Agriculture Bill

Debate between Lord Cameron of Dillington and Lord Greaves

Committee stage & Committee: 7th sitting (Hansard) & Committee: 7th sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 28th July 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Cameron of Dillington (CB) [V]]

My Lords, I put my name to Amendment 271 with a degree of sadness, just as, I am sure, the current Defra Secretary of State did when he was temporarily out of office last year. He put down his own, similar amendment to the Bill as it was last year and wrote an article in the Guardian supporting his views.

As others have said, the problem lies with the Government’s manifesto commitment, saying:

“In all of our trade negotiations, we will not compromise on our high environmental protection, animal welfare and food standards”,


and then trying to reconcile that with achieving a trade deal with America and, inevitably, other countries. To make the situation more complicated, at the same time we are trying to prove to the EU negotiators that, if anything, the standard of products available in the UK, and thus possibly available for re-export to the EU, will go up and not down—that there will be no regression on what has become known as the level playing field. A further factor of course is that the British public are adamant that we should support our farmers against cheap imports. There is absolutely no wish, out there, for a race to the bottom. Having had numerous assurances from numerous Ministers that there is nothing to worry about, it seems odd to me that we cannot have something on the face of the Bill.

As far as I am concerned, this is not a food safety issue. The Food Standards Agency and Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs have all the powers they need to audit and control the quality and safety of the food being sold in this country, so there is no need to worry, for instance, about chlorinated chicken as such. It is the production methods, not the product, that matters. If the President of the United States and his regulators think that disinfectant is the cure for all ills—including, apparently, Covid 19—then that is up to them.

However, if certain states—and it is only certain states—allow their farmers to breed their chickens with a higher density than is legally allowed in the UK and they do not have to clear out the litter between batches, and we are then forced to accept their product as imports, that is something that we should get hot under the collar about. Under their sub-standard regulations, production costs are much cheaper. Capital costs per head, for instance, are some 13% cheaper. Therefore, if our farmers are to compete on an equal footing, they have to risk going to prison for breaking our laws or we have to change our laws in a race to the bottom—or, best of all, we should just insist on some form of certification indicating that the US farms supplying us with chickens are breeding to our standards. It is not a very difficult thing to do. Every farmer in this country supplying a supermarket has to have every aspect of their farming processes supervised and certified by that supermarket.

Similarly, hormones in beef are not really a problem in the human diet—although they might undermine consumer confidence, as the noble Lord, Lord Curry, has just said—but many would argue that their use is an unnatural way of rearing meat. Again, the main point is: do we lower our standards, which have been in place in this country for some 35 years, or do we just say no? Ractopamine in pigs is another matter altogether, of course. It is an additive used to manipulate growth and is known to cause lameness, trembling and shortness of breath. It should not be used to produce pork eaten in this country. If we were to import such pork—not that I think we will—it would be tantamount to exporting animal cruelty.

This is not a party-political issue. The Government are aware that farmers have the people on their side. More than a million people signed the NFU petition, and voters will not forgive the Government if they sell our farmers down the river. I think their gut feeling is that, if it were the other way round and the US was insisting that we raised our standards before we could export to it, there would be absolutely no doubt that we would jump to it without a murmur. That is what happened in the 1980s when New Zealand wanted to sell its lamb to China. New Zealand had to produce an entirely different product. That is the way these things work. Who on earth wants to market their goods on the basis that they are cheap and dodgy?

Turning to the letter from the DIT on the Trade and Agriculture Commission, I have to say that I am not overly impressed. Both the commission’s terms of reference and its output would be at the beck and call of the DIT, its short life would hardly allow its members to get their feet under the table, and its recommendations would be only advisory. In other words, it would have no teeth and a very short-term say. I fear that it is more of a PR sop than a genuine effort to provide a solution to this problem.

Personally, I am not fussed which solution we as a House support: this detailed amendment—Amendment 271, to which I have put my name—the rerun of the Neil Parish amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Hain, or Amendment 279 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Curry. However, on the latter, like the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh, I would have to insist that his commission was given, on the face of the Bill and not just at the whim of a Secretary of State, an extended life to continue its work on trade deals into the longer-term future. Anyone who thinks that all trade deals will be wrapped up in a year or two is fooling themselves. I suspect that the key period will be from three to 10 years from now, so it is vital that this commission can still do its work during that time.

Let us think what a difference we could make. As the current Secretary of State at Defra said in his Guardian article last year:

“In the US, legislation on animal welfare is woefully deficient”.


Maybe we can help with that. We should note, for instance, that in the EU free trade agreement with Chile, the EU insisted on animal welfare provisions in the agreement, and Chile’s animal husbandry and slaughter standards have indeed gone up since. We should remember that we in the UK are the third biggest market for food imports in the world, and countries will remain very keen to sell their products to us, even if we stick to our guns—maybe especially if we stick to our guns. Being able to sell into a quality market is no bad advertisement for your goods, so perhaps we can make a difference to the way livestock is reared in all parts of the world. Let us be ambitious about this.

[Lord Greaves (LD)]

My Lords, if the Government are not too keen to listen to the voices from Opposition Benches or even from expert Back-Benchers on their own side, they really ought to listen to someone like the noble Lord, Lord Cameron of Dillington, who speaks in this House as the voice of the countryside and of farming communities.

This group of amendments is very important. Even though we are now on the seventh day in Committee on the Bill, it is one of the most important groups of amendments that we will discuss. That is why I was very happy to put my name to the amendments from the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, and the noble Lord, Lord Hain, which between them cover food standards on the one hand and animal welfare, plant health and the environment on the other.

I repeat those four things because they sum up just why politically this is such an important issue for the Government. This is an extremely unusual issue, in that it unites a whole series of people in the country who would not normally march down the street together. I know that this Government are rumoured to take daily opinion polls and have a focus group every 10 minutes to work out what people think about things, so they must know that what I am saying is true and that somehow they have to draw the line and put it into legislation, otherwise people will never be satisfied.

This is also an issue that unites the media, and not just the farming media or the liberal-left minority media who normally get involved in this matter. It also includes the right-wing tabloids—the Daily Mail, the Daily Express and the rest of them—and the Daily Telegraph. We have seen what happens when they get behind a campaign such as this: the Government cannot win unless they are able to satisfy them that everything is okay.

I ought not to be giving political advice to the Government; I ought to be telling them to do hopeless things that allow me to go out on to the streets to campaign and say what rotten folk they are. However, this is too important for that. I know that Ministers in this House are not the final decision-makers on what they can and cannot do; they are working for their bosses in other places. Nevertheless, we have here a Minister who has influence and authority in the department, and we are relying on him to come back with something that will satisfy us and the country. I say that in all honesty, although perhaps he does not want to hear it.

On issue after issue, we now have a country where a large number of people are very frightened about their health, because of Covid and everything that has happened. A lot of people are scared to go out of their house, and if they are willing to do so they will want to wear a mask for the next 10 years. A lot of other people are on the side there, but a lot of the people who matter are very frightened. We also have a Prime Minister who has just launched a campaign to make sure that we are all a bit less fat. I can appreciate that and I will join his campaign, but these issues are all linked: good health, good food, relying on good farming and good production processes, and all within a good environment that allows people to go out and enjoy themselves and get exercise.

It seems a long time since we started this Committee. When we were discussing access, perhaps on the first day, and people were worried about the speed at which we were going, I said, “Well, you ain’t seen nothing yet”. For good or for bad, I have been in your Lordships’ House now for over 20 years, and I have to say that seven days in Committee for a Bill of this complexity, importance and size is not unusual; it is normal. I do not think it is because we have had to operate within this hybrid system. I join everyone who compliments the staff, the leadership and everybody else who found a way for us to have something that approximates to a Committee. Even though I agree entirely with what the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, said earlier in the House about the need to get back to a new normality—if that is not a contradiction—because we have to make more progress, nevertheless we have had something approximating a Committee and everybody needs to be congratulated on that. However, I do not believe that this Committee a year ago it would have taken less than seven days; in fact, it might even have taken a bit longer.

To go back to the amendment, I am not an expert on a lot of the things in this group, although I know about the environment, but they are so important to people. Everybody cares about food. Increasingly they care about good food, increasingly they care about the environment and increasingly they are realising that the future of farming is in jeopardy unless we get it right.

I beg the Government to listen to what is being said here today by voices across the House, by voices from the rural parts of Yorkshire and Northern Ireland, by the noble Lord, Lord Cameron, from the countryside—people who know what they are talking about. Unless something comes back, I think the Government will suffer serious defeats on Report. Another old tradition of the House is that ping-pong goes on for longer than two days, and this may be a sufficiently important issue that we might even get back to proper ping-pong.

The noble Lord, Lord Empey, said that the tradition in this House is that we do not vote in Committee. That is absolute rubbish. It is a modern invention by Governments trying to have an easy time. There are traditions and traditions in this House. I do not know whether Lord Palmerston would recognise our House today as the one that he presided over, but I do know that for the first 10 or more years that I was a Member here we always voted in Committee. I am not suggesting that we should in hybrid, because that is a bit different, but voting in Committee is a very good way of getting shot of some issues early, one way or the other, and allowing the major issues to go to Report. So when people tell you that what happened last year or the year before are the traditions of this House, it is bunkum. The traditions of this House go back longer than any of us—even those of us who have been here rather longer than we ever thought we would be.