Fishing Industry: Visas for Foreign Workers

Lord Knight of Weymouth Excerpts

Monday 24th April 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Murray of Blidworth (Con)]

I thank the noble Lord for that question. It has been the long-standing position of this Government and previous ones that foreign nationals coming to work in the UK—be that on land or in our waters—should comply with the immigration system when doing so. I do not believe that this is a controversial proposition, and the fishing industry is no exception. This House and the other place legislated to rectify and clarify the position in Section 43 of the Nationality and Borders Act. The action that the noble Lord complains about is merely the implementation of those provisions, which have been approved by Parliament.

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

My Lords, a week last Thursday, a good friend of mine in Orkney rang me in some distress. He runs a crab fishing business with two vessels, with several thousand crab creels at the bottom of the north Atlantic. The decision made by the Home Office, which was effective that day, meant he had no way of going and servicing those creels and no way of bringing them in. There is no space on the dock for him to land them if he could bring them in, but if he went to get them with his crew, he would be subject to a potential £20,000 fine per crew. He applied many weeks ago for the skilled worker visas and they are still being processed, so today’s letter was not received with great cheer. Can the Government make a special dispensation for Orkney crab businesses to carry on fishing in their traditional waters, which are far off in the north Atlantic but count as inshore due to three tiny uninhabited islands? If they were discarded from the calculation around inshore waters, an important traditional industry for Orkney would be allowed to survive.

[Lord Murray of Blidworth (Con)]

I know that the noble Lord is a doughty campaigner on these issues. Indeed, we have previously exchanged views on this. I am happy to look at the suggestion he raises, but it is right that the fishing industry should be able to utilise domestic labour where possible and use the skilled workers visa route to employ foreign nationals if necessary within 12 nautical miles. I am afraid that it is not within the department’s ability to change the geography of the waters around Orkney, but I will certainly look at the matter he raises and write to him about it.

Data Protection Bill [HL]

Lord Knight of Weymouth Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard - continued): House of Lords
Tuesday 10th October 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

My Lords, as the economy becomes more digitised, the politics of data become centrally important. As the Minister himself said, data is the fuel of the digital economy, and public policy now needs an agile framework around which to balance the forces at play. We need to power the economy and innovation with data while protecting the rights of the individual and of wider society from exploitation by those who hold our data. The recent theft of the personal details of 143 million Americans in the hack of Equifax or the unfolding story of abuse of social media in the US elections by Russian agents make the obvious case for data protection.

This Bill attempts to help us tackle some big moral and ethical dilemmas, and we as parliamentarians have a real struggle to be sufficiently informed in a rapidly changing and innovative environment. I welcome the certainty that the Bill gives us in implementing the GDPR in this country in a form that anticipates Brexit and the need to continue to comply with EU data law regardless of membership of the EU in the future.

However, we need e-privacy alongside the GDPR. For example, access to a website being conditional on accepting tracking cookies should be outlawed; we need stricter rules on wi-fi location tracking; browsers should have privacy high by default; and we need to look at extending the protections around personal data to metadata derived from personal data.

But ultimately I believe that the GDPR is an answer to the past. It is a long-overdue response to past and current data practice, but it is a long way from what the Information Commissioner’s briefing describes as,

“one of the final pieces of much needed data protection reform”.

I am grateful to Nicholas Oliver, the founder of people.io, and to Gi Fernando from Freeformers for helping my thinking on these very difficult issues.

The Bill addresses issues of consent, erasure and portability to help protect us as citizens. I shall start with consent. A tougher consent regime is important but how do we make it informed? Even if 13 is the right age for consent, how do we inform that consent with young people, with parents, with adults generally, with vulnerable people and with small businesses which have to comply with this law? Which education campaigns will cut through in a nation where 11 million of us are already digitally excluded and where digital exclusion does not exclude significant amounts of personal data being held about you? And what is the extent of that consent?

As an early adopter of Facebook 10 years ago, I would have blindly agreed to its terms and conditions that required its users to grant it,

“a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content”.

I posted on the site. It effectively required me to give it the right to use my family photos and videos for marketing purposes and to resell them to anybody. Thanks to this Bill, it will be easier for me to ask it to delete that personal data and it will make it easier for me to take it away and put it goodness knows where else with whatever level of security I deem fit, if I can trust it. That is welcome, although I still quite like Facebook, so I will not do it just yet.

But what about the artificial intelligence generated from that data? If, in an outrageous conflagration of issues around fake news and election-fixing by a foreign power to enable a reality TV star with a narcissistic personality disorder to occupy the most powerful executive office in the free world, I take against Facebook, can I withdraw consent for my data to be used to inform artificial intelligences that Facebook can go on to use for profit and for whatever ethical use they see fit? No, I cannot.

What if, say, Google DeepMind got hold of NHS data and its algorithms were used with bias? What if Google gets away with breaking data protection as part of its innovation and maybe starts its own ethics group, marking its own ethics homework? Where is my consent and where do I get a share of the revenue generated by Google selling the intelligence derived in part from my data? And if it sells that AI to a health company which sells a resulting product back to the NHS, how do I ensure that the patients are advantaged because their data was at the source of the product?

No consent regime can anticipate future use or the generation of intelligent products by aggregating my data with that of others. The new reality is that consent in its current form is dead. Users can no longer reasonably comprehend the risk associated with data sharing, and so cannot reasonably be asked to give consent.

The individual as a data controller also becomes central. I have plenty of names, addresses, phone numbers and email addresses, and even the birthdays of my contacts in my phone. Some are even Members of your Lordships’ House. If I then, say, hire a car and connect my phone to the car over Bluetooth so that I can have hands-free driving and music from my phone, I may then end up sharing that personal contact data with the car and thereby all subsequent hirers of the car. Perhaps I should be accountable with the car owner for that breach.

Then, thanks to AI, in the future we will also have to resolve the paradox of consent. If AI determines that you have heart disease by facial recognition or by reading your pulse, it starts to make inference outside the context of consent. The AI knows something about you, but how can you give consent for it to tell you when you do not know what it knows? Here, we will probably need to find an intermediary to represent the interests of the individual, not the state or wider society. If the AI determines that you are in love with someone based on text messages, does the AI have the right to tell you or your partner? What if the AI is linked to your virtual assistant—to Siri or Google Now—and your partner asks Siri whether you are in love with someone else? What is the consent regime around that? Clause 13, which deals with a “significant decision”, may help with that, but machine learning means that some of these technologies are effectively a black box where the creators themselves do not even know the potential outcomes.

The final thing I want to say on consent concerns the sensitive area of children. Schools routinely use commercial apps for things such as recording behaviour, profiling children, cashless payments, reporting and so on. I am an advocate of the uses of these technologies. Many have seamless integration with the school management information systems that thereby expose children’s personal data to third parties based on digital contracts. Schools desperately need advice on GDPR compliance to allow them to comply with this Bill when it becomes law.

Then there is the collection of data by schools to populate the national pupil database held by the Department for Education. This database contains highly sensitive data about more than 8 million children in England and is routinely shared with academic researchers and other government departments. The justification for this data collection is not made clear by the DfE and causes a big workload problem in schools. Incidentally, this is the same data about pupils that was shared with the Home Office for it to pursue deportation investigations. I am talking about data collected by teachers for learning being used for deportation. Where is the consent in that?

I have here a letter from a Lewisham school advising parents of its privacy policy. It advises parents to go to a government website to get more information about how the DfE stores and uses the data, if they are interested. That site then advises that the Government,

“won’t share your information with any other organisations for marketing, market research or commercial purposes”.

That claim does not survive any scrutiny. For example, Tutor Hunt, a commercial tutoring company, was granted access to the postcode, date of birth and unique school reference number of all pupils. This was granted for two years up to the end of March this year to give parents advice on school choice. Similar data releases have been given to journalists and others. It may be argued that this data is still anonymous, but it is laughable to suggest that identity cannot then be re-engineered, or engineered in the first place, from birth date, postal code and school. The Government need to get their own house in order to comply with the Bill.

That leads me to erasure, which normally means removing all data that relates to an individual, such as name, address and so on. The remaining data survives with a unique numeric token as an identifier. Conflicting legislation will continue to require companies to keep data for accounting purposes. If that includes transactions, there will normally be enough data to re-engineer identity from an identity token number. There is a clause in the Bill to punish that re-engineering, which needs debating to legitimise benign attempts to test research and data security, as discussed by the noble Baroness, Lady Manningham-Buller.

The fact that the Bill acknowledges how easy it is to re-identify from anonymous data points to a problem. The examples of malign hacking from overseas are countless. How do we prevent that with UK law? What are the Government’s plans, especially post Brexit, to address this risk? How do we deal with the risk of a benign UK company collecting data with consent—perhaps Tutor Hunt, which I referred to earlier—that is then acquired by an overseas company, which then uses that data free from the constraints of this legislation?

In the context of erasure, let me come to an end by saying that the Bill also allows for the right to be forgotten for children as they become 18. This is positive, as long as the individual can choose what they want to keep for him or herself. Otherwise, it would be like suggesting you burn your photo albums to stop an employer judging you.

Could the Minister tell me how the right to be forgotten works with the blockchain? These decentralised encrypted trust networks are attractive to those who do not trust big databases for privacy reasons. By design, data is stored in a billion different tokens and synced across countless devices. That data is immutable. Blockchain is heavily used in fintech, and London is a centre for fintech. But the erasure of blockchain data is impossible. How does that work in this Bill?

There is more to be said about portability, law enforcement and the intelligence services, but thinking about this Bill makes my head hurt. Let me close on a final thought. The use of data to fuel our economy is critical. The technology and artificial intelligence it generates have a huge power to enhance us as humans and to do good. That is the utopia we must pursue. Doing nothing heralds a dystopian outcome, but the pace of change is too fast for us legislators, and too complex for most of us to fathom. We therefore need to devise a catch-all for automated or intelligent decisioning by future data systems. Ethical and moral clauses could and should, I argue, be forced into terms of use and privacy policies. That is the only feasible way to ensure that the intelligence resulting from the use of one’s data is not subsequently used against us as individuals or society as a whole. This needs urgent consideration by the Minister.

Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Bill

Lord Knight of Weymouth Excerpts

Wednesday 16th July 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Taylor of Holbeach]

My noble friend has got it wrong: it is about safeguards. I am talking about safeguards, not powers. I am talking about the Bill imposing limits on the discretion of the Secretary of State through the regulations and the Bill itself. If my noble friend will allow me to continue he will see that I am placing that in the context of seeking to provide a basis for continuing the provisions of the Bill without extending the powers that are available to the Secretary of State or the Government under the Bill.

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

I apologise for intervening in the Minister’s speech, but given that he has just been interrupted anyway, on the same point, can he clarify that Clause 4, “Extra-territoriality in Part 1 of RIPA”, is not an extension of the legal powers that the state has in respect of these matters?

[Lord Taylor of Holbeach]

I can indeed do so. Extraterritoriality was assumed by the Government to be part of RIPA, and rightly so, as part and parcel of their legislation. We are making it explicit so that there can be no question of doubt about it. On extraterritoriality, as I said in my opening remarks, RIPA was based on the correct assumption that any firm that provided services here within the UK was governed by the law that we had in connection with these matters. In my view, there is no argument about that. Perhaps I may go on and finish my speech. The noble Lord is gracious enough to acknowledge that this is all of a piece, and I would like to be able to present it to the House as a piece.

I mentioned the number of safeguards to be introduced through regulations made under the Bill. These regulations were published in draft last week to enable parliamentary scrutiny and are available from the Printed Paper Office. The Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee has considered those regulations and made a report, which I am sure many noble Lords will have considered. I thank the committee’s members for their work. They have, as always, provided a useful and thorough review of the issues. In the case of this Bill, they have done so in a necessarily short period of time.

The committee is of course correct that it would be best to avoid a gap between the passage of this legislation and the passage of regulations. That is why the Home Secretary has been clear that our intention is to ensure that this secondary legislation can be approved by both Houses before the Summer Recess. This should reassure members of the committee, and other noble Lords, that the powers in question will not be exercised in lieu of those regulations being approved. It will not, therefore, be necessary to use the “made affirmative” procedure in this case. However, I thank my noble friend Lady Thomas of Winchester and her committee: their suggestion was a positive one. I am pleased that we have been able, through the usual channels, to ensure a more direct way of achieving the same objective —bringing the regulations into play before the Summer Recess.

The committee has also invited me to address the potential scope of the delegated power at Clause 1(3). I am pleased to do so. The Government have already published a provisional draft of the regulations to be made under the Bill, and these go no further than the existing data retention regulations 2009. They are, I can confirm, limited to matters relating to the powers conferred by Clause 1(1) and (2). I hope that this will satisfy the House of the Government’s intention.

The second part of the Bill deals with interception. In relation to interception, Clauses 4 and 5 make it clear that the obligation under RIPA to comply with interception warrants applies to all those companies that provide communications services to people in the United Kingdom, regardless of where those companies happen to be based. These provisions do not extend existing powers. They simply seek to make explicit what has always been asserted to be the case.

I know that many noble Lords will be interested in Clause 5, which clarifies the definition of a telecommunications service. When RIPA was considered by Parliament in 2000, it was intended to be technologically neutral. Much of it relates to fixed line or mobile telephony, so it also covers web-based e-mail and social media communications. We are simply seeking to clarify that definition in order to put this matter beyond doubt.

These provisions will make clear the legal obligation on companies that provide communications services to people in the UK to comply with warrants issued by the Secretary of State. In the absence of such clarity, vital capabilities may be lost in the near future. It is of course never ideal for these matters to be considered in haste, but I trust that noble Lords will agree that it is imperative that we urgently address these issues.

I know that some noble Lords have asked about the delay between the court judgment on 8 April and this legislation being introduced. Following that judgment we needed to balance the necessity to respond quickly with the need to ensure that care was taken to get our response right. We could not have acted prior to that judgment because the precise response needed to be framed in relation to the detail of the judgment. While we are clear that the existing regulations remain in force, we must act now to put this matter beyond doubt, providing a basis in primary legislation and responding to some of the points made by the court.

In relation to interception, as I have told the House, we have reached a dangerous tipping point. It has become clear that without immediate legal clarity we could soon see a loss of vital co-operation. This is not a matter that we are able to leave until after the Summer Recess.

I express my thanks to both sides of the House for the support that they have given to the Bill. It has been constructive, I think, to have spent Monday talking to various Peers about it. I particularly pay tribute to the noble Baroness, Lady Smith of Basildon, for the constructive approach that the Opposition have taken. I look forward to an equally constructive debate in the House as we consider the Bill on Second Reading and at later stages.

I recognise that this is a tight timetable, but I hope that I have made clear the reasons for that. They were accepted in the House of Commons, which overwhelmingly backed the Bill yesterday. I am sure that noble Lords agree that we must ensure that the police and the security and intelligence agencies have the capabilities they need to protect the public and keep us safe. That is what the Bill will do. I beg to move.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Knight of Weymouth]

My Lords, I have to start —like the noble Lord, Lord Butler, who made such an excellent contribution—by saying that the Government’s handling of this Bill has been a disgrace. I cannot repeat any better why it is a disgrace, and it would be ridiculous of me to try to compete with the noble Lord’s analysis. To have given Parliament three days when they have had three months to consider their response is a disgrace. Although my ministerial experience, at just five years, is much more limited than that of the previous speaker, whom I equally respect, particularly his experience as Home Secretary, I know that when there was the threat of a case in the European Court, Ministers would receive a risk analysis. I find it difficult to believe that no one in the Home Office had a plan B. If they were to lose that case, the thinking was not going on within government as to how they were going to handle losing the case and the uncertainty with which they would then have to deal with the RIPA powers. So I am afraid that that is my starting point.

I would also strongly agree with my noble friend Lady Smith of Basildon and others when they say that there is a need for Parliament to be seen to address the very real public concerns over the balance of privacy and security and the desire for personalisation of digital services. Some of us use digital services very heavily and are only just becoming aware of how much our desire for all those personal services that come through on our phones and tablets generate metadata that are now the subject of this legislation. Given the need for Parliament to be seen to address and debate, and lead a debate in the wider public, on those concerns, it is an affront to see the legislation railroaded using the fast-track mechanism. The basis of my comments is to analyse whether some of that is justified.

Yesterday, as is my wont, I gave some friends and some of their family who are over from Canada a tour of the Palace of Westminster. Highlights of that tour are always things such as the Magna Carta; there is a copy in the Content Lobby, and we will enjoy celebrating its 800-year anniversary next year. Then there is the statue of Lord Falkland, where the sword was cut to allow a suffragette called Marjory Hume to be taken off to prison in 1909, and the plaque commemorating Nelson Mandela speaking in Westminster Hall. Best of all is the broom cupboard in the Crypt, where Emily Wilding Davison hid on the night of the 1911 census, and the phrase at the end that Tony Benn put there:

“By such means was democracy won for the people of Britain”.

That tour contains in its highlights all those moments where we recognise hard-won civil liberties for us as individuals, both here and around the world. It is incumbent on us as a Parliament and those who serve at any given time in this Parliament to protect those liberties as strongly as we protect the safety and security of the people in this country.

We also need to remember that we have a different tolerance of our own privacy, because we agree to become public figures when we agree to come here, than do most people who live in our country. The information in Who’s Who would probably allow anyone who wanted to steal some of my information to do so, because it has my mother’s maiden name as well as my date of birth, which are the sort of questions that you get asked online. We understand that when we fill out the entry in Who’s Who and we are aware of the risks that we take when we do so. I hope when we make up our security information online that we are also aware of it and are accordingly cautious.

We also need to be aware of the issue of metadata. When I sat in the audience in the Donmar Warehouse theatre a month or so ago, as a guest of my noble friend Lord Mitchell, watching the play “Privacy”, we heard gasps from the audience when they found out how the default settings on an iPhone mean that Apple knows exactly where we are and exactly when at any given time, unless we change those settings. They were some of the greatest moments of theatre that I have seen in some years—it was my first profession— when I heard the gasps of the audience who saw the pictures of their houses flashed up on the back of the screen, because the researcher had researched them using metadata to show where they all lived. That is metadata, the subject of the Bill—and that is something that we have to be cautious about.

There has been a breakdown of trust in recent years between the people of this country and the state, particularly those pursuing criminal investigations. This is because of Hillsborough and Savile; because of phone hacking, and plebgate. We must have an active debate on a regular basis because of PRISM and because of the powers that the private sector and, through it, the state and GCHQ have to access our data. As a Parliament we have been remiss in not debating Snowden as actively as we should have and as actively as they have done in the US. If we do not, I think we are failing the public

I am persuaded by the arguments that Clauses 1 to 3 are necessary. I believe that security and the ability to continue criminal investigations mean that we have no choice but to pass Clauses 1 to 3 of this Bill. This was well put by the noble Lord, Lord Paddick. We need the status quo for criminal investigations.

I welcome the concessions that my right honourable friend the shadow Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper, has won in getting the RIPA review and six-monthly reporting into the legislation. I worry that the thinking behind these reviews is through the prism—if that is not the wrong word—of security and law enforcement as the starting point, rather than the data privacy of individuals. I should also like to see a review of the operation of the Information Commissioner’s Office. According to its website, it is:

“The UK’s independent authority set up to uphold information rights in the public interest, promoting openness by public bodies and data privacy for individuals”.

That office needs to be the guardian of members of the public on these issues. I hope the Minister will be able to give an assurance from the Dispatch Box that the Information Commissioner’s Office will be included in some of that review work.

Clause 4 concerns what I will call the new powers overseas because I cannot pronounce extraterritoriality very well. I struggle to see the emergency for this to be included in a fast-track Bill. In the report of the Constitution Committee, published today, paragraph 11 says:

“It is not clear why these provisions need to be fast-tracked”.

It may not be fashionable to quote Liberty but it says that Clause 5 of DRIP, read together with Clause 4 (8), gives the Government “new, express powers” to go to foreign webmail providers and demand that they hand over or obtain communications data. The objectives of the snoopers’ charter are therefore met via another route. That is their charge. If the Minister were able to respond to that, I think that supporters of Liberty would be pleased to hear it.

As I am sure your Lordships will all have done, I have received a letter from a list of highly credible legal experts on internet law. These are professors from a whole range of our best universities. They say that this clause,

“introduces powers that are not only completely novel in the United Kingdom, they are some of the first of their kind globally”

The letter continues,

“the proposed Bill arguably breaches EU law to the extent that it falls within the scope of EU law, since such mass surveillance would still fall foul of the criteria set out by the Court of Justice of the EU in the Digital Rights and Seitlinger judgment”.

They would say that the reassurance which the Minister gave, following my intervention, is not true. I am sure that everything the Minister is saying is on good advice and in good faith. I know him to be a completely honourable and truthful man and I do not question what he is saying. However, I would value it if he were able to publish or circulate to Members of your Lordships’ House the advice he has received that this legislation, particularly Clause 4, is not in further breach of EU law, and that it will not extend the legal rights—not the practice but the legal rights—of government in respect of these matters.

On balance, very reluctantly, I support the Second Reading of this Bill, but I question whether Clause 4 should continue to be in the Bill.

Horses: Transportation

Lord Knight of Weymouth Excerpts

Thursday 5th July 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Knight of Weymouth]

My Lords, as my noble friend Lady Mallalieu said in her authoritative speech, this is a timely debate because we finally have the opportunity to make some good progress on this important issue. I am delighted to join not only the consensus in congratulating the noble Lord, Lord Higgins, on his opening of the debate but the consensus that seems to be emerging, even from the noble Earl, Lord Caithness, in favour of stronger EU regulation, if only on this particular issue.

I speak as a former Minister for the horse. When I was leafing back through the 2005 strategy that we produced at that time in Defra, I found that some of the stats were worth repeating to show the importance of the horse industry to this country. It had a gross output in 2005 of around £3.4 billion; it employed up to 250,000 people directly and indirectly; 2.5 million people ride in this country; and 11 million people have some interest in the horse industry, 5 million of them having an active interest. The horse population was then certainly at least 600,000 and could total nearly 1 million horses.

Although it is largely left to my wife, I, too, am a horse owner and I would certainly endorse the view that has been put by so many of your Lordships about the remarkable nature of these animals. That nature has of course been celebrated very successfully, first in the novel War Horse by Michael Morpurgo, then in the wonderful stage adaptation and then in the slightly less wonderful but certainly watchable movie of the same name. I am also a patron of a charity called TheHorseCourse, which is doing innovative work with horses in prisons by using one of the remarkable features of these animals: they provide instant feedback to people because of their nature—they are both pack and prey animals. That is proving extremely effective for some of the more difficult offenders, particularly young offenders. I have seen that work at Portland young offender institution.

As the noble Lord, Lord Higgins, said in repeating the excellent Library note from, I think, 2008, we are a nation of horse lovers: hence our concern about transportation and welfare within the EU. This country’s affection for the horse is reflected in the Animal Welfare Act 2006 and especially in the five freedoms that we gave all animals in that Act: a need for a suitable environment; a need for a suitable diet; a need to be able to exhibit normal behaviour patterns; a need to be housed with, or apart from, other animals; and a need to be protected from pain, suffering, injury and disease. We have heard graphically from speakers in this debate how horses are being denied those freedoms in the way in which some of them are being transported around the European Union.

Unfortunately this tradition in our culture is not uniform across EU member states, although I agree with those who say that it is not that citizens of other states want to be cruel; it is just that the culture is different. I am pleased that our tradition is now to some extent reflected in the 1997 revision of the treaty of Rome that happened in the Amsterdam treaty. The wording was changed to:

“Desiring to ensure improved protection and respect for the welfare of animals as sentient beings”—

the first time that animals were recognised as sentient beings in the treaty of Rome. This was then strengthened in the Lisbon treaty, which says:

“In formulating and implementing the Union’s agriculture, fisheries, transport, internal market, research and technological development and space policies, the Union and the Member States shall, since animals are sentient beings, pay full regard to the welfare requirements of animals”.

That is a very important context for legislation and action by the Commission and member states on horse welfare and for concerns about the lack of consistent implementation of current regulations. As a result of those treaty changes, these are now fundamental animal welfare obligations on member states for which the Commission should be held to account. It should in turn be held to account on how it is using its powers to pursue member states that allow the unnecessary suffering of horses that are being transported unnecessary and inhumanely long distances. I am pleased that the Commission is currently focusing its efforts on enforcing the existing regulation and on guidance on its implementation. However, I agree with World Horse Welfare when it says that:

“Enforcement of any legislation is essential and there are certainly areas where guidance could have a positive impact. However, enforcement and guidance alone cannot address the key problem of journey times, which do not reflect current scientific knowledge about the impact of long journeys on horses, and other serious issues such as minimum space allowances which should be increased and vehicle standards, which are in need of improvement”.

We need a maximum journey of 12 hours at the very extreme, and ideally lower; and we need an enforceable regime, as transportation crosses borders so easily. Surely in these days of GPS tracking and other recording technology in vehicles, it must be possible to ensure manageable enforcement across the European Union.

I join my noble friend in congratulating the Government on pressing the Commission on this issue through their intervention last month, and am pleased to see the Council now agreeing to encourage the Commission to act. I look forward to the Minister’s update on the Commission’s response and would gently say to the noble Earl, Lord Caithness, that we should push for what we want, even if inevitably negotiation means that we have to give ground in achieving our ambition. However, I accept from his hand gesture that you can argue that one both ways; it is six of one and half a dozen of the other.

I also look forward to the Minister’s response on the tripartite agreement, which all speakers have mentioned and which was examined in particular detail by the noble Lord, Lord Dear. I support his call for the Government to look at this a little more and to come back to us with an update if they need to. I also support what the noble Baroness, Lady Trumpington, said about getting more publicity if the Government’s obviously legendary spin machine can do anything to raise the profile of this, around which there is considerable public interest.

This is an important issue. The UK has a proud international reputation as a world leader on animal welfare and conservation. I hope that the Government can continue to influence progress on this issue. On that they will have our full support.

Food Security Policy

Lord Knight of Weymouth Excerpts

Thursday 24th May 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Knight of Weymouth]

My Lords, I too thank the noble Baroness, Lady Miller, for instigating this debate and congratulate her on her timing. There can have been no more topical time to discuss this, given the establishment of the New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition by the G8 last weekend and given that we are in the build-up to the Rio+20 conference. There can be few more profound issues for this or any other Parliament to grapple with, and this debate has demonstrated the merits of having a House of expertise and experience to address such a complex issue. As we have heard, there is an interplay of issues such as food production, food distribution, sustaining biodiversity and ecosystem services, population change, energy supply, water supply and, of course, climate change, so authoritatively discussed by my noble friend Lord Giddens and by the noble Lord, Lord Stern, who asked a key question of the Minister on the Government’s failure to meet the 2009 G8 commitments—a point reinforced by my noble friend Lord Judd.

As has been clear, the debate is against the backdrop of the Foresight report by the Government’s Chief Scientific Adviser, Professor Sir John Beddington, which was commissioned by the then Secretary of State, Hilary Benn MP. It is worth reading out the opening words from the preface to Sir John’s report:

“The case for urgent action in the global food system is now compelling. We are at a unique moment in history as diverse factors converge to affect the demand, production and distribution of food over the next 20 to 40 years. The needs of a growing world population will need to be satisfied as critical resources such as water, energy and land become increasingly scarce. The food system must become sustainable, whilst adapting to climate change and substantially contributing to climate change mitigation. There is also a need to redouble efforts to address hunger, which continues to affect so many. Deciding how to balance the competing pressures and demands on the global food system is a major task facing policy makers”.

There is no better summary of the challenge we have been seeking to address in this two-and-a-half-hour debate.

To demonstrate the scale of the challenge, it is also worth reminding the House of some of the statistics: a world population of 7 billion, rising to 9 billion by 2050, with currently around 1 billion going hungry every day; demand for water will increase by 30% by 2030; the amount of arable land per head has almost halved since 1960; agriculture accounts for up to 30% of worldwide greenhouse gas emissions. Consumers in rich countries waste, as we have heard, as much as a quarter of the food that they buy and, in more than half of industrialised countries, 50% or more of the population is overweight—I declare an interest. Some 40% of the US corn crop ends up in gas tanks instead of in stomachs.

The noble Baroness, Lady Sharp, reminded us of the fragility of political norms if we ignore this potential perfect storm. This is a crucial subject for ongoing debate in your Lordships’ House. I ask the Minister to use his influence on business managers to see if they would consider an annual debate with more time, as requested by the noble Earl, Lord Caithness, on this most fundamental of subjects. It is not possible to do complete justice to this in the remaining time that I have available, so I will focus on just three or four points.

The first is the great 21st-century food challenge: how to produce more food sustainably. The issue was addressed well by the noble Earl, Lord Selborne. As my honourable friend the shadow Secretary of State for Defra, Mary Creagh MP, said at the Oxford Farming conference this year:

“We cannot have food security without sustainability. It’s not either produce more or produce sustainably. It’s both”.

In government, my right honourable friend Hilary Benn published Food 2030 to set the then Government’s vision for food policy over the following 20 years. I do not know if the Minister has read it. I hope so, but I also ask him if the Government endorse it and if not could they not produce their own vision to attempt to draw some of these themes together for us to debate? We hear about sustainable intensification, but we need some flesh on the bones of the soundbite.

The Government need to give certainty to farmers and businesses wanting to invest in renewable energy such as solar and anaerobic digestion. Like the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter, I would like more action on the separation of food waste by catering outlets and others. We need a comprehensive approach to carbon reduction across agriculture and food manufacturing. The food that is produced needs to be affordable. We need to harness the power of research and development to ensure that food remains widely available and that publicly funded research is publicly available to all who need it. I agree very much with what the noble Baroness, Lady Miller, said on GM, and say to the noble Lords, Lord Taverne and Lord Curry, that Labour supports the publicly funded GM trials being undertaken at the Rothamsted Research Institute. I hope that those trials are properly protected from damage, especially this weekend.

This brings me to my second point about tackling food poverty. We are, sadly, familiar with the images of people struggling to avoid starvation in Somalia, Kenya, or the Sahel region of Africa. We know the global pressures that we face in competing for food and water supplies. In the recent past, no one in this country has worried too much about food prices or food security. Now, I am afraid, we also need to be alive to the challenge of food poverty here at home. Last year food prices in the UK rose by 6%, more than in any other EU country except Hungary.

When Ed Miliband first used the phrase “the squeezed middle” to describe families feeling the effect of rising food prices, energy bills, pay freezes and job losses there was scorn from our friends in the media. I am happy to see that that phrase has now entered the English language. The consumer prices index estimates that we spend 12% of our income on food, but jobseeker’s allowance for a single adult is currently £71 a week. If the noble Earl, Lord Caithness, is right that poor people spend an average 15% on food, that is £10.65 a week. The noble Baroness, Lady Jenkin, talked about living on £1 a day and I pay tribute to her fundraising and what she has done in organising that with noble Lords, but I challenge the rest of us to spend £7 or £10.65 a week on food and to eat healthily and well. I do not think that it is possible. This is why we are seeing the rise of the food banks and FareShare schemes mentioned by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of St Edmundsbury and Ipswich.

The third point I will make is to ask the Minister the Jamie Oliver question. If we are serious about changing cultures so that we eat more healthily and more sustainably, surely we need to start in schools. Why are we letting academies off the hook on the school nutritional standards? Bringing them in was one of the most important things I was able to do in government, and it is scandalous to see them being eroded away as all secondary school become academies. Turkey Twizzler 2 is just around the corner.

Finally, I want to talk about the threats from commodity speculation facing the global food supply chain. We need a fair market for food. That starts with international action to tackle the commoditisation of food. Increased volatility in commodity prices makes it difficult for UK farm businesses to plan. World commodity prices have risen steadily over the past decade, and some economists and hedge fund managers are now concerned about the impact this could have on the global cost of food and other commodities. Ten years ago, less than $300 million of non-commercial money was invested in commodity markets. In one decade, that has risen 1,000 times, to over $300 billion of financial investment today, more than the entire value of the market 10 years ago.

There is a vicious circle where commercial producers and purchasers pay more to hedge and need to hedge more as financial speculation has increased market volatility. The problem is not so much commercial hedgers—the food producers—but excess speculation caused by Wall Street selling its latest financial products that in turn raises food prices. The UK Government have recognised the impact of world commodity prices, exchange rates and oil prices on food prices, but they failed to support French moves for greater transparency during the French presidency of the G20, so the US has had to act unilaterally.

The answer to many of these multilayered global problems is global co-operation and global leadership. This was one of the points made by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Derby. While, as the noble Lord, Lord Gardiner, reminded us, this is not just down to Governments, they have a key role. So my final question is: will the Prime Minister find time between “Fruit Ninja” and football photo opportunities to show the kind of leadership we saw when the previous Government made Africa and climate change their priorities for their presidency of the G8, and that Gordon Brown showed in April 2008 to form the G20 to mitigate the worst of the global financial collapse? That is the sort of leadership we now need to deal with this issue. I hope we will keep returning to this subject, and I look forward to what the Minister has to say.

Education Bill

Lord Knight of Weymouth Excerpts

Tuesday 4th October 2011 Grand Committee

[Lord Sutherland of Houndwood]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, has made a powerful and cogent case, and I look forward with more than usual interest to the Minister’s response because there are some issues of real principle. I would add two points. One is that much of the odium for charging fees is falling on universities. I still remember sufficiently far back when that would have fallen on me, and it looks like there is an extra 3 per cent of odium being added. That is not a good principle.

More to the point, I have supported the principle of student fees on the basis that students pay for what they get in educational terms, not for an additional premium for whatever accounting reasons seem necessary to the Government at the time.

[Lord Knight of Weymouth]

My Lords, I wanted in part to make a contribution so that anyone reading the proceedings of this Committee did not feel there were one or two isolated voices concerned about these proposals. The strength with which the arguments were made by my noble friend Lord Stevenson in particular do not need many words to be added and I know that the Committee is keen to move on.

I would fully endorse what my noble friend said and emphasise two points. One is this move around RPI and CPI. The Chancellor was perfectly clear in his Budget of 2011 that the Government were moving to use CPI in respect of benefits and pensions uprating and it is certainly something that has been around for some time. I remember appearing before the STRB and arguing the use of CPI over RPI. I was very glad to have Ed Balls alongside me making the technical aspect of that argument when giving evidence on behalf of the Government against, I think, the teaching unions, who wanted RPI. I would be really interested in the Minister’s response about why we have gone with something different in this case. The second point is the final point that my noble friend Lord Stevenson made around the Students Loans Company. I ask for a direct answer whether in conversations about the Student Loan Company, it has been a condition of being able to sell it off that a commercial rate of interest is chargeable. A direct answer would be helpful.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Foulkes of Cumnock]

The purpose of us coming along here today is to discuss this and get explanations from the Minister, who presumably had a very extensive briefing before coming along, and presumably inquired of her officials these kinds of questions. She must have anticipated that they would come up.

RPI is being charged to the student when they have to pay the Government, but CPI is being applied when the Government pay me and other retired people. So it is all right that when you take money from other people you charge RPI but, when you give increases to people to pay for all the extra costs of energy and everything else, it is only CPI. Would the Minister take a minute to explain?

[Lord Knight of Weymouth]

Before the Minister stands up, perhaps I could try to be helpful. This is a key question. My understanding is that the only circumstance in which RPI is lower than CPI is when mortgage interest rates are falling and that is relatively unusual, although we have experienced a bit of that recently.

When the Chancellor made his announcement about making the shift from Rossi to CPI, he was honest enough to say that it was to save money—it would save £6 billion to the Exchequer. Would it not be easier for the Minister to have the same sort of honesty as her right honourable friend in the Government and say, “It’s to save money”?

[Baroness Verma]

I remind the noble Lord, as he was in Government, that they also used RPI as a measure. It is a commonly used measure. My right honourable friend the Chancellor, of course, is the Chancellor, and has to find all means of reducing the debt that unfortunately we inherited from noble Lords opposite.

We should remember that the changes to the rate of interest on student loans are part of a new student finance package that creates a progressive repayment system and is designed to protect lower earning graduates, as well as balancing the financial demands of universities with the interests of students and future graduates by delivering necessary savings without cutting the quality of higher education or student numbers.

Under the new system, students from lower income households will receive more support than they do now—I hope that that satisfies the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes—although many will pay back for longer than they do now. Their monthly repayments will be less than now, and the variable interest rate we propose will mean that they will also pay back less overall. If we accepted this amendment and capped the rate of interest that we could charge on student loans, we simply could not deliver this new system, nor would it create a suitable or worthy alternative. A cap would have little or no positive effect on borrowers who did not repay in full, nor would it afford greater financial protection.

This amendment would mean that higher earners would be charged a lower rate of interest than under the Government’s proposals. Higher earners would therefore benefit the most from this amendment, since the interest rate that they are now charged would reduce typically from RPI plus 3 per cent to RPI plus 2.2 per cent, while lower earners would not benefit at all as their interest rate would already be less than the Government’s cost of borrowing.

The system of student support would be much less progressive as a result. The Government remain committed to delivering a progressive system whereby those who benefit the most from higher education contribute the most. Would the noble Lord really favour a package that meant that the highest earners did not contribute to the cost of their higher education in net terms, or one that would inhibit our ability to protect lower earners?

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Verma]

No, the Deputy Prime Minister has not got it wrong; maybe the noble Lord has got it wrong. It is 40 per cent. This is why the threshold for repayment is being increased to £21,000 and why repayments will be taken at 9 per cent above that level. This, hopefully, will mean that individuals will repay less. There will be less opportunity for them not to pay their loans off because we have made it easier for them to repay their loans. The noble Lord makes faces. I am sorry that I am not satisfying him. But I think he will agree, when he reads Hansard tomorrow, that I am laying out a very clear, comprehensive way of making sure that we are protecting most those on the lowest incomes and giving them an easier way of repaying so that there will be less opportunity for them to default and hopefully more students, rather than fewer, repaying the loans that have been taken out.

[Lord Knight of Weymouth]

Before the Minister sits down, could she answer the question that I asked quite directly about whether it is a condition of being able to sell the Student Loans Company book that this arrangement around interest rates is applied?

[Baroness Verma]

I am sorry if the noble Lord did not hear my response. I thought I had answered his question, but I will answer it again. The Sale of Student Loans Act makes it clear that the borrower will not be affected by the sale. Their loans will be subject to the same terms as those that remain unsold.

[Lord Knight of Weymouth]

That is not the question. The question was: as part of the Government’s desire to be able to sell off the student loan book, is being able to shift to this more commercial arrangement around interest rates one of the conditions of being able to do so?

[Baroness Verma]

I suspect that my answer will not satisfy the noble Lord, because I am not satisfied with it either. However, I will read it out, then look at my civil servants to give me a better response at some point. Looking at the existing loan portfolio now, I do not think that we can give the response that the noble Lord wants.

Public Bodies Bill [HL]

Lord Knight of Weymouth Excerpts

Monday 28th February 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Knight of Weymouth]

I do not want to delay the House, because I know that there is other business that we want to get done. The Minister is talking about the south-west, where the rivalries between Plymouth and Cornwall are well known; left to their own devices, the Tamar will remain the border between them and it will be difficult to persuade a LEP to form across that river. But I also think that it is very difficult to see in economic geography terms how you can develop parts of Cornwall and Devon without taking into account Plymouth and the city region approach. That relationship between a deprived rural county, Cornwall, and the only major city and centre of population needs to be thought through in terms of economic strategy, but the LEP approach will not do that.

[Lord Taylor of Holbeach]

I am grateful to the noble Lord for that intervention because it gives me the opportunity to respond by saying that there is almost a mathematical relationship between size and the importance of the boundary that exists between different regions. One difficulty with regional boundaries is that they are frequently quite dramatic, although there may be a geographical coherence. I am a Fenman. The Fens are in the eastern region, about which the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie, spoke, but they are also in the east Midlands. Yet it makes sense for them to work together as a geographical whole. One great advantage of the LEP approach is that, when the models are smaller, the boundaries are slightly less severe and there is an opportunity for LEPs to work together. That is the whole point of the policy—to create greater flexibility in how the units of economic development can work together where they wish to. That supports the argument of One North East and the degree to which common policies across the north-east can work. I accept that it is possible to have a different point of view, but I am telling noble Lords how we see this. If we really want to address the regional imbalance in this country, we have not succeeded with RDAs.