Agriculture Bill

Lord Russell of Liverpool Excerpts

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

[Baroness Boycott (CB) [V]]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to be in this debate and to follow the noble Earl, Lord Devon. I thank the noble Baronesses, Lady Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville, Lady Meacher and Lady Bennett of Manor Castle, for supporting my amendment. I agree with pretty much all the amendments proposed, and agree entirely with the provision and principle of ELMS, but I want to make a few points.

Of course, we must support the environmental goods that our farming can do, but if we do that without including the need to grow healthy food, we have in a sense lost the primary reason why we farm and have given it back to the market. By that, I mean the overwhelming power of the big retail producers, which has meant that so much land has been given over to grow grains which feed animals, or grains which are highly refined and end up in un-nutritious products such as cheap white bread and that so little of our land ends up producing the nutritious fruit and vegetables that we need.

I shall give a few facts and figures. The volume of home production decreased by 1.8% in 2019 to the lowest level that we have had for 20 years, despite its value having gone up. Imports have increased as well. Home production of vegetables contributes only about 54% of the total UK food supply. I know that the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh, and others have talked about our food security but it is bigger than that: it is about trying to support farmers to do the right thing to support our health. Some 31,000 premature deaths in the UK could be averted every year if we ate enough fruit and veg, yet according to the Food Foundation, of which I am a trustee, UK adults currently eat an average of just 2.5 portions of veg a day.

When the previous Agriculture Bill went through its Second Reading in the Commons, Michael Gove, then Secretary of State for Defra, said:

“Every measure in the Bill is designed to ensure that our farmers receive the support that they deserve to give us … healthy food.”


When challenged on why this was not in its Clause 1, he said that

“food production in this country is critical to the improvement of public health … we put the importance of improving public health at the heart of everything that we do”.—[Official Report, Commons, 10/10/18; cols. 150-51.]

In answer to another question about whether that Bill would support the production of fruit and veg, he said that it was a critical issue. I therefore consider this Bill worryingly silent when it comes to healthy food production. It has to be a matter of strategic national interest and social justice that we ensure that our country is better able to feed itself with healthy, nutritious food and to protect itself from volatility.

Sustainable production must be central to this Bill—it cannot be seen as something to be left to the market—and that, I am afraid, takes money. The noble Lord, Lord Greaves, spoke about the need for allotments and more growing spaces. When I ran the London Food Board, we had a project called Capital Growth and created 2,500 new community projects. It is tremendously successful and we are trying to roll it out across the country. However, at the end of the day, it accounts for a tiny amount of vegetables. The point is that, if we are to grow more, farmers need money. At the moment, a very small amount of our land is devoted to this. We have to understand that financial help is needed, first, to make the transition and, secondly, to get this produce to the market. All the other things that I have talked about in our debates on amendments—local food networks, local abattoirs and so on—are part of the same thing.

We know that we have terrible problems with obesity, heart disease and type 2 diabetes. These are the results of a food system which is not working for us and our citizens. We have had a policy based on food corporations. We now have a unique opportunity to take this system back into public ownership and public concern.

Healthy food is a public good just as much as our NHS, and if we had better diets we would save that amazing institution about £2 billion a year. If we ate more local and seasonal fruit and vegetables, and if we bought from local producers, we could also reduce our carbon footprint, at the same time as improving our health, our land, our mental health and the mental health of our communities, which, as every noble Lord will have seen in the last few weeks, is an issue of such importance to our country.

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Russell of Liverpool) (CB)]

As the noble Lord, Lord Grantchester, has indicated that he will not speak on this group, I call the next speaker on the list, the noble Earl, Lord Caithness.

[The Earl of Caithness (Con) [V]]

My Lords, first, I thank those responsible for the speakers’ lists for heeding my words and those of the noble Lord, Lord Greaves. The present speakers’ list is in a much better shape and leads to better debate than was the case previously.

I have put my name to Amendment 70. I think that the words “have regard to” in Clause 1(4) weaken the importance of producing good, healthy food. I hope that my noble friend the Minister will agree that they should be deleted, and I congratulate my noble friend Lady McIntosh on sponsoring this amendment. I was happy to sign up to it.

All noble Lords have been speaking about food security. I hope that every single one of your Lordships participating in today’s debate has read the recently published report of the Food, Poverty, Health and the Environment Committee entitled Hungry for Change: Fixing the Failures in Food. The report goes into the subject in some depth, covering many of the points raised in this evening’s debate.

I would like to make one point about growing healthy food. It sounds as though our farmers do not grow healthy food at the moment. I think that, in the present circumstances of the CAP, our farmers grow very healthy food but it is the food industry that turns it into ultra-processed food, and that is the poison that contaminates our diets. Rather than just concentrating on farmers, the food industry has to be looked at as a whole.

We make a number of recommendations in our report Hungry for Change, and I hope that the Minister will respond positively to them in due course. Food security covers a vast number of departments. We talked to three different ministries during our deliberations, which were somewhat hampered by the Covid pandemic, but it is clear that this is a whole-government rather than just a Defra problem.

Given what everybody else has said, I can now terminate my remarks, but I hope that my noble friend will agree to Amendment 70.

[Lord Whitty (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, I added my name to Amendment 35, which was so comprehensively moved by the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh, and I did so for one simple reason: it explicitly recognises that a key part of the output of farming must be its effect on human health. It is somewhat strange that Clause 1, which lists all the ways in which public money can be spent to support the output of farming—the improvement of land, water, woodlands, the environment, natural heritage, the countering of environmental threats, the welfare of livestock, the health of plants, plant and livestock conservation and so on—contains no mention of human beings.

The biggest impact of farming, both in its production methods and in what it produces, is on human beings. I was provoked, to some extent, to add my name to the amendment of the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh, because I received advice on pesticides when I was tabling a different amendment that comes much later on in this Bill. Some of the issues relating to this have already been referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Wigley, and the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, in the earlier debate today. However, I asked that this amendment be headed “human health”, and I was told that this was beyond the scope of the Bill. It must not be. I have amended that amendment to conform, obviously, but human health is central to this Bill.

It is not just the potentially negative effects of some farming processes; it is much more positively the effect of the produce of farming on the balance of our diets and nutrition, and the way it gets to the public. Like the noble Earl, Lord Caithness, the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, and others, I was a member of the Select Committee under the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, which produced its report very recently. That report spells out that farming has to be seen as part of the totality of the food chain, and one of its principal impacts is its being directly or indirectly responsible for the health and nutrition of our population.

As the noble Earl, Lord Caithness, has just said, much of the responsibility here lies with the big processors, the wholesalers and the retailers, which both specify and advertise food that is quite often not so healthy. However, the responsibility also lies on farmers and government policy towards farming. The Krebs report makes quite a wide range of recommendations that relate to this, and the Bill does not fully reflect that priority because the availability, quality, pricing, convenience and affordability of nutritious food is vital to turning around the declining quality of our diets, which is causing such things as our obesity being the worst in Europe and examples of malnutrition and so forth in our population—mostly, but by no means exclusively, among the least well-off families.

Good food is a public good. This Bill needs to reflect that. A more plant-based diet is a health benefit. More domestic production of fresh fruit and veg is a key part of any strategy for healthier food. Hence I—and I think the whole of the Krebs committee—would wish to see, in Clause 1, a reference to health and diet as a public good derived from the output and methods of farming, and therefore worthy of our support. Therefore, I support Amendment 35, to which I have added my name, and Amendment 36 in the name of my noble friend Lady Jones of Whitchurch, which refers explicitly to healthy food.

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees]

The noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, has withdrawn from the list, so I call the noble Lord, Lord Judd.

[Lord Judd (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, I want to speak to the whole group of amendments as I find the interrelationship between the various amendments on this occasion particularly interesting. My noble friend Lord Whitty has been talking about food security. This group focuses on food security not only in the context in which he mentioned it—although that is vital—but in the context of the most unstable period in world affairs that we can remember. It is very important to think of food security in that context as well.