Direct Payments Ceilings Regulations 2020

Lord Liddle Excerpts

Wednesday 1st July 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Liddle (Lab)]

My Lords, my interest in this topic arises from my role as a county councillor in Cumbria, where, of course, there are many issues to do with farming. In a sense, some people might think that this is a trivial regulation. It actually commits the Government to spend £2.8 billion, which I do not regard as a trivial amount of money. I welcome the certainty that it gives the farming community. All I would say—and this is no personal criticism of the Minister—is that in Cumbria we are also very dependent on structural funds, and we have no certainty about what will replace them at the end of this year.

I am a very strong pro-European and I greatly regret Brexit, but I was always a critic of the common agricultural policy, and I think that this is an opportunity for better arrangements for agriculture.

I welcome the curbs on payments to large farmers—I always thought they were excessive—but would like to have seen a further shift from Pillar 1 to Pillar 2 in the allocation of money. That would have been a step towards the fulfilment of the environmental land management goal which, in principle, most of us support. However, we are stuck in what appears to be a very lengthy transition period, from direct payments to these new arrangements.

Opponents of the European Union’s agricultural policy were always very critical of direct payments for their bureaucracy, but we appear to be sticking to them for a long time. At the same time, Europe is going ahead with reforms of its own, such as trying to ensure that 25% of food is grown organically. I would just like to ask: why the slow pace of change? Could we not do better?

I think these issues are very relevant to hill farmers who, as I have discovered, are often in very desperate poverty. We do not tend to think of very poor people living in the countryside but some of our hill farmers are in a very bad situation, and a shift to a system of payment with stronger environmental objectives would be of great assistance to them.

I support the measure, but there are many unanswered questions.