Agriculture Bill

Debate between Lord Faulkner of Worcester and Duke of Montrose

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

[The Duke of Montrose (Con) [V]]

My Lords, I must thank my noble friend the Minister and his officials for the time they have spent briefing us on the interpretation of the Bill. I also declare my interest as a hill farmer and livestock breeder in Scotland.

The legislation before the House has not been shy in hiding that it is purely an enabling Bill for the Secretary of State. Fortunately, it allows us a fair bit of scrutiny but, at the same time, I am struck by the absence of any hint of common frameworks for the devolved Administrations. In April 2019, the Government reckoned that there were 21 policy areas where negotiation was needed on common frameworks. Can the Minister say in how many of those areas frameworks have been achieved and how many more are left in consideration?

One thing that has obviously been put to one side in the Bill is any sense of a common framework for carcass classification, which, given the quantities of the product that are traded between the devolved components of the UK, would seem like an obvious area for consideration. What effort will be made to achieve some common direction here? The noble Lord, Lord Grantchester, pointed out the missing Dimbleby review of food policy. It is not easy to make sense of the finer points of an agricultural Bill without a clear assessment of the current role that both agriculture and food are expected to play.

The present message coming through to me is that farmers are being clearly told that we must guard the purity of any water and contribute to the national target for net zero carbon emissions, but much of the other side of the equation is missing. Unless there is a scientific breakthrough, there can be no doubt that this will mean a loss of land for productive capacity, and it is hard to see that happening without a loss of farm units and national self-sufficiency. The upside of Brexit is supposed to be trade. The farmers in this country would be very ready to compete but their basic request is for a level playing field.

I think that we all received the joint letter from the Secretaries of State saying how the Government promise to maintain our high standards, but they have already rejected the opportunity to put those on the face of the Bill. If the standards that we wish for come to be seen in any way as restrictive to trade, I am still puzzled to know how they will be enforceable in the face of any WTO charge. The boundaries that we are trying to maintain do not infringe any sanitary or phytosanitary issues. I hope that the Minister will make it plainer to us what the Government would like to see.

Another factor that we are dealing with centres around trading with the United States. We are in the middle of a drive for agriculture to contribute to net zero carbon equivalence. Money and research are going into this topic on both sides of the Atlantic and, in the US, much of it is to do with achieving faster growth rates and using additives that are not allowed under EU rules. The effect of this will be that United States beef could claim a lower carbon footprint than we can achieve in this country, especially if the US can find an ecological way of transporting it.

[The Deputy Speaker]

I now call the noble Lord, Lord Judd.