Avian Influenza Outbreak

Tim Farron Excerpts

Wednesday 30th November 2022 Westminster Hall

[Tim Farron (Westmorland and Lonsdale) (LD)]

It is an honour to serve under your guidance, Sir George. I want to pay a genuine and heartfelt tribute to the right hon. Member for Maldon (Sir John Whittingdale), who has successfully secured this debate on a hugely important and significant issue for us all, particularly in communities such as mine.

Animal diseases pose an enormous threat to UK farming, trade and rural communities. We are in the midst of the worst outbreak of avian influenza that we have ever seen. H5N1 has stayed with us all year round for the first time ever, and it is more virulent than previous strains. Yesterday, the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee heard evidence on this; I am grateful for the work it does, and many of its members are here today. There have already been more than 140 confirmed avian influenza cases in poultry and captive birds in the UK—in previous years, getting to double figures was considered to be bad news. The fact that we are well into three figures is terrifying.

As of 20 November, 1.6 million birds had been culled directly because of bird flu on farms. Half of the free range turkeys produced for Christmas in the UK have been culled, as we have heard. British farmers are under immense pressure, both emotional and financial. Poultry farmers often rely on the Christmas trade to pull their annual income out of the red and into the black, but that Christmas trade has been wiped out in an instant, and the small independent farmers, particularly in Westmorland, are bearing the brunt of it, fearing that their businesses will be wiped out completely.

It is not just avian flu that we should worry about. The UK faces real threats from bovine tuberculosis, new diseases such as African swine fever and, of course, diseases affecting domestic pets, including rabies. These outbreaks do not just threaten our food security, trade and farming; they also threaten our natural environment. All birds are being culled, not just those sold for meat—the great skua population, for example, has declined by between 55% and 80% in the UK this year. The species has immediately been placed on the red list, and its population will not recover for decades. If the Government do not intervene effectively, the ecosystems and food chains we rely on—the very fabric of Britain’s countryside —will be changed forever.

A report from the Public Accounts Committee this month found that the Animal and Plant Health Agency has been

“left to deteriorate to an alarming extent.”

It said that the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs had “comprehensively failed” in its management of the agency’s Weybridge site. That is the site where the science happens—surveillance testing, disease tracking and so on.

We have seen what the consequences of inaction and not learning from the past can be. The foot and mouth disease outbreak in 2001 devastated communities in Cumbria, not just financially and economically but socially and emotionally. A friend of mine who passed away just a month ago was among those 20-odd years ago who were involved in the large-scale culling in the Rusland valley. It broke him—and 20 years on, it continued to live with him.

A year after foot and mouth happened, I remember the children of Kirkbie Kendal School doing a play they had written themselves about the emotional effect the outbreak had on them. One of them likened it to Nevil Shute’s “On the Beach”—waking every morning and thinking, had the disease got closer to them? Had it hit their valley yet? Those people are adults now, and the impact on them, on all of us and on our shared memory is huge. We must never think that animal disease outbreaks only affect animals; they have a huge impact on human beings as well.

[Cat Smith (Lancaster and Fleetwood) (Lab)]

I pay tribute to the hon. Gentleman for the contribution he is making, particularly on the impact of foot and mouth in Cumbria. I was one of those schoolchildren in Cumbria at that time. Given the closeness of Cumbria and north Lancashire to the Scottish border, does he share my concerns that, while we are housing birds in England we also need to see the devolved Governments following suit when it comes to biosecurity?

[Tim Farron]

I absolutely agree that this needs to be a whole-UK project. I thank my friend and neighbour for her contribution—not least for reminding me how much younger she is than me. If we had an outbreak of foot and mouth on the same scale today, it would have an economic impact of £12 billion. As I said, there are impacts that are not quantifiable but even more devastating.

What do the Government need to do? I will briefly suggest three things. First, they should support our farmers through the current crisis. As the right hon. Member for Maldon rightly said, the compensation scheme is not fit for purpose, and the Government must bring it into the 21st century. The legislation that it was built on was introduced in 1981. It is practically prehistoric —like me. Farmers are able to receive compensation only for birds that are alive when the flock is seen by a vet.

[Helen Morgan (North Shropshire) (LD)]

As the representative of a constituency that has a large number of intensive poultry farms, and as someone who has kept a backyard flock and been the financial controller of a poultry farm, I have seen at first hand the difficulties of trying to house poultry. Most importantly, I have seen the difficulties that the farming industry faces when trying to insure against avian influenza. It used to be possible to obtain insurance, because the disease was an unlikely event—it was a peril that insurers would happily insure against—but now it is almost impossible. Does my hon. Friend agree that taking preventive action—

[Sir George Howarth (in the Chair)]

Order. If the hon. Lady wants to make a speech, she should indicate so. Interventions should be brief.

[Tim Farron]

I agree with my hon. Friend, and am grateful for her intervention. The uninsurability of flocks is a reminder of why the compensation scheme must work and be effective.

In 1981, avian flu had a low pathogenicity. It did not kill the poultry, so farmers could get a vet to confirm an outbreak and command a cull before the livestock was dead. That is the crucial thing. Now, the disease has a high pathogenicity. Turkeys are dying within four days. The legislation was introduced to incentivise farmers to take their birds to be culled, and it is no longer serving that purpose. The Government must therefore intervene to correct the compensation scheme accordingly.

Secondly, the Minister should take evidence-based decisions. Earlier, I mentioned that the Animal and Plant Health Agency is where the science happens. It is vital that our approach to the disease outbreaks is based on science. Scientists think that avian flu probably lasts for around six weeks after death, so why do farmers have to rest their sites for 12 months? Why are some being told to strip six inches of soil off their free-range paddocks? Farmers are ordered to move their bird flocks indoors, but it takes longer for avian influenza to spread among a flock if they are kept outside on the ranch.

Thirdly, I ask that the Government ensure that they properly prepare for future outbreaks. I expect that the Minister might say that the Government are investing £2.8 billion to redevelop the Animal and Plant Health Agency. That is welcome, but the programme is not due to complete until 2036, and the Treasury has not yet agreed to fund it.

I am grateful to the right hon. Member for Maldon for bringing forward the debate. It is a huge issue for farmers in my patch, for rural communities across the board and for the infrastructure of our natural environment across the UK. Action must happen now.

Oral Answers to Questions

Tim Farron Excerpts

Thursday 17th November 2022 Commons Chamber

[Dr Coffey]

My hon. Friend offers an interesting invitation. Given my diary, I cannot commit now, but his constituents’ work is exceptionally positive. We introduced the Genetic Technology (Precision Breeding) Bill because we know we need to adapt some of our food production industries to be resilient for the future.

[Tim Farron (Westmorland and Lonsdale) (LD)]

We will produce less food if we have fewer farmers. In just a few weeks’ time, the Government plan to take 20% of the basic payment away from farmers, at the same time that barely 2% have got themselves into the new sustainable farming incentive. Will the Secretary of State consider delaying the reduction in the basic payment scheme to keep farmers farming while she sorts out the mess in her Department on the environmental land management schemes? Will she also meet Baroness Rock at the earliest opportunity to discuss her important tenant review?

[Dr Coffey]

It has been well trailed for several years that we will shift from the EU common agricultural policy for distributing money to our farmers and landowners to using public money for public goods. That is why we have been working on the environmental land management schemes and will continue to make sure we get them right. We will make further announcements in due course.

Bathing Water Status: Rivers

Tim Farron Excerpts

Wednesday 9th November 2022 Commons Chamber

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Trudy Harrison)]

I thank Members for showing such interest in this important subject. In particular, I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Harrogate and Knaresborough (Andrew Jones), who has a wonderful career ahead of him as a blue badge guide—or, indeed, in any role in the tourism industry in his area—such was the wonderful picture that he painted. I congratulate Members across the House on championing what DEFRA very much wants to achieve: clean water.

Let me set out how we are going to achieve that. We are absolutely committed to driving up the water quality of our lakes, our rivers and our coasts for the public to enjoy and for the benefit of nature. Designated bathing waters protect people’s health at popular swimming spots across the country. As a Member of Parliament in the Lake district who has enjoyed much wild swimming for many of my 46 years, I know the benefits that that can bring. The water quality at those sites is monitored regularly—much more regularly than previously, as Members noted—and improvements are made if it does not meet the minimum standard.

There are 421 designated bathing waters in England. As my hon. Friend mentioned, the vast majority are coastal, but in the past two years we have designated our very first bathing waters on rivers. It is very much thanks to my hon. Friend the Member for Keighley (Robbie Moore) that we have been able to achieve that in his constituency. I am pleased to say that we have many more applications for rivers to be designated bathing quality areas.

[Tim Farron (Westmorland and Lonsdale) (LD)]

The Minister will be surprised to hear that I want to talk about a river and not a lake. We are seeking bathing status and clean water status for the River Kent. The “Clean River Kent” campaign has raised over £8,000 to do sampling, lab testing and surveys—massive thanks to it for raising that money, and to the people who sponsored me to do the Staveley trail to help raise a bit of it. Does the Minister agree that the regulator should be driving this work, instead of local groups having to raise the money to do it? Does she also agree that the water companies could come up with some of the money to fund these bids, because, let’s be honest, it is their fault that the rivers are not in a clean state to start off with?

[Trudy Harrison]

The hon. Gentleman raises an excellent point on the part water companies must play in cleaning up our lakes, rivers and coastal areas. I am a neighbouring MP and will be delighted to meet him to talk about the natural management that could be done—very much part of my portfolio in the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs—to assist in cleaning up Lake Windermere in particular and of course the River Kent.

Bathing waters across England are a success story, with almost 95% achieving “good” or “excellent” status last year, the highest rate since the new stringent standards were introduced in 2015. Of these, 70% of bathing waters were classed as “excellent”, the highest quality standard, whereas just 28% of bathing waters met the highest standards in force in the 1990s. That demonstrates the excellent progress the Government are making in cleaning up our waters and holding water companies to account. Over the last 30 years, there has been good progress, following more than a century of poorly regulated industrial practices. A large proportion of the improving trend in bathing water quality can be attributed to improvements in sewage treatment.

Over £2.5 billion has been invested by English water companies to improve bathing water quality since privatisation, and England now has the cleanest bathing waters since records began. We know there is more to do to continue to drive up the quality of our rivers, lakes and coastal areas so people can enjoy them and nature can thrive. Areas used by large numbers of bathers and that have facilities to promote and support bathing are eligible for designation. We welcome applications for bathing water designations for both coastal areas and inland waters such as rivers. We actively encourage applications by writing annually to the chief executive of every local authority in England; we also write to other stakeholders such as swimming associations, because local authorities and stakeholders best know which popular riverside bathing areas may be suitable for designation. Once a site is designated as a bathing area, the Environment Agency will assess what action is needed to improve the water quality so that it can meet the standards that the public rightly expect and which are set by the bathing water regulations.

In 2021, we were delighted to approve the first designated river bathing water on the River Wharfe in Ilkley, and I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Keighley for his superb championing to get that designation over the line—I know he is supporting other Members across the House. That was followed by Wolvercote mill stream on the River Thames at Oxford this year, so it is wonderful to have my hon. Friend the Member for Witney (Robert Courts) here, championing bathing water quality and improving all water quality across the country. The designations are driving action to improve water quality.

My Department has received a lot of interest this year, and clearly society is paying a lot of attention to cleaning up our water. Our aim is to announce which new sites will be eligible to be designated before the start of the next bathing season, which is officially 15 May 2023, so get your Speedos ready—other outfits are available. We look forward to receiving the application for the River Nidd in the very near future, and I will be delighted to work with my hon. Friend the Member for Harrogate and Knaresborough, as will the Minister responsible for this area, my hon. Friend the Member for Taunton Deane (Rebecca Pow).

Guidance to assist applicants with their applications is already available on the Government website, and we plan to update this next year. To respond to the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Harrogate and Knaresborough, that will make it easier for community groups to understand the criteria for bathing water and ensure that only the necessary information is requested, to save such a lot of time and effort. In addition, we are reviewing the Bathing Water Regulations 2013 to ensure that they reflect changes to how and where people use bathing waters.

My hon. Friend the Member for Harrogate and Knaresborough raised the subject of wet wipes. There is absolutely no doubt that wet wipes cause huge damage to sewers and to the environment when they are incorrectly flushed away. In fact, they make up 90% of the material that causes sewers to block. Let me take this opportunity to remind everybody across this House and across the country to bin it, don’t flush it.

Blockages can cause pollution and surface water flooding, and cost the water industry in England and Wales £100 million a year. The case for action is very clear. We are considering various options to tackle the issues caused by wet wipes. In November 2021 we launched a call for evidence that included questions on those options to help us build our evidence base and to inform our approach. That call for evidence closed on 12 February, and the Government will publish a response later this year.

Once again, I thank all Members, in particular my hon. Friend the Member for Harrogate and Knaresborough, for championing the best quality water we can possibly achieve, to support people to enjoy bathing and so that nature benefits from clean water, which we will all benefit from. I also agree, as has been said across the House, that water improvement is a team effort. We can all play a part. That is why we will continue to take action to require water companies and industry to achieve the necessary improvements to reduce pollution. I am pleased that water companies have committed £56 billion to be spent over the coming years to clean our water and improve storm overflows.

We recognise that healthy and well-managed water is key to our wellbeing and an important part of the Government’s pledge to hand over our planet to the next generation in a better condition than we inherited it.

Avian Influenza

Tim Farron Excerpts

Tuesday 1st November 2022 Commons Chamber

[Mark Spencer]

I thank my right hon. Friend for his three questions. First, we have moved the date for the compensation scheme to as early as legally possible, to try to assist farmers with the challenges they face. He mentioned the labelling of free-range eggs. The law currently allows 16 weeks from the second a bird is housed, before eggs may no longer be called free-range. We have a while before the end of that 16-week period, when eggs would have to be labelled as barn-reared. That can be done with a simple label to say the eggs are barn-reared, rather than free-range.

As with covid, vaccination will be the route out of this problem, but we need our best scientists to concentrate on developing an effective vaccine. We need to work with our colleagues across the European Union so that birds and products exported for food will be accepted into their marketplace, as well as keeping conversations open with retailers to ensure they are also happy.

[Tim Farron (Westmorland and Lonsdale) (LD)]

Twenty-one years on from foot and mouth disease devastating our communities in Cumbria, we are especially sensitive to not only the animal welfare consequences of outbreaks of animal diseases such as avian flu, but the crushing impact on people, livelihoods and the wider community. Will the Minister say more about the support he will be giving—compensation and other support—to poultry farmers directly affected and to those who will be indirectly affected by this hammering of their business, which puts their businesses at risk? Given that the Department has delayed imposing mandatory housing until next week, what evidence is there that this window could not now trigger panicked and unsafe practices, creating greater infection and increased misery for communities such as mine?

[Mark Spencer]

Clearly, the housing order came in following the best scientific and veterinary advice that we have, but I cannot reiterate enough the impact that improved biosecurity has on those units over a housing order. I recognise the impact that foot and mouth disease had in the hon. Gentleman’s part of the country and the mental scars it leaves on livestock holders. We have brought forward the compensation scheme so that cash flow is assisted. In bringing forward the moment at which the compensation scheme kicks in, we have also brought forward the moment at which the compensation is received in the bank account of the affected farmer. However, we cannot pay compensation for consequential losses further down the track. As a society, we will have to monitor and support those whose mental health is affected and address the impact that has on many, many families up and down the country.

Genetic Technology (Precision Breeding) Bill

Tim Farron Excerpts

Report stage
Monday 31st October 2022 Commons Chamber

[George Eustice]

What a number of countries have done—the UK was in the vanguard of this—was to move away from maceration of day-old chicks towards the use of carbon dioxide and argon gas as a means of dispatching them. However, I think we could accelerate the process of identifying the eggs through the use of genetic technology.

Dehorning cattle is another mutilation that we would like to phase out over time. Progress has been made for some breeds on polled cattle—that is, cattle born without horns, so that we do not have to use a hot iron, albeit under anaesthetic, to de-bud them. Again, it is difficult to perfect without precision breeding techniques, but if we had that technology, we could have more polled cattle and reduce the need for conventional dehorning of cattle, or even pave the way for a regulatory change to prevent it.

There is also the prospect of breeding more resistance to diseases. In the dairy herd some selection is already done for natural resistance to bovine tuberculosis. It is limited in its ability, but if we had the technology, we might be able to go further.

At the moment, the Government plan to phase out and remove badger culling is predicated on a lot of confidence that a cattle vaccine will be viable and deployable, but it would be helpful to have additional tools in the box, and resistance to TB could be one of them. Of course, we are about to face another very difficult winter when it comes to avian flu, and this technology might have some application there.

However, my sense when I read amendment 4 was that whoever drafted it had had one sector in particular in mind—the broiler chicken sector. There is a genuine concern that the production speed of broiler chickens, reduced now to around 32 to 33 days, is so fast that they are having all sorts of leg problems, and we might be able to make some changes there. That is a legitimate point, because while we might say it has improved the welfare of a broiler chicken that it is bred to finish within 32 days, we might say it is in its welfare interest to ensure that it does not have leg problems. There is a second question, which is whether it is the ethical and right thing to do to produce a chicken within 32 days rather than, say, 37 days, in which case the welfare problem goes away.

A less obvious and less talked-about situation might be commercial duck production. We know that ducks need and want open water—it is part of their physiology and the way their beaks work. However, many commercial duck producers do not give ducks access to water. I have come across vets who will argue that it is in the interest of ducks not to have access to water, since that can spread disease and that is not in their welfare interest, but that goes to the root of the issue with animal welfare. We can either see animal welfare in the conventional five freedoms sense—freedom from pain, hunger, thirst and so on—or we can see it in the more modern sense of a life worth living.

The amendment does not work, because the more we put into an amendment the more we inadvertently exclude. If we accepted an amendment that proscribed certain things but missed certain things, at a future date a breeder might bring a judicial review and say, “Well, this wasn’t covered by the Bill and everything else was.” Therefore, we would not be future-proofing the importance of animal welfare.

However, that is where guidance could work. After Second Reading of the Bill, I asked our officials to give some thought to the idea of guidance, which might give organisations such as Compassion in World Farming and people such as Peter Stevenson, who is very thoughtful on these matters, the reassurance they need in the absence of a legislative change on the face of the Bill, which is difficult to do. The Minister may find that there is some guidance helpfully drafted—or it may be that it was not drafted, but it is not too late, because the Bill has time in the other House.

Will the Minister consider whether this issue of how the animal welfare body should approach its task and how it should assess the impacts on animal welfare could be dealt with in a non-statutory way through guidance. He and his officials will have to issue terms of reference anyway to the animal welfare body, which is likely to be a sub-committee of the Animal Welfare Committee, and it would not take much to set out some parameters for the things we want it to bear in mind when making assessments.

[Tim Farron (Westmorland and Lonsdale) (LD)]

I will not speak for too long, but I want to address a couple of the amendments and some of the issues affecting the Bill overall.

I will start by being extremely critical of the European Commission—[Hon. Members: “Hear, hear.”] Indeed. Most of us in this House think that science is broadly a good thing, or certainly at least neutral; it is a case of what we do with it. One of the things that has irritated me most about part of the Commission over a 20 or 30-year period is its knee-jerk objection to science in this area and the idea that there can be a moratorium not just on the application of knowledge, which is an issue, but on the very knowledge and research in the first place. That troubles me greatly. We should weigh all issues up and make wise, evidence-based decisions.

On the one hand, I welcome the Bill and I certainly welcome and support science-based approaches to technologies such as genetic modification and what the Government refer to as precision breeding. They have the potential to deliver a major improvement in productivity and on the environmental front, reducing the impact of farming. Genetic modification can have a positive impact by allowing us to address pest and disease pressures on crops and farm animals, and so reduce our reliance on fertilisers and pesticides; that helps more broadly in the fight against climate change. Genetic modification also provides opportunities for us to meet global need, including the food requirements of the global poor. However, there are problems with the Bill, and reasons why I would support the Government being more open to amendments from the other place, and especially to amendments 3 and 4 tonight.

Let me mention some areas in which the Bill is weak. It does not solve the intellectual property and commercial issues surrounding genetic modification technology. If we allowed science to be better used in farming, for the reasons we have set out relating to the environment and the quality and scale of production, but ended up making farmers, particularly tenant farmers, entirely beholden to the commercial interests of large, multinational agribusinesses, that would be an outrage. That is not what farmers in this country want; they want science applied, and they want freedom. They do not want to be pawns in a multinational game. That major area of concern is not addressed in the Bill.

The Bill is also light on the details of the new regulatory requirements for crops and animals. I accept that animals should be in the scope of the Bill, but we are transitioning from a very high regulation system to a relatively low regulation system. The lack of detail on how the new system will work makes it hard to support the Bill.

Amendment 12, tabled by the right hon. Member for North Thanet (Sir Roger Gale), would prevent the Secretary of State from authorising a new product if scientific evidence indicated

“that the precision bred traits are likely to have a direct or indirect adverse effect on the health or welfare of the relevant animal or its qualifying progeny”.

Lack of detail on those kinds of situations makes it hard for us to go into the Aye Lobby and support the Bill this evening. Editing a pig’s genes could, for example, make it resistant to disease—that would obviously be a welcome advantage of this technology—but the Bill must not be a shortcut that allows pigs to be reared in less hygienic, more crowded conditions. Again, that issue is not covered. Animals’ welfare must not only continue to be protected but be continuously improved.

We do not want all the effort that has been put into the high standards in British farming to be wasted as a result of a back-door watering down of standards; but if there was such a watering-down, it would be part of a pattern, I am afraid. It would fit the pattern of the trade deals that are being designed and agreed to. The deals with Australia and New Zealand in particular basically throw away the high standards we have developed. It is not only that it is morally right to have those standards; they make the provenance of our produce important, make it high-quality, and give it high ethical value. What a desperate shame that free trade, which is a good thing, should be done so badly that our farmers are thrown under the bus, have their livelihoods threatened, and cannot take advantage of the benefits that free trade ought to provide. If the Bill is part of a deregulatory framework, or part of an agenda that seeks to unfairly disadvantage British farmers or throws the standards that they have developed under the bus, that is unacceptable. Unamended, the Bill forms part of a pattern of this Government throwing our farmers to the wolves.

Farmers do not benefit from the application of science envisaged in the Bill if they do not survive the transition from the current payment scheme to the new one. Reshuffle upon reshuffle has followed on from great uncertainty, which the Government introduced in September when they indicated that they might be prepared to rip up the environmental land management scheme. There are many problems with that scheme, by the way; the fact that only 1% of eligible farmers have applied for the sustainable farming incentive shows how poorly the Government are rolling out a scheme that most Members agree with in principle. The worst thing the Government could do is rip it all up; the best thing they could do is invest in protecting the £3.5 billion supposedly ringfenced for ELMS and allow the process to take place, so that farmers survive. Farmers will be in no position to protect our environment, produce our food or apply the science that the Government want them to apply if they do not survive.

In short, we strongly support the principle underlying the Bill, but we strongly urge the Government to consider the amendments before us this evening, and those that will undoubtedly be tabled in the other place, to improve regulation, safety and animal welfare, and protect farmers from the damage that could be done to them if they end up being the pawns of multinational global enterprises. I would hate the United Kingdom to end up a mirror image of the European Commission, which regulated to such an extent that applying science was impossible. Alternatively, the Government may deregulate to such an extent that it is hard to defend the science, and that would be a real shame for all of us who genuinely care about the application of science in farming.

--- Later in debate ---

[Tim Farron]

Briefly—I promise—I thank the many, many Ministers who have helped to lead this Bill through Parliament. Let me say on behalf of farmers in Cumbria that we would be grateful if this Government did not take us for granted in the transition to the new payment system, which has been botched so badly, or any indeed in the trade deals that have thrown so many of my farmers underneath the bus.

Science has an important role in farming. That includes GM, and there is no doubt in my mind that the European Commission’s stifling position on GM was massively regrettable. It is good to have a debate on it in this place and to try to move forward with it. GM and science in agriculture can reduce harm to the environment, reduce the reliance on damaging and expensive pesticides and fertiliser, increase productivity and help to meet global food needs, but to achieve those advances the Bill would need to provide proper detail and regulation, to protect animals and consumers and to protect farmers from being sold out and their livelihoods placed at the mercy of multinational businesses. We must not replace the European Commission’s knee-jerk opposition to science with a reckless lack of detail. I fear that that is where we are.

Sewage Discharges

Tim Farron Excerpts

Wednesday 12th October 2022 Westminster Hall

[Tim Farron (Westmorland and Lonsdale) (LD)]

Thank you for chairing this debate, Ms Elliott, and I also thank the hon. Member for Bexhill and Battle (Huw Merriman) for securing it.

We hear that there will potentially be an increase in the maximum fine. There have been only 11 prosecutions in the last four years, so we know that the real cause of anger is the failure to deal with legal discharges of sewage into our waterways, lakes and rivers. The collective profit of the water companies last year was £2.7 billion—£1 billion in shareholder dividends. The choice is not having sewage back up into people’s houses or letting it flow into our waterways, rivers, lakes and streams. The alternative is to invest those obscene profits in holding tanks to ensure that we do not get sewage outflows in the first place. [Interruption.] I hear Conservative Members muttering from sedentary positions. I wish they were as angry about sewage as they are about people campaigning against sewage.

In Windermere, the largest lake in England, there were 71 days last year when sewage was discharged legally. In Coniston, there were 112 days when sewage was discharged legally. In the River Eden, in Kirkby Stephen, there were 2,500 hours of sewage being discharged legally. In Morecambe Bay, there were 35,000 hours of sewage being discharged legally. The option here is obvious: to force the water companies to invest their profits now—not over a 20-year period—to ensure that the water in the lakes of the Lake district, the dales and the rest of the country are not polluted by sewage, so that this environmental health risk, public health risk, risk to animal welfare and risk to our economy is not allowed to continue. The Government have the power to force the water companies to take the action that they should take. We know that the water companies have the money to do it. Why are the Government not forcing them to do it now?

Sewage Pollution

Tim Farron Excerpts

Tuesday 6th September 2022 Commons Chamber

[George Eustice]

No surprises there.

[Tim Farron (Westmorland and Lonsdale) (LD)]

rose—[Interruption.]

[Mr Speaker]

As a matter of interest, the hon. Member did put his name in on this urgent question, so I am taking his question and I do not need any barracking.

[Tim Farron]

Thank you, Mr Speaker; impeccable timing, as always.

Look, it is obvious to everybody watching that we have a colossal problem: 6 million hours of sewage being dumped legally into our seas, lakes and rivers in the last year. These are the specifics of it: in the last 48 hours, a sewage dump on the beach at Seaford in Lewes. In my part of the world, Morecambe bay, 5,000 hours of sewage discharges on to the sands, and 1,000 hours into Windermere. Juxtapose that with £2.8 billion of profits for the water companies, £1 billion in shareholder dividend and the executives giving themselves 20% pay rises, 60% in the form of bonuses. I do not know about you, Mr Speaker, but I thought bonuses were what you got when you do a good job. And all this is done legally, on the sanction of this Government. When will they make these discharges illegal and ensure that the water companies pump their profits into ensuring that they protect homes and businesses, and our seas and lakes?

[George Eustice]

Our Environment Act addresses all the substantive points that the hon. Gentleman raised. As I said in my statement, Ofwat is currently consulting on an ability to regulate the dividends that companies pay and to link that to their environmental performance.

I would simply repeat that this is the first Government to prioritise this issue. These are long-term challenges. We could argue that the coalition Government, and Governments before them, could have acted on this issue and had a different strategic policy statement. There were Liberal Democrats in that Government. They chose to prioritise other issues, such as the alternative vote and Lords reform.

Agriculture Sector: Recruitment Support

Tim Farron Excerpts

Wednesday 25th May 2022 Westminster Hall

[Tim Farron (Westmorland and Lonsdale) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Twigg, not least because you are so lenient. I appreciate you giving me the opportunity to speak, given that I was not here at the beginning.

I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for North East Fife (Wendy Chamberlain) for introducing this debate on the hugely important issue of recruitment in the agricultural sector. If we enjoy the benefits of eating food, if we enjoy the environment, if we think tackling climate change is important, and if we think water management and flood prevention or tourism and hospitality are important, then we should be very grateful to our farmers and those who work in agriculture. We should be determined to protect that industry, not do it harm.

My great concern is that the average age of a farmer in the United Kingdom is 59. The Government are transitioning from the old common agricultural policy to the new environmental land management scheme, and while there is a golden goodbye programme in that scheme, which many people will take advantage of, there is no golden hello. My concern is that we are seeing people leave the industry, but we are not seeing people coming into it, either from farming or non-farming families.

The recent closure of Newton Rigg College, an agricultural college outside Penrith for the UK’s second-largest farming county, was outrageous and unnecessary. The Department of Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs in Northern Ireland directly fund agricultural education there. Why could we not do that in the UK, given that we now have that freedom? Why did DEFRA not choose to invest in saving our college in Cumbria, so that we can reach farming families while also recruiting people from other communities to be the farmers of the future? That seems a terrible wasted opportunity, and I call upon the Government to put it right, even at this late stage.

Young people are not likely to be attracted to agriculture if the opportunity to make a living is badly reduced. The hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) talked about his support for leaving the European Union. Members will know that I did not agree with him on that. Nevertheless, if I was asked to find positives of us being outside the European Union, I would pick getting away from the perverse incentives of the common agricultural policy.

There is an opportunity for the UK to build a better agricultural policy than the one that we used to have and are moving away from—if we do things right. The intention of the Government to move towards the environment land management scheme, and public money for public goods, is good. I want to be clear that in principle the Liberal Democrats agree with that. My concern is that the transition is being botched, which will damage farming and recruitment into farming, thereby damaging our ability as a country to feed ourselves, care for our environment, and provide the backdrop to the hospitality and tourism industry that is vital to my community and those in the south-west, as well as rural places such as Northumberland and other rural parts of this country.

I have got about 1,000 farms in my constituency. Every single one of them has lost 20% of its basic payments this year. Of those 1,000 farms, a grand total of 13 will be getting something through the new sustainable farming incentive. What does it mean for recruiting people into farming when they realise that farm incomes are evaporating and new sources of income are not available any time soon? If we care about recruitment into agriculture, surely it makes sense to park the reduction in basic payments while we continue to develop the new environmental scheme, so that we can recruit people into agriculture.

There is a huge problem in rural communities such as mine. Cumbria is the second biggest agricultural county in England—the biggest is Devon. There has been a 70% drop in the number of private-rented properties available to local people in the past two years. Why? House prices have gone bananas because of a huge increase in demand for holiday lets and an increase in the number of Airbnbs. What has that done? It has squeezed out the working-age population. That is affecting Devon and Cornwall, Somerset, Cumbria, North Yorkshire, Northumberland and other rural communities. That is why action is needed right now.

In our community, hospitality, tourism and agriculture are absolutely intertwined. So many farms are viable only because they have diversified into the hospitality and tourism market. If I say that last year 63% of hospitality businesses in Cumbria were operating at less than capacity because they could not find enough staff, that gives a sense of the recruitment crisis facing much of rural Britain. It is caused by three basic issues.

The first is the lack of affordable housing for people to live in. If there is nowhere for the working-age population to live, there is no working-age population and no workforce. That is why, despite the huge demand for tourism businesses last year, there was no availability. People could find a house to stay in for a week, but they could not find anywhere to eat or drink, or any way of having a pleasurable experience on a lake, because no one could recruit any staff.

The lack of affordable housing for a local workforce is a crucial part of the crisis, and the Government’s failure to have sensible visa rules is another. If we want to control our borders, great. But why not control them in our interests rather than doing ourselves damage? There is a desperate need for us to use youth mobility visas, for example. We have spoken to the Home Office about them to ensure that we try to do something to arrest the agricultural and hospitality labour shortages.

Finally, we have huge distances to cover in areas such as ours, with very expensive travel and a lack of affordable and accessible bus services. That is another major reason why there is a problem. There is no doubt that in communities such as mine and in Devon, Cornwall and other rural parts of the United Kingdom, a staffing shortage—a recruitment crisis—is undermining hospitality and tourism and undermining agriculture. If we undermine agriculture, particularly at a time such as this, we run the risk of not being able to feed ourselves as a country, which will make us more dependent on imports from other countries. We will put ourselves in the morally questionable position of fishing in the same markets for grain as the poorest countries in the world, thereby inflating the prices they pay or robbing them of the grain altogether.

I would argue that the farming policy the Government are now enacting, which is almost deliberately designed to reduce the amount of food that Britain produces and the number of farmers Britain has, is not just strategically stupid but morally abhorrent.

Animal Welfare (Sentience) Bill [Lords]

Tim Farron Excerpts

Report stage
Monday 14th March 2022 Commons Chamber

[Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown (The Cotswolds) (Con)]

I will speak to amendment 2, in my name and those of 30-odd colleagues.

The problem with the Bill is that it goes beyond the commitment made by Ministers to recognise animal sentience in British law in the same way that it is recognised in European Union law. My amendment is designed to ensure that the safeguards of the EU law are duplicated in British law. Currently, those safeguards are not in the Bill, as was the original ask of the animal welfare lobby.

It seems to me that we should have a bit of equivalence here. If this committee is set up by statute, its remit should also be defined by statute. I therefore ask the Government seriously to consider accepting my amendment as a sensible, fairly minor, but nevertheless important amendment to the remit of the committee, which recognises local customs,

“religious rites, cultural traditions and regional heritage”.

That seems to me a perfectly reasonable thing to do. With these few words, I strongly urge my hon. Friend the Minister to see whether she cannot, on behalf of the Government, accept my amendment.

[Tim Farron (Westmorland and Lonsdale) (LD)]

I will speak in favour of new clause 5, which would ensure an annual report including,

“the number of sentient animals killed or injured”,

as a result of pollution, a description of water companies’ actions to protect animals and an assessment of the impact of Government policy on those two things. I will also speak briefly in favour of new clause 6, which we do not intend to push to a vote, which would establish an annual report into the ways the Government have taken into account animal sentience when establishing new trade deals.

Turning to new clause 5, Cumbria contains two national parks, the Yorkshire Dales and the Lake District, the latter being a world heritage site. The richness of our biodiversity throughout Cumbria is of great importance, not least in our rivers and lakes, whose ecology is of global significance as home to countless species. Yet Government policy threatens that diversity and damages animal welfare. In 2020, across the United Kingdom, water companies were permitted to dump raw sewage into our waterways on 400,000 occasions for a total of 3.l million hours, at enormous cost to the lives of aquatic and semi-aquatic sentient animals. At the River Lune near Sedbergh, we saw the longest discharge in the country lasting for 8,490 hours. At Derwentwater, a discharge of 8,275 hours took place. Is it any wonder that only 14 % of Britain’s rivers are classed as being in a “good” state?

The Government’s Environment Act 2021 acknowledges the problem and sets an ambition to reduce the pollution in our rivers caused by the dumping of raw sewage. Of course, as we all know, the Government had to be dragged kicking and screaming by Opposition Members, their own Back Benchers and members of another place to even do that.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

Is the hon. Member aware that today’s papers have indicated that while some of the beaches in the UK have the blue flag designation that shows that the water should, in theory, be acceptable, that designation is sometimes not acceptable either?

[Tim Farron]

Yes. Often rivers can meet an acceptable standard but in reality not be healthy places, particularly as regards biodiversity and wildlife. The hon. Gentleman makes an extremely good point and makes the case as to why the increased scrutiny that the new clause would bring about is that much more important.

The ambition of the Environment Act, which was given Royal Assent last year, is open-ended. There are no meaningful targets or timescales to prevent water companies from dumping raw sewage into our rivers, harming fish and other animals. In 2020, water companies made £2.2 billion in profits. At the same time, as I said, they were dumping sewage in our waterways on 400,000 separate occasions. What kind of accountability is that? What kind of justice is that? What kind of impact is that having on our wildlife? The new clause would expose that.

Between 2018 and 2021, there were only 11 prosecutions of water companies for dumping sewage in our lakes and rivers. United Utilities, which serves Cumbria and the rest of the north-west, was responsible for seven out of the 10 longest sewage leaks in 2020, but, outrageously, was not fined even once. Despite the damage done to the ecology and animal life in rivers such as the Leven, Crake, Brathay, Kent, Lune, Sprint, Mint and Gowan, discharges are permitted either because Government will not stop them or because hardly any of the offenders are ever meaningfully prosecuted. The meres, tarns, waters and lakes of our lake district are all fed by rivers into which raw sewage can be legally dumped. I am particularly concerned about the ecology of Windermere and the failure to take sufficient action to protect the animal and plant life that is so dependent on England’s largest and most popular lake. The new clause would hold Government and water companies to account so that our wildlife and our biodiversity is protected.

New clause 6 addresses the impact of trade deals on the welfare of sentient animals. This country has concluded trade deals with Australia and New Zealand, and any scrutiny of those deals is now effectively meaningless because the Government have already signed them. Yet the impact on sentient animals will be enormous. Free trade is vital to liberty, prosperity and peace, but trade that is not fair is not free at all. These trade deals are not fair on animals and not fair on the British farmers who care for our animals. In Australia, for example, huge-scale ranch farming means the loss of many times more animals than in the UK because of the absence of the close husbandry that we find on British family farms. Some 40% of beef in Australia involves the use of hormones that are not allowed in the United Kingdom. Cattle can be transported in Australia for up to 48 hours in the heat without food or water. These are clearly lower animal welfare standards. By signing these deals without real scrutiny, the Government have endorsed that cruelty and enabled it to prosper at our farmers’ expense. Lower standards are cheaper, so these deals give a competitive advantage to imported animal products that have reached market with poorer animal welfare, thus undermining British farmers who practise higher animal welfare standards. That is why the new clause is important—because it seeks to hold Ministers to account and to limit how much they can get away with sacrificing the welfare of sentient animals at home and abroad in order to achieve a politically useful deal.

Despite this, this Bill has much to commend it. However, the new clauses would allow the Government to look the British people in the eye and say that they were prepared to take on powerful vested interests in order to protect animals and our wider environment. In seeking to press new clause 5 to a vote, I urge Members in all parts of the House not to take the side of the most powerful against those creatures that are the most defenceless.

[Greg Smith (Buckingham) (Con)]

I rise to speak in favour of amendment 2, tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for The Cotswolds (Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown), and new clause 4, amendments 3 to 22, and new schedule 1, which are in my name.

From the outset, and for the avoidance of all doubt, I am not, through any of these amendments, arguing against animals being sentient or being able to feel pain. After all, the sentience of animals has long been recognised in UK law, as evidenced by animal welfare legislation passed over the course of nearly 200 years. The purpose of amendment 2 and the other amendments in my name is to help the Government to avoid the main dangers and unforeseen consequences posed by the undefined aspects of the creation of the new Animal Sentience Committee. Crucially, under the unamended version of the Bill, it remains unclear who will be on this committee and what direct powers it will have. The unamended Bill’s draft terms of reference seem to suggest that the committee could have a role in scrutinising the substance of policies and not just the processes that led to those decisions being made. The Secretary of State will have the final sign-off on the committee’s composition, but what mechanisms will be in place to ensure that it is made up of dispassionate and genuine scientific animal experts and not ideologically driven animal rights activists with political agendas?

The amendments would protect against the Bill clumsily becoming a Trojan horse for what I would consider an extreme agenda that the Government could live to regret in years to come. Indeed, passionate supporters of the committee’s creation have already talked publicly of its not excluding animal rights extremist groups such as PETA. My amendments, especially amendments 3, 10, 11, 12, 18 and 21, new clause 4 and new schedule 1, suggest some statutory structure for the committee, how appointments to it are to be made, and how it might operate. The amendments would clarify that the committee is concerned with the process by which current policy is being formulated and not with policy decisions taken or suggesting policy changes, whether proposing new policy or changes to existing policy.

The amendments would also help to address the question of the Bill’s retrospective effect. The current drafting, confirmed by the draft terms of reference, would allow the committee to report on past policy decisions. Without my amendments, there will be no limit to how far back the committee can look, which would, in practice, allow it to draw attention to policies that have already been decided and implemented, or are being implemented. I fear that in doing so, it could start to drive a policy agenda of its own. Far from ensuring that in the process of policy making all due regard is had to animal welfare, it could raise policy issues that are not under current consideration or have already been decided, or decisions made before Ministers were expected to take account of animal sentience.

The current draft terms provide little clarity, and there is little if anything binding on Ministers, whether current or future. To rely on terms of reference to provide detail in these areas is not desirable for a statutory body, as they are non-binding and can be changed at will without any parliamentary oversight.

Food and Farming: Devon and Cornwall

Tim Farron Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd February 2022 Westminster Hall

[Tim Farron (Westmorland and Lonsdale) (LD)]

It is an honour to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Betts. I am hugely grateful to the right hon. and learned Member for Torridge and West Devon (Sir Geoffrey Cox) for an excellent speech, and for raising an important set of issues. I will not cheat: I am not a Devon or Cornwall Member. However, I am a Member from a western county that shares a farming heritage with Devon and Cornwall, particularly when it comes to livestock. As a Liberal Democrat Member of Parliament, I want to say that my party is utterly committed to those two counties, to the west of England, and to supporting farming, agriculture and rural communities more generally.

Although I differ from the right hon. and learned Gentleman on whether it was right to leave the European Union, it is clear that we agree that the common agricultural policy was one good reason to leave. It is one silver lining. The CAP is restrictive and did all sorts of harm, not only to UK farming but internationally, in terms of fairness of trade, and our standing with other countries, particularly those in the developing world where there is farming. It did not reward farmers for the good that they do.

In principle, I agree with the process towards ELMS. I do not believe that many Members who represent farming communities or people who farm think that ELMS is bad, in principle. However, I am deeply concerned that we may be botching the transition. There are three things I want to focus on. Some are accidental, but some are policy related, and I take issue with them.

A couple of months ago, farmers saw their first reduction of between 5% and 25% in their basic payment cheque. Over the next few years, that will decline to 50% and then to nothing. During that time, people will be—and already are—losing their farm income, without having a replacement available to them. What would any of us do if our income fell by half or more?

Some 85% of farm profitability in the livestock sector is from direct payments, so we are talking a colossal chunk of farmers’ incomes. What Devon and Cornwall have in common with Cumbria is a preponderance of smaller family farms, which, we can be sure, will be hit the worst.

What will happen if farmers have a massive gap in their income over the coming years? They will do one of two things: go broke, or go backwards. They will either leave the industry altogether—taking the golden goodbye or, worse, just leaving because the business fails—or will have to look for other ways to make a living. That will mean piling sheep high, undoing all the good environmental work farms have done over the last several years, and will continue to do only if they are included in the schemes that are to come.

Losing farmers at this point is massively dangerous for food security, for all the reasons that have been given. For all the focus on energy security, and for all that we rely so heavily on supplies from Putin’s Russia, we should be just as aware of the threat to our country’s security if our food supply is interrupted. We are dependent on others for our food supply; more than a third comes from overseas. That is a dangerous place to be. If we do not have farmers, we do not have food. If we do not have farmers, we will have no hands to deliver the Government’s environmental policies, either.

We are focused on a transition towards a system in which we pay public money for public goods. I completely agree with the Chair of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee, who said that food is a public good—of course it is. There are also environmental and landscape public goods, but if we do not have farmers, those environmental policies are just nice bits of paper in a drawer. They will not get implemented if there is nobody on the land to do that. That is why botching the transition—an accident, I am sure—is something we should all be deeply concerned about.

I also look at what farmers who are in the market to do environmental good—as I know so many are—say about the sustainable farming incentive. They say, basically, that it is not sufficiently attractive to bring them in. I was talking to a regenerative farmer in Cumbria just a few weeks ago who has done enormously impressive things in a couple of years; the quality of their soil has increased enormously. They are absolutely in the mindset to want to get into the SFI, but they have chosen not to bother. It is just not worth the faff. This is a farm that is minded to carry on and do environmental good, but they will just ignore the Government’s schemes because they do not think they are interesting or attractive enough.

What about all those people who are perhaps not so minded, or not so able to go in that direction? They will think, “You know what? I’ll just get another 100 head of sheep. I’ll try to make my living that way.” I fear that the Government are sending farming backwards and decimating it, as family farmers will simply not be able to make a living. They will go out of business, or, at the very least, go backwards, and not meet the environmental targets that all of us, cross-party, want them to. There is the accident. Though the Government are trying to bring people into the ELMS process, I fear they are making the offer too unattractive and setting the bar too high. If people are not in the room, they will not be involved in delivering the schemes.

I am also worried about some counterproductive elements that are coming through in landscape recovery and other aspects of ELMS that are being developed. They provide a very active, real and lucrative incentive for landowners to perform English clearances. They reward landowners in places such as Cornwall, Devon or Cumbria—they probably do not even live there—with money for clearing off their tenant farmers and letting the farm go to seed. That is an outrage. I can see what will happen: people will sit around their Hampstead dinner tables, bragging to their friends about how green they are, having taken a massive chunk of money from the Government. How did they get that money? They got it by evicting someone whose family may have farmed that area for generations. What happens to the farmhouse and buildings? They become second homes and holiday lets. It is a decimation of farming and rural communities, and the Government are incentivising it.

We want to encourage nature. We see people maintaining woodland pasture, and balancing livestock with woodlands. They are doing carbon capture and all those other things that are right. Let us make sure that the funding goes to the farmers, not to landowners who will exploit and expel those farmers and wreck our countryside in the process.

It is very hard to value food production—in Devon, in Cornwall, in Cumbria or elsewhere—if we are signing trade deals with countries that have worse animal welfare standards than ours, thereby bringing down our standards and potentially throwing our farmers under a bus. As has been said, the plight of the pig industry is a reminder that when it comes to migration policy, freedom is no good if it is not used. If 40,000 healthy pigs are slaughtered and thrown away, as NFU president Minette Batters was saying on the radio yesterday, then that is an outrage. That is happening because of a lack of staff in abattoirs and a lack of butchers, and because the Government’s migration policy is not being used in a sovereign way. It is possible to be prisoner to an international organisation, but it is also possible to be prisoner to an ideology that stops us serving our community and our country—and punishes farmers in the process.

Farming is vital to food production in this country. It is vital to our environment, and it is vital to our rural communities. My fear is that as we move from a system that is far from perfect to one that we like the idea of, we botch that transition. That is what the Government are doing. They simply need to do one thing: peg basic payment at the current level and keep it there until ELMS is available to everyone.

[Several hon. Members rose—]