British Agriculture

Debate between Lord Kerr of Kinlochard and Lord Willoughby de Broke

Thursday 26th February 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Willoughby de Broke (UKIP)]

My Lords, I am grateful to have the opportunity to have this short debate about farming because farming is facing something of a perfect storm at the moment. It is a storm made up of low prices, overregulation and unwarranted regulation, in many cases, from Brussels, and the imposition of a new payment scheme—the basic payment scheme—to replace the single payment scheme, but more of that a little later.

Some noble Lords may be familiar with Noel Coward’s song “There are Bad Times Just Around the Corner”, which states:

“From Colwyn Bay to Kettering they’re sobbing themselves to sleep,

The shrieks and wails in the Yorkshire Dales have even depressed the sheep;

In rather vulgar lettering a very disgruntled group have posted bills in the Cotswold hills

To prove we’re in the soup”.

I declare my interest as a member of that disgruntled group of farmers. I farm in Warwickshire and I am disgruntled because during my time in the Lords I have served on the committee chaired by the noble Earl, Lord Selborne, who is in his place, and have spoken in many debates, including debates in 1991, 1994, 1996, 1999, 2000, 2004 and 2008. I think that in nearly all those debates there were calls for reform of the common agricultural policy. I think that both Front Benches in this House have always agreed with the idea of reforming the common agricultural policy. However, what has happened after all those fine words? Where are we now? Has anything changed? Has the common agricultural policy become less bureaucratic, less centralised and less corrupt? No, it has not. Has it made farmers any more prosperous? No, it has not. Actually, things have got worse, as I will explain.

Let us look at where we are now. Dairy farming is on its knees and in many cases producers are being paid less than the cost of production. In some cases, milk is absurdly being sold at less than the price of water. I checked this out for myself in my local branch of the Co-op supermarket in Shipston-on-Stour last week and found that one litre of milk was priced at 85p, while a litre bottle of San Pellegrino water cost £1.35. Perhaps noble Lords should put San Pellegrino water on their cornflakes as it is obviously better than milk.

The beef and sheep sectors are suffering under overregulation, passports and identification schemes, many of which are unnecessary and certainly very burdensome and time-consuming for stock farmers. Arable farmers are regularly stripped of their ability to grow profitable, healthy and viable crops at a time when they are being enjoined to feed an ever increasing population, but the rules from Brussels make it more and more difficult to do that. I take the example of winter wheat. One of the big enemies of winter wheat is the black-grass weed. Over the last couple of years, the most effective black-grass herbicides have been gradually withdrawn against the advice of our own very independent and expert Advisory Committee on Pesticides and that of the previous government Chief Scientific Adviser, Sir John Beddington. However, their advice does not really count. What counts is what goes on in Brussels. The ayatollahs in Brussels decide what we are going to do and we have almost no say there any more. The rules are decided by the agricultural bosses in Brussels in the Commission and are subject to qualified majority voting in the Council of Ministers, where we are regularly outvoted. Perhaps the Minister can explain why Britain’s much trumpeted strong voice in Europe—about which we hear all the time from the Liberal Benches and the—

[Lord Kerr of Kinlochard (CB)]

I am most grateful to the noble Lord, who is famous for his continental courtesy. When people ask, “What did the Normans do for us?”, you have to say that, after the initial fracas at Hastings, they brought a great degree of courtesy to our debates, as we will see when the noble Lord, Lord De Mauley, who is legendary for his courtesy, replies to this debate.

Does the party of the noble Lord, Lord Willoughby de Broke, wish us to withdraw from the European Union and, if so, would we not still be subject to these terrible regulations which he has described, with only one difference—that we would no longer have any vote in what they were?

[Lord Willoughby de Broke]

Certainly, my party—UKIP—would definitely withdraw from the common agricultural policy. I am time limited in this debate and I do not want to go on for too long but we would have the money to pay farmers and our vote now is—

[Lord Kerr of Kinlochard]

My Lords—

[Lord Willoughby de Broke]

I am very sorry but I do not want to take any more interventions. If the noble Lord wanted to speak in the debate, he should have put his name down. Farmers can survive in this country without the CAP.

As the Minister will remember, the humiliating position of having no say in what goes on in agriculture in this country was underlined last summer when the Commission, spurred on by demonstrators dressed up as bumble-bees, suspended the use of neonicotinoid seed dressings for oilseed rape and other brassicas. Yet again, our Advisory Committee on Pesticides was against this, as to their credit were the Government and the Minister. Yet again, we are being forced to enforce a policy with which we do not agree.

The rule of unintended consequences will now kick in. Large acreages of oilseed rape have been damaged. The percentages are arguable, but these acreages have certainly suffered. According to Home Grown Cereals Authority estimates, about 40,000 acres of oilseed rape last autumn had to be destroyed, abandoned or re-drilled. The consequence of that is that as oilseed rape is a major food for bees and pollinators, there will be less food for them: there will be less oilseed rape. Now that neonics are banned, farmers will use airborne sprays. They have to be put on at flowering time. This initiative by the Commission will definitely damage bees more than was the case when we had neonicotinoid seed dressings—but welcome to the EU, and have a nice day.

Next on the EU shooting-itself-in-the-foot department were genetically modified organisms. Last year the scientific adviser to the European Commission, Professor Anne Glover, was effectively sacked by the new President of the Commission, Herr Juncker. He simply abolished the post. While she was not an active supporter of GMOs, her big mistake—her misdeed—was to say that she understood that the technology is safe and used all over the world. She made the serious error of actually saying this, when she told an organisation called EurActiv:

“I would be confident in saying that there is no more risk in eating GMO food than eating conventionally farmed food”.

For this extreme view she was vilified and pilloried by the usual suspects: Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and the Soil Association. Her job was abolished.

The result of this negative, damaging and anti-scientific approach to risk-based regulation, which is what we should have in this country, is that British farmers are disadvantaged by not being able to use technologies that their rivals all over the world are using to their and to consumers’ benefits.

It gets a bit worse. Brussels has come up with a shiny new and exciting replacement for the single payment scheme. It is called the basic payment scheme, or BPS. It is even more complex and irrational than the scheme that it replaces; it sounds hard to do, but Brussels has done it. There is a whole lot of bumf in six papers that I have had that covers 160 double-side pages of print and weighs in at 1 pound and 7 ounces. It defines what a farmer is and tells us what we can do on our own land.

The critical point here is that as farmers we can no longer decide what we grow. We are now handed down a demand and requirement by the Commission that in order to get the subsidies from the BPS we must grow three separate crops. The peasantry can no longer decide what it wants to grow. Presumably we are too stupid to decide what grows best on our own land, too ignorant to grow food that the market requires, and not fit to know what sort of rotational scheme we should have. We have to be told what to do by the European Commission.

This is complete madness. Do the Government really think it right to remain in this wasteful, corrupt, mismanaged, bureaucratic and utterly hopeless organisation, when the common agricultural policy has been condemned on both sides of this House for many years with, as far as I can see, absolutely no result? We would surely be better off bringing agricultural policy back to this country. This would be better for consumers and farmers, and much better for our self-respect.

European Union Bill

Debate between Lord Kerr of Kinlochard and Lord Willoughby de Broke

Monday 23rd May 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Kerr of Kinlochard]

It is a pleasure to speak after the noble and learned Lord, Lord Howe of Aberavon. He speaks with great authority on a number of subjects, but particularly on the 1972 Act, of which he was the father.

The noble and learned Lord causes me a little difficulty. I welcome his support for the amendment in my name and that of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay of Clashfern—which is not surprising, as I am rather in favour of my amendment, and I am glad that he should be rather in favour of it, too. My position is slightly different from that of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay of Clashfern, who said that Clause 18 was unnecessarily vague. I believe that it is unnecessary and vague, and I would go for the amendment of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Howe of Aberavon, calling for the elimination of Clause 18 —the Armstrong-Howe amendment.

I am against the clause because I am against declaratory provisions in principle; it seems to me that they are actively undesirable. I quote, as an authority on the subject, the then Sir Geoffrey Howe, Solicitor-General in 1972, who rejected a declaratory provision of this kind in his Bill because it would be,

“futile … and … a hollow sham ... the position is that the ultimate supremacy of Parliament will not be affected”—

by the Bill—

“and it will not be affected because it cannot be affected”.—[Official Report, Commons, 5/6/1972; col. 627.]

I agree with the noble and learned Lord. I think that that is absolutely correct.

My preference is for there to be no Clause 18. However, I strongly agree with the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay of Clashfern, that the vagueness of the version of Clause 18 which is in the Bill is undesirable and, I would say, dangerous. I argued on Second Reading that it was potentially sinister. I hope that I was wrong about that but I have not yet heard an answer to it.

The Explanatory Notes are not much help. They attracted the particular ire of Jean-Claude Piris, the then head of the Council Legal Service, in the memorandum from which the Minister made a perhaps selective quotation. Piris said that the intention behind paragraph 104 of our Explanatory Notes “is not crystal clear”, which is a very elegant way of putting it. The Explanatory Notes say:

“The words ‘by virtue of an Act of Parliament’”—

not the 1972 Act—

“cover UK subordinate legislation made under Acts, and because of the particular context of this clause, also cover Acts and Measures of devolved legislatures in exercise of the powers conferred on them by the relevant UK primary legislation”.

I do not understand that. That all derives from the 1972 Act, which is all you need to cite. Because of the 1972 Act directly applicable law applies in this country. It applies even in areas where the authority has been devolved. The 1972 Act is still the fundamental basis for all this. If we have to have a Clause 18, it should refer clearly and precisely to the 1972 Act. I thought it potentially sinister because the loose phrase “an Act” could be construed as referring to future as well as past Acts. The reference to the 1972 Act is only implicit and not explicit as the clause stands.

On Second Reading I wondered whether it was some kind of a dog-whistle or signal to those who would like us to be able pick and choose, to apply or disapply particular pieces of EU law depending on whether we like them. Of course, the Government know that that is not possible. Their notes say that nothing affects the primacy of EU law. The addition to the text suggested by the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, would say that explicitly in the Act. Why go for such vague wording? Why have something that is open to the interpretation that it might cover future Acts? I withdraw the word “sinister” as that goes too far, but I will settle for the words of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay—“unnecessarily vague”, and add unnecessary. I believe that Clause 18 is unnecessary and unnecessarily and dangerously vague.

[Lord Willoughby de Broke]

My Lords, I hesitate to introduce an inquiring note to this love-in. I do not know whether noble Lords have read the Commons European Scrutiny Committee report on this Bill, which has some interesting things to say on the principle of parliamentary sovereignty, having listened to a lot of legal evidence.

I draw the Minister’s attention to what that report says in paragraph 76, as it might help him. The committee states:

“We think it right that, should an Act of Parliament instruct the courts to disapply an aspect of European Union law, the courts should do so: this is not only consistent with the case law of the courts, but also with the doctrine of the legislative supremacy of Parliament; and also with the rule of law.

As I said on Second Reading:

“Encouragingly, the committee goes on to conclude that it is entirely within bounds for Parliament to ask judges to disapply any aspect of European Union law if that is the will of a democratically elected Parliament, even if—this is important—that were to lead to infringement proceedings in the EU Court of Justice”.—[Official Report, 22/3/11; Col. 699.]

There seems to be a divergence of opinion. Who is right—those who say EU law is supreme and should be within the Bill as the amendments suggest; or is the Commons European Union Scrutiny Committee right? It presumably has had legal advisers to instruct them as well. I suppose that we ought to take account of the fact that the French Government threw out the Romanian Gypsies, which must have been contrary to EU law. However, as far as I know, no infringement proceedings were taken. Even now, the French and Danes are ignoring the provisions of the Schengen agreement, which they signed, and are putting in place border posts. As is well known, the French stopped a train from Italy that contained Tunisian emigrants who were given some sort of EU passe-partout and were supposed to be allowed into France. The French police stopped the train and would not let them in. Denmark has reinstated full border controls to stop immigration. Therefore, the argument about the complete supremacy of EU law does not any longer hold. I will be interested to hear what the noble Lord or his advisers say about this in response to the amendments.