Groceries Code Adjudicator

Debate between Alistair Carmichael and John Hayes

Tuesday 3rd June 2025 Westminster Hall

[Sir John Hayes]

I am delighted to accept the hon. Lady’s advice on that. She is not, in parliamentary technical terms, my hon. Friend, but she is a friend none the less, and she is right in her assertion, which I shall move to after I entertain the House a little further with my preparation for making exactly that argument. The essence of my call today is that this Government need to take action to deal with the near-monopolistic supply of foodstuffs that our constituents are obliged—I use the word again—to endure. The best way of doing that is through a more regulated market, and she is right to say so; but let me set the scene a little more before I come to the point at which I will call for exactly what she has suggested.

As well as the loss leaders that I mentioned, which have the seductive effect on consumers of encouraging them to buy many other things, secondly, that kind of provision of food has led to a great deal of waste. From studies that have been done, we know that these days much of what people buy—as much as 20%, or perhaps a little more—is never consumed. That would have been unthinkable a couple of generations ago. People would not have believed it was possible to stock the pantry or fridge with all kinds of things that ended up on the scrapheap.

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

rose—

[Sir John Hayes]

I give way to the Select Committee Chairman, to whom I pay tribute on this subject for bravely making the case that I will make today, with less expertise than his.

[Mr Carmichael]

The right hon. Gentleman flatters to deceive, I fear. He is right about the way grocery supermarkets go about their business, but much of the problem is the way they choose to go about it. I recently heard from a livestock farmer who bought in potatoes to feed stock. He expected to find them green, bruised or damaged, but when they arrived they were perfect; they just were not conformed to the particular specification that the supermarket demanded. That demand does not come from consumers, but directly from supermarkets. If he looks around Europe and elsewhere, the right hon. Gentleman will find that supermarkets there behave very differently.

[Sir John Hayes]

The right hon. Gentleman is right. That is why, when he and I were in Government together, we introduced the Groceries Code Adjudicator. He will remember that I worked closely with his colleague Vince Cable, then Secretary of State, and was involved in that decision. He is also right to focus on the producers. I have spoken so far about consumers, but I want to go on to talk, thirdly, about the distortion in respect of producers.

I began my speech by speaking about how both producers and consumers need a multiplicity of places to buy and sell. In the model that I set out, the one that prevailed for aeons, people who made and grew food, primary and secondary producers, were able to sell to a variety of places. In our lifetimes—I might be overestimating the age of some hon. Members present, but certainly in many of our lifetimes—markets existed where farmers would take their produce to auction. Indeed, there was a livestock market in Spalding in the streets until the 1930s and a covered market until the 1990s, where livestock was brought to be traded and auctioned very openly.

Producers have also been affected by this distortion. As the food chain breaks, it is not only consumers who struggle, able to go to only one or two places to get not just what they want, but what they need, because, as I said, foodstuffs are fundamental.

Farming and Inheritance Tax

Debate between Alistair Carmichael and John Hayes

Wednesday 4th December 2024 Commons Chamber

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

I remind the House of my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests.

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Peterborough (Andrew Pakes), who is a fellow member of the Select Committee, and the hon. Member for Ribble Valley (Maya Ellis). They both, in their own way, made an important contribution to the debate by giving a bit more context to it. I will vote for the motion in the name of the Leader of the Opposition, not because it is the most elegant piece of drafting that I have seen in 23 years in the House, but because there is nothing in it with which I really disagree. It does feel, though, like a bit of a missed opportunity to move the debate onwards. I say that not as any real criticism, because it is a response to a Government measure in the Budget, which was also a bit of a missed opportunity.

It is worth taking a minute or two to pause and reflect on how things might have been done differently. We could have gone through the process that multiple Governments and Departments have gone through over the years by starting with a Green Paper or a White Paper, and looking at the way in which inheritance tax has worked, and some of the unintended consequences that it has generated. We have all heard of the super-rich buying up land and inflating the price as some sort of tax avoidance measure. I have not met a single working farmer who wants to defend that, so there was a real opportunity to do things differently. We could have built a consensus about the proper value of land, and about some stuff that is not really being spoken about in this debate.

I speak as a former solicitor. Thankfully, I never did any executory practice, but some of those who are still in practice and with whom I am in contact tell me candidly that, because there was 100% relief on agricultural land, they did not really give a great deal of thought to the valuation that went into the application for confirmation. That is bound to have had an impact on the figures on which the Government rely. Had we done things in a proper and reflective way, we would have been able to build consensus on values and thresholds, for example, and do things very differently.

[Sir John Hayes]

I welcome the contribution of my former ministerial colleague. Had the tax been levied on exactly the people he describes—the super-rich, and non-working farmers—few would have complained, but it has been set at the wrong level. That is why I asked for detailed modelling to be made available to the House.

[Mr Carmichael]

I think I just said more or less exactly that. A debate of the sort that I am talking about would have allowed for a wider debate about farming finances. We have had 70 years of very direct Government intervention in the agricultural economy through farm subsidies. Taking a step back, critical though those farm subsidies are, their net effect has ultimately been to keep farmers poor. There is now such an enormous mismatch between the capital value of the assets being farmed and the derisory return on them. DEFRA tells us that there is a 0.5% return on capital. Farmers in my constituency tell me that a £3 million farm will give them an income of about £25,000 a year. That is pretty much in line with DEFRA’s figures.

We hear about farmers working into their 80s. It is a slightly patronising and very romantic view of doughty farmers working on into their 80s because they are seized with a sense of vocation. There absolutely is a sense of vocation among farmers, but let us not forget that a lot of them work into their 70s and 80s because they have been running businesses that have had no spare money to put into a pension so that they can look after themselves in their old age.