Agricultural Transition Plan

Lord Inglewood Excerpts

Tuesday 8th December 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Gardiner of Kimble (Con)]

I understand that today the co-chairs of the EU-UK joint committee have announced their agreement in principle on all issues with regard to the protocol on Ireland and Northern Ireland. I think this will have some impact on some of our areas, and further details will be given. I believe that the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster is making a Statement tomorrow. I put that in the context of the recognition that agriculture is devolved. If one remembers, we included provisions in the Agriculture Act respecting the devolved arrangements of all parts of the United Kingdom, the importance of ensuring that Northern Ireland can make its own provisions as a devolved part of the UK and respecting the protocol on Ireland and Northern Ireland. Our manifesto pledge was to maintain the current annual budget to farmers, and that would mean that the total farm support provided to Northern Ireland farmers was £330 million. It is within the scope of the Northern Ireland Administration to ensure that they have the policies that they would wish for Northern Ireland farmers.

[Lord Inglewood (Non-Afl) [V]]

My Lords, I must draw attention to my agricultural interests in the register. Like all other speakers, I welcome the publication of the agricultural transition plan, but, like them, I also recognise that it leaves a huge number of questions still unanswered. Can the Minister confirm that all the money taken away from the BPS each year will be transferred to schemes which will pass it on in its entirety to farmers and land managers and will not be used for the government administration of the scheme? Furthermore, can he confirm that the new arrangements will not lead to additional bureaucracy imposed on the payees, which in turn will cost them money?

[Lord Gardiner of Kimble (Con)]

My Lords, as I said at the outset, and as my right honourable friend the Secretary of State said in his announcement, it is designed so that the reductions in the legacy direct payments will be transferred into a whole range of schemes within the agricultural budget. These might be productivity schemes, environmental land management schemes or slurry schemes, and this will ensure that farmers and land managers have that resource available within the amount of that budget that was promised for every year of this Parliament. The money being transferred from the direct payments will go into the schemes that I have outlined.

Picking up the point about bureaucracy, I assure noble Lords that all Ministers are determined not to replace one sort of bureaucracy with another. Complaints such as “We have not got the detail” are, I believe, precisely allayed by us wanting to ensure that at every turn—whether in simplifying the BPS or in having ways in which we do things differently—the schemes are not bureaucratic, and that their design is straight- forward. This is so that people such as me can understand them, and not have to read them three times or employ someone to help with that.

I assure my noble friend Lord Inglewood that the whole point of what we want from the codesign is for all farmers to feel that these are their schemes, because for so many it may involve retirement, new entry or productivity. It is about environmental land management in all its component forms. All the tests and trials in that area involve working with farmers, precisely to ensure that they are not bureaucratic and that we are not asking for mission impossible. We want farmers to have a sense of achievement not only because they produce public benefits, but because they feel that this is a worthwhile part of their joint endeavour in producing food for the nation.