a lot more time and much more detail.

My last point is that a lot of this traffic goes between the EU and the UK in trucks. There is still no border operating manual to tell operators and customers how they are supposed to move these goods, whether they are temperature-controlled fresh fruit and vegetables, meat or animals. Many of these journeys need phytosanitary controls. It is no good trucks queueing up for several days at Calais or Dover, because most of the product will be inedible or dead, sadly, before they get to the other side.

I hope the Minister will tell us a lot more about the information that operators and customers will need. I hope that he actually cares. I think that he does, but an awful lot of other people in the Government do not seem to care at all as long as we can get Brexit done and all our exports to the EU converted to the United States.