Agriculture Bill

Lord Blunkett Excerpts

Committee stage & Committee: 1st sitting (Hansarad) & Committee: 1st sitting (Hansarad): House of Lords
Tuesday 7th July 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Tyler (LD) [V]]

My Lords, the noble Earl, Lord Dundee, when opening the debate, observed that Clause 1 gives Ministers powers, not duties, so the financial assistance objectives of the Bill are only permissive and thus inevitably subject to the economic context in which it all becomes operational. It is all very well trying to allocate the most appropriate slices of the financial cake, as all amendments in this group do, but the overall size of that cake is the more critical issue for 2021 and beyond. Every single one of the bids for inclusion is at risk if the cake is drastically shrunken.

I said at Second Reading that I have no interests to declare, but in addition to substantial constituency and Commons responsibilities, until last year I had a small shareholding in a large farming company, and over the years, that enterprise had dairy and substantial arable interests, as well as renewable energy projects. I hope I can claim, therefore, to take an informed interest in the economic health of agriculture and rural areas.

The Bill is a legislative pig in a poke. Perhaps inevitably, but with dire consequences, it is entirely dependent on its context, and in the last week, since Second Reading, the likely context has deteriorated still further. First, the Government, for absurdly obstinate and dogmatic doctrinal reasons, refused to even consider giving the Brexit negotiators more room for manoeuvre by extending the transition. Secondly, Mr Frost then failed again to make any progress in the current discussions. Growers of fruit, vegetables and flowers are all too familiar with substantial frost damage. However, this frost damage is on an incalculable scale. We seem destined to charge towards a really bad deal for British agriculture, or, even worse, no deal at all. In his otherwise very comprehensive letter to us all on 29 June, the Minister completely failed to acknowledge this unprecedented uncertainty. He could make no concrete commitments. How could he, with the Covid-19 recession heading towards us at breakneck speed?

There are global trends to which our industry is especially vulnerable; for example, the failure of Trump’s attempt to build a market for US crops in China has left powerful American agribusinesses desperate to dump into the UK. On top of those major challenges, the combination of the Covid-19 recession and the Brexit failures is producing a uniquely unfavourable financial combination for UK farmers and growers, and the longer the crisis lasts, the nastier the results will be. For example, farmers will start to produce less. We are already experiencing the impact of having few of the 90,000 pickers we usually have from Europe. There will be resultant harvest losses. Then there is scarce credit. As operations slow down, loan terms are extended, cash is trapped and lenders are reluctant to finance commodities and are wary of volatile currencies. Governments everywhere will get scared. Export controls or attempted bans will cause price rises and shortages, with deprived communities hit disproportionately hard.

This all adds up to all the sectors of UK agriculture and horticulture finding it impossible to plan or invest in a climate of unprecedented uncertainty, just as the Government will be grappling with the worst economic crisis since the Second World War, and here, I thought the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Inglewood, were very relevant. In these circumstances, Ministers can hardly be blamed for being so vague about the multiannual financial assistance plan specified in Clause 4. I am willing to bet that this appears only much later in the year, long after the Bill has reached the statute book.

In his letter, the Minister wrote:

“The Government intends to provide more detail about the early years of the transition, including Direct Payments and future schemes, in the autumn.”


I warn farmers and growers not to expect a cheerful Christmas present. With all the other competing claims—the NHS, the care sector, schools, reviving our already hard-pressed manufacturing sector and trying to stabilise service industries that are forced out of Europe—the Treasury is never going to be very generous to farmers.

Clearly, No. 10 plans to bury Brexit under the Covid-19 recession, but it risks burying large numbers of farmers and growers in the process, with calamitous consequences for consumers and for the nation’s food security. These amendments are crucial. They require the Government to be realistic and frank, because empty promises are literally worthless.

[Lord Blunkett (Lab)]

My Lords, I am very pleased to be back in the Chamber after nearly 15 weeks, and to reflect on what the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, and others have said about the need to accommodate more Members and get back to normal as quickly as possible. I have a personal interest in that I have discovered that I am very poor at reading a speech into a computer microphone, or even improvising, and whatever skills I have in oratory, humour and irony are absolutely wasted when online—not that I intend to draw on all three of those this afternoon.

I want to reinforce points made by the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh, and the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, and to comment on the speech by my old—not in age but in longevity of friendship—friend, the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher. For those who do not know, the city of Sheffield incorporates in its boundaries a substantial part of the Peak District; in fact, a third of the landmass of Sheffield is in the Peak park. For the benefit of the noble Baroness, I can say that it is not, like some other cities, tatty—I think that was the word used by the noble Lord, Lord Greaves—land on the edge of the city. It is an essential part of the Peak park, as well as a breathing space, as it always has been, for the city itself.

The reason I mention it is that, as lockdown diminished—this was not one of those forays to discover whether I could drive a car safely—I went out into the area, still in Sheffield, around the Redmires Reservoir, and heard a curlew, one of the greatest sounds you can imagine. As the speeches this afternoon have emphasised, I simply want to say that in conserving as well as developing our agriculture, we should nurture the natural environment. I am all in favour of growing trees—they have to be the right trees—but we need our moorlands. On a point about water-gathering and conservation, we need to understand the essential nature of upland wet areas, particularly the peat bogs, which 13 years ago dried out to the point where, at around this time, in late June or early July, we had the most enormous flooding. At that time, civil servants told the Secretary of State, who happened—and continues —to be a friend of mine, that we were exaggerating when we said we had a problem. When the RAF lifted people by helicopter off the Meadowhall shopping centre, and when a 14-tonne piece of equipment was lifted out of its moorings and swept 100 yards from the Forgemasters factory in the lower Don Valley, I think they may have changed their minds. We need to be aware of what we do, how it affects our environment and why the Environment Bill that is to be brought forward and this legislation should go hand in hand.

I want to comment briefly on land management. The noble Lord, Lord Greaves, is right to indicate that small farmers—tenant farmers, herdsmen—have a job surviving; they use their skills to try to make a sufficient living from keeping the countryside working. But I say to the noble Earl, Lord Devon, that there are large landlords who, like the Duke of Devonshire—no relation —have been struggling to manage the watercourse. They have been working to defend the river running through the land around Chatsworth House from the scourge of American crayfish—which is not one of the breeds that I hope we will be protecting so Amendment 27 is, perhaps, not appropriate after all. They have been trying to do this by persuading Defra to give them a licence so that, having dealt with these crayfish under proper regulations so that nobody thinks of farming them, they can dispose of the fish in a way that allows them to cover the enormous costs involved. I am talking about 20,000 crayfish per year from a stretch of water of just two miles, which destroy the embankments, undermine the area around and are incredibly dangerous in relation to flooding.

All these things go hand in hand. My plea this afternoon is that, as we go through this Bill in Committee and on Report, we reserve for amendments those things that are in synergy with each other, to ensure that the Bill comes out not as a Christmas tree but as a good English pine.

[Viscount Trenchard (Con)]

My Lords, I am delighted to follow the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, and strongly endorse his remarks with respect to the need to get back to this House properly, as soon as possible. I declare an interest as a trustee of the Fonthill Estate in Wiltshire, as listed in the register. I have read and considered all 36 of the amendments in this group and believe that the majority are unnecessary, even if they are well intentioned.

My noble friend Lord Lucas likes to use the verb “conserve” and attributes to it a meaning wider than words such as “protect” and “improve”. I sympathise with his intention to broaden the scope of the purposes for which the Secretary of State may provide financial assistance, but I am not sure that his suggestion to use “conserve” actually clarifies approved purposes, except in the cases of species of animals and plants.

My noble friend Lord Dundee and the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, seek in Amendment 1 to clarify whether the Secretary of State really will provide financial assistance for the activities listed in Clause 1. I should have thought that this was obvious, but I welcome this amendment if it will encourage my noble friend the Minister to be much more specific in informing your Lordships of how much financial assistance will be made available under the ELMS scheme, and whether it will completely compensate for the loss of direct support payments, which will hit farming businesses hard in 2021.

It may be true that the larger estates are better able to survive the withdrawal of direct payments, but it is also true that the larger farming businesses employ a large majority of agricultural workers, and the prospects for those currently furloughed to return to the payroll will be enhanced if the Government can give a lot more clarity on how businesses can mitigate the loss of direct payments. Indeed, it should be made possible for those who are particularly innovative and active in introducing new, environmentally friendly practices to receive more than they have been receiving under the present system.