Agriculture Bill

Debate between Lord Northbrook and Lord Greaves

Committee stage & Committee: 3rd sitting (Hansard) & Committee: 3rd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 14th July 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Greaves (LD)]

My Lords, I thank the previous speaker for her support of my Amendment 53. I do not want to say much about it, but I wonder whether the Government can comment on the way in which new technologies are producing food, such as protein in laboratories and the concept of vertical gardens and vertical market gardens in urban areas. How do they fit into their general food strategy?

I want to support pretty much everything that the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh of Pickering, said in introducing this group. It is extremely important. I have one minor quibble: she said we need less reliance on food banks. I always have to pinch myself when I come across a food bank, and I come across them fairly frequently nowadays. Why do we have to have food banks? Food banks are an indication that there is something very sadly wrongly with the society and the economy in which we live. Although at one level they are an excellent example of community endeavour and of people coming together to meet a need, we ought not to be looking for less reliance on food banks; we ought to be looking to abolish them because nobody needs any longer to go and get free food because they and their families cannot afford to eat.

I added my name to Amendment 63, tabled by the noble Earl, Lord Dundee, about “urban and peri-urban areas”. I have mentioned urban areas; I had not really come across the phrase “peri-urban areas” before, until I realised that I probably live in a peri-urban area. There are urban buildings on the very edge of the fields. We are talking about the areas surrounding towns, cities and urban agglomerations—earlier in this Committee, I spoke briefly about this on Amendment 79, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher.

What I want to do briefly now is to mention the importance of the range of small-scale enterprises that go under the name of allotments. A lot of allotments are hobby allotments, but they are still very important as part of a food strategy because people are growing their own food which, by definition, is what they want and it is usually organic and nutritious. Some allotments are community enterprises and some are semi-commercial enterprises—small market gardens and that kind of thing. It seems to me that there is huge scope for the expansion and extension of this kind of thing in peri-urban areas, as the noble Earl describes them.

I should perhaps declare an interest as a councillor in the Waterside ward of Colne because I want to mention something that happened there. Much of Waterside ward is an areas of closely packed terraced streets which are nevertheless on the edge of the countryside. They are on the edge of the peri-urban area because we have old mill towns that never expanded —particularly between the wars because the towns were shrinking not expanding. In that area, we have several community-based allotments, including a community land trust, an allotment used by a group catering for people with special needs and one I am particularly proud of as, as a councillor, I was fairly responsible for the council acquiring land in the 2000s and laying them out for new allotments using money from what eventually became the ill-fated housing market renewal scheme, but which nevertheless provided us with very useful funding that we could use for that purpose.

We need a lot more. In most areas the provision of allotments is a responsibility of town and parish councils. The problem they have in expanding is getting the money to acquire land and lay out the infrastructure of an allotment, such as dividing it up, providing the fencing and perhaps a water supply and so on. By the structure of the way they work, parish and town councils do not get direct funding from the Government in a general sort of way. They do not get local council support grants. However, there is a huge need for an expansion of mini market garden community allotment and traditional allotment provision, particularly in the areas around towns where not only can they provide very useful growing facilities for people but they can solve some of the problems of what is quite often a tatty zone around some urban areas.

I do not think it is his department, but I ask the Minister to go back and see whether in what the Government are doing under their proposals to regenerate towns, in particular left-behind areas such as the old industrial areas, specific funding for allotments could be given a great deal more priority.

[Lord Northbrook (Con)]

My Lords, I was very pleased to hear about the success of the excellent allotment scheme mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Greaves. I shall speak to Amendments 56, 60 and 69, which are tabled in my name. I was one of the 20 or so noble Lords who were excluded from Second Reading, and while my Whip courteously gave me an explanation of the causes—the combination of Covid-19 and technology factors—I had hoped for some sort of apology from someone on the Front Bench to the 20 or so of us, but as far as I am aware none has been made. Such exclusion from Second Reading is a not a good precedent.

I declare my interests as a landowner and arable farmer. These amendments support domestic agriculture to ensure that food security and the stability of food supply are included in the purposes to which financial assistance can be directed under Clause 1. It is an important requirement for any Government to serve the interests of their people by investing in domestic food production to ensure stability and security in the provision of a safe and affordable domestic supply of food, as the quantity and quality of imports cannot always be guaranteed. Today’s FT points out that the UK is only a little over 50% self-sufficient in food and that, of the balance, four-fifths comes from the EU. Should there be any disruption by way of port delays, it will be serious.

The coronavirus crisis has shown how important it is to have a domestic supply of food. The view of farmers as food producers has never resonated more with the public than at this time, with the need to keep our shelves stocked the highest of priorities. I welcome the fact that the Government recognised that food production role by granting farmers key worker status during the countrywide lockdown, although the future of domestic fruit and vegetable supply may not be guaranteed if there are not enough workers to pick them. Given the increased significance of food security in the UK, the first amendment in particular would enable the Government to give financial assistance for the explicit purpose of supporting the domestic production of food.

In developing new forms of financial assistance, the Bill obliges the Government to,

“have regard to the need to encourage the production of food by producers in England and its production by them in an environmentally sustainable way.”

This is a welcome advance from the first Agriculture Bill, which, extraordinarily, did not mention food at all. While in the Bill “have regard to” provides a robust starting point and an ongoing reference point during the development of schemes such as the environmental land management scheme, the Government should be clearer about how exactly they see this provision influencing government policy in practice. It would be strengthened by an explicit requirement that any financial assistance scheme is designed to encourage the sustainable production of food by producers in England. I do not know whether the ELM scheme will do that.