Climate Change: Support for Farmers

Lord Fuller Excerpts

Thursday 23rd January 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

My Lords, my noble friend Lord Framlingham has reminded us of the many different members of the brassica family, which include tenderstem and sprouting varieties of broccoli, mustard, oilseed rape, Brussels sprouts, cauliflower and Calabrese—even the purple sprouting broccoli, which matches the colour of the right reverend Prelate’s episcopal garb.

Broccoli is good in iron and high in fibre, and sprouts can be strong in taste. This is particularly important, because we are not getting enough vegetables in our diet at the moment. We know that curly kale is packed with antioxidants that reduce inflammation, and the Telegraph tells us of how green smoothies can slow brain ageing—which is important in this place. John Innes has bred a fast-growing broccoli that can be harvested twice a year in the field and five times in the greenhouse. I suppose I should declare my interest in the agricultural and farming industries in Norfolk, because I know that our local farmers grow strong English mustard, and the more of their products that are left on the side of the plate, the more prosperous they will become, and deservedly so.

So, let us celebrate this humble family of vegetables, which we are being told is in the middle of a cauliflower crisis—and which, we are told, is being caused by climate change. I just do not buy it. I am sorry to bring a sour note to proceedings. I am not bitter, like undercooked sprouts can sometimes be. But let us examine the real reasons for the right reverend Prelate’s fears.

This year, slugs are a particularly bad problem for broccoli and caulis. Unfortunately, owing to the slow performance in the chemicals regulation division of the Health and Safety Executive, a new and more benign slug control pellet is not coming to the market fast enough, because the new slug pellet that was released for assessment in 2020 is still not approved. As a result, the crops are harder to grow.

A lack of skilled staff under the seasonal agricultural workers scheme has made the crop harder to harvest, and progress on robotics to replace this labour is slower, so it is harder to grow. Not allowing UK producers to treat homegrown seeds for cabbage stem flea beetle, but permitting the use of pretreated seed from Canada or Ukraine, has given overseas growers competitive advantage. We know that brassicas need sulphur to grow strongly, and cleaning up the power stations has made the crop harder to grow as well.

Our larger supermarkets share the concerns raised by my noble friends about the new inheritance taxes that will stifle innovation and investment and put our farming industry on the back foot. New packaging taxes make it harder to profitably present our products on the shelf. The conversion of land to solar production on grade 1 farmland in Lincolnshire, the county of my noble friend, makes it harder to grow too.

Taken together, it is a miracle we have any broccoli at all, especially when the British Growers Association tells us that British growers have scaled back production since 2017 as a result of poor profitability and reducing yields, not climate change. I do not want to trivialise the difficulties caused by bad weather—hot or cold, dry or wet. I know how many parts of Lincolnshire and Nottinghamshire have been under water for months, but let us be honest with ourselves: this is nothing to do with climate change, which was debated seven days ago in your Lordships’ House. Shroud-waving on climate change when it has absolutely nothing to do with the broccoli breakdown is obscuring scrutiny of the real underlying causes that the right reverend Prelate raises. Look: it is time to change the record and to prioritise the practical actions that will get Britain farming immediately, rather than falsely concluding, “Well, there is no point, because the Chinese are opening a new coal-fired power station every other week”.