Farming

Alistair Carmichael Excerpts

Monday 4th March 2024 Commons Chamber

[Sir Bill Wiggin]

Indeed, but the mobile abattoir did not require planning because it was mobile, and cleanliness and hygiene are essential for confidence in human consumption. However, there is at least some margin for improvement on the veterinary bit. When I looked into slaughtering through that particular abattoir, the cost was very high because of the veterinary inspection rather than the other things, although those of course must be dealt with. I completely support the project that my hon. Friend refers to, and I hope to see far more little abattoirs popping up, be they mobile or fixed like the one that closed in Gower.

[Mr Alistair Carmichael (Orkney and Shetland) (LD)]

rose—

[Sir Bill Wiggin]

I would be delighted to give way to the man with the answer on abattoirs.

[Mr Carmichael]

If only. I should remind the House that my wife is a practising member of the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons, and my younger son is three rent cheques away from following in her footsteps.

The hon. Gentleman makes a good and significant point about the nature of the regulation of abattoirs, but there are other forces at play here, particularly market forces. The reason we have seen the consolidation of abattoirs is that it produces a lower unit cost for throughput. That comes back to his earlier point about the demands of the supermarkets and their determination to drive down farm-gate prices. Does he agree that this is another area where the Groceries Code Adjudicator could perform a significant role if it had sufficient powers? If he is interested in that, he may wish to join me in the Adjournment debate tomorrow evening.

[Sir Bill Wiggin]

I can think of nothing nicer than to join the right hon. Gentleman in all sorts of debates. He was a first-class Deputy Chief Whip in the coalition Government. Of course, he absolutely right in what he says about abattoirs. I congratulate his son on being three cheques away from qualification—it is no small achievement to become a vet, so he deserves our congratulations.

One thing that the Government have done right, and about which I am really delighted, is to establish the statutory food security index and make it an annual event. Whether Members agree that we should have a health index or a food security index, all of that will come together, and we will see that our 60% figure is too low. Sixty per cent of the food that we eat is produced here—that is 60% of the food that we could produce, so there is potential for farmers to fill that 40% void. If we look at the world price of wheat, they are not going to be doing it at this rate. It is very, very difficult for some of our farmers to make any money. In 2022, the value of imports of feed, food and drink was £58.1 billion, over double the value of exports of feed, food and drink for the same year. That is an enormous sum, which could be directed towards British farmers if we supported them to feed our country.

The other thing I would like to see is tax breaks as well as grants. Grants are very limited; tax breaks are a much more efficient way of getting farmers to cut their costs and compete with farmers abroad. The Government recently announced a £427 million grant for farming, which is welcome, but it fundamentally misunderstands the sector. We like to use second-hand machinery in farming, but the grant system does not permit that. A better solution would be to offer tax breaks to farmers, allowing them to keep their hard-earned capital to invest as they wish. That capital would also go towards new technologies to generate efficiencies, increase yields, and combat the negative impacts of extreme weather. One of my constituents wanted to buy a hop-drying machine from Germany, so she applied for a grant. It was such an expensive machine—more than half a million pounds—that it blew through the system. There was no way that that grant could be approved, so in the end, she bought it herself.

The hop sector is tiny, but that is why these grants cannot just tick the boxes; they have to be much more comprehensive. When we talk about farming in this place, we talk about it generally, but each sector is completely different on the ground. A hop-drying machine is completely different from a blackcurrant-picking machine. That is all very well, but a cattle crush nowadays is very different from the one that I could afford to buy, and much more impressive. There is a desire to bring in robot fruit-pickers, and that would be great. We already have robot milkers, but the robot milkers we need are the ones that work on a rotary parlour instead of individually. Give us the tax breaks, and we will do the work. Do not tell us how to spend our money, because the grant system is not efficient.

Some 70% of land in England is managed by growers and farmers, and the work that we could do and do to combat flooding is often overlooked. One of the lowest pieces of low-hanging fruit is to allow local authorities to let their farmers clear flood blockages. Most farmers have a digger, and most farmers have a bulldozer of some sort. They have the kit, and that is where the flooding is, but they are not allowed to do anything because they are not insured. That is just mad. Let us make sure that local authorities can authorise a farmer to get in his tractor, put the snowplough on and clear the road. It is not that hard, but it does seem to be for my local authority—mind you, to be fair, almost everything is very hard for Herefordshire Council.

The Environment Agency could also do a great deal more. One little thing that would really help is that the River Wye has phosphates in it from chicken muck, and there is a man in my constituency who has spent a lot of money on building a phosphate-stripping plant. The chicken muck comes in, it goes through the anaerobic digester, the digestate is stripped of its phosphate, and then the muck can go back on the fields. At £300 a tonne, nitrogen fertiliser is very expensive; at £18 a tonne delivered to your farm, chicken muck is a much better alternative. If we want to stop the pollution, we need the Environment Agency to permit activities such as phosphate stripping, so that people can get on with putting on proper fertiliser—muck—instead of buying in fossil fuel-based fertiliser from countries such as Russia. There are all sorts of little things that the Environment Agency could do instead of putting my constituents in prison.

Diversification would benefit from a less rigid planning system, which of course the Government are thinking about at the moment. That rigidity is counterintuitive when a development would be helpful, so I welcome the Prime Minister’s recent comments about allowing greater diversification in farming. I look forward to seeing that legislation in April.

One or two Members have already talked about the need for connectivity. Some 46% of rural deprived areas are notspots for 5G, including most of my constituency. The NFU found that 79% of respondents did not have a reliable mobile signal on their farms. How can we possibly fill in our forms and drive our tractors using GPS when we cannot get a mobile phone signal?

We also need better digital mapping. At the moment the maps the Rural Payments Agency is using are not accurate for hedgerows, and the work needed for hedgerows is even harder because by the time we have filled out our digital map and put in our sustainable farming incentive forms, then, oh dear, we are not allowed to do anything for our hedges because of the wild birds. Then we have to wait, and then the patch comes up again when we can do stuff to our hedges, but we cannot do the same thing for hedge laying as we can for hedge cutting, so it is hard and complicated. Then some bright spark thought we would plant trees in the hedges, and that is absolutely fine until someone crashes into one and then we have a fatality. Hedges are very helpful for many reasons, but not many of them are quite right in the SFI at the moment.

Lastly, there are the issues of transport infrastructure for rural communities and livestock worrying. There has been a 63% decrease in the percentage of under-25s managing farms. That has to change; we are all getting older and that knowledge is needed. We saw it on “Clarkson’s Farm” when Kaleb calved a cow. It is not easy; if you do not know what you are doing, you cannot do it, and you will then have to call a vet and that will spoil all your economics. We have seen it again and again on television; people need to know what they are doing with agriculture. It is exceptionally dangerous. If you get your fingers in the power take-off, you will lose your whole arm. If you try and do things that do not work and turn your tractor over, you will die. And even if you do all right, if you are on your own for weeks on end with very little contact, you may well choose to take your life. I have lost six farmers in my constituency in the past 12 months. Things are not all right and there is no room for complacency, but some of the good things the Government are doing are so welcome.

While I am on a cheerful note, my right hon. Friend the Member for Suffolk Coastal (Dr Coffey) has the Dogs (Protection of Livestock) (Amendment) Bill coming through. We really need it; there is nothing more miserable than lambing a Schmallenberg lamb and then coming back and seeing the remains of your flock torn to bits by one of these pit bulls. It is absolutely appalling, and that is why I support that private Member’s Bill. The damage done to livestock in the midlands alone was £313,000 so this is a really serious problem, and I am delighted my right hon. Friend is doing that.

I am delighted the Government are maintaining their £2.4 billion annual budget, but they should be increasing it. That is the money that keeps us standing still; it is not going to be sufficient to compete with our European competitors or other countries. We need more money, we need it delivered through tax breaks, and we need to make sure that British farmers are supported at every level by honesty in food labelling.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Alistair Carmichael (Orkney and Shetland) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for The Cotswolds (Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown). Like him, I refer the House to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests; I am an owner of farmland and a partner in the firm that manages it.

Agriculture is enormously important to Scotland as a whole, but particularly to rural Scotland and island Scotland. NFU Scotland reminds us that it is a £3.3 billion industry, employing 67,000 workers in Scotland, with a further 150,000 working in agricultural activity. When we consider that the money earned and brought into the community through farming has a spin-off in ensuring that there are post offices, local shops and the critical mass of people needed for village and rural schools, we understand the importance of the sector to Scotland. I will be back in the Chamber at the close of business tomorrow night with an Adjournment debate on the Groceries Code Adjudicator. The large number of Members who have referred to it in this debate makes me hope that I will not be on my own for once in an Adjournment debate. That issue strikes at the heart of what is necessary if farming is to be sustainable and self-sustaining in the future.

Farming and crofting are critical to the economy of the northern isles. Orkney is prime suckler beef pasture. We have had beef farming at the heart of our economy for what feels like forever, while Shetland, with its more rugged landscape, is ideal for the production of sheep, especially the native breed, Shetland sheep. The old saw that the Orcadian is a farmer with a boat while the Shetlander is a fisherman with a croft remains true to this day. In recent years, prices have been decent, but every time I speak to my neighbours in Orkney, and to farmers and crofters throughout Orkney and Shetland, it is difficult to get away from the lack of certainty that I hear about from them, especially—it pains me to say it—among younger farmers, who are asking whether the industry has a future. I believe that it does—in fact, agriculture is not a single industry but a collection of different industries—but I can see why so many of them have that concern.

I have noticed over the years, as a farmer’s son and as a representative of an agricultural community, that piece by piece, and sector by sector, the importance of farming has been diminished. Once we have lost a sector, we never get it back. I look at dairy farming in my constituency. We have seen a significant reduction in the number of dairy farms in Orkney, and in Shetland we are down to just two. We talk about food security. In Shetland, in the depths of winter, we quite often go up to a week without a ferry to bring in food. The supermarket shelves are just bare, but in that time, the one part of the supermarket and country shops where people can still see something on the shelves are the fridges that contain milk, because we have a local supply. If those two dairy farmers were to decide that they could not carry on production, followed the example of their neighbours and colleagues, and left the sector, that would leave us completely at the mercy of imports for milk. We talk about public money for public good. Surely the continued production of milk in Shetland is a public good, and schemes that spend public money on supporting agriculture should be constructed in a way that allows that to continue.

The shape of future funding is critical to addressing the uncertainty that I hear spoken about by the farmers and crofters in my constituency. The hon. Member for Coatbridge, Chryston and Bellshill (Steven Bonnar) spoke about the First Minister’s contribution to the recent NFU Scotland conference. His announcement about the 70% was welcome, but the hon. Member must know as well as I do that a great deal more detail is required. The lack of detail leads to continuing uncertainty. We need certainty about not just the structure of future funding but its quantum. We need a multi-annual ringfenced budget. That requires the Scottish Government and the UK Government to work together constructively, which should not be that difficult, but somehow it never seems to be quite as easy as it ought to be.

The House may be aware that Scotland’s farming budget is linked to the UK’s. It is pegged at about 17% of the UK’s farming budget, in recognition of the different structure in Scotland and the importance of agriculture to Scotland’s economy, but the policies in Scotland are increasingly divergent from those south of the border in England, and in Wales and Northern Ireland. That is essentially the point of devolution. It is sensible and necessary to have divergence in policy, but that diversity risks being undermined if there is not the resource in the budget to accommodate it. If the consequence of the changes in England is a smaller amount of public money going into farming there, that risks Scottish farming assistance being reduced and becoming inadequate for the job that it is required to do. The Treasury needs to come forward with a framework based on a multi-annual agreement, because we all know that farming is not an industry that will work on an annual budget; it needs a multi-annual settlement. We must also ensure that funding is ringfenced, so that the money cannot be taken away and put into something else if there is another winter crisis in the NHS, or whatever.

I agree with the hon. Member for North Herefordshire (Sir Bill Wiggin) about the importance of abattoirs. In many ways, the absence of smaller local abattoirs is indicative of the problems facing the agricultural sector and rural communities as a whole. We are shipping animals around the countryside by whatever means, be it by ferry from Orkney or Shetland to the mainland, or by road and motorway on the mainland. Animals are being slaughtered in greater numbers in a smaller number of locations—as a consequence, I believe, of the way in which supermarkets drive down price, and the fact that it is so much cheaper for animals to be slaughtered in that way. That definitely works to the detriment of farmers in my constituency.

I understand why there is no functioning abattoir in Orkney. I remember well the many problems of regulation, particularly in relation to the disposal of offal, that ultimately meant that abattoirs could not continue there, but at the end of the day, for a community that is proud of its animal welfare and the quality of the meat that it produces, that simply makes no sense. With a bit of native wit, flexibility and creativity, something better is surely possible.

There are so many ways in which agriculture, farming and crofting impinge on life in my community, so I could talk for a great deal longer, but I suspect that is also true of many other right hon. and hon. Members, so I will give them the chance to have their voice.