Agricultural Products, Food and Drink (Amendment etc.) (EU Exit) Regulations 2020

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Monday 30th November 2020 Grand Committee

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP) [V]]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Naseby, particularly because, in his celebration of new, small, independent producers of wines and spirits, he gave me the opportunity to note that Yorkshire has what is billed as its first single-malt whisky distillery—the Spirit of Yorkshire distillery—and that a number of new, small, independent businesses are creating interesting gins in Yorkshire. It is clearly important that these local businesses are able to flourish.

I thank the Minister for clearly outlining these regulations. I warn the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh of Pickering, since we have swapped places in the speakers’ list compared with the previous set of Sis, that I am planning to be quite brief and not take up my full seven minutes.

I want chiefly to concentrate on the agricultural products regulations—particularly the geographical indicators element, focusing, as I began, on the importance of small, local, independent producers. We want to see so much more food production and small-scale manufacturing in the UK. It is interesting that most of the examples that people have cited come from meat, dairy and alcohol; given that so many parts of the UK have brilliant conditions for growing fruit and vegetables, it would be nice to see much more celebration of—and encouragement of the celebration of—those products.

I join other noble Lords in asking what attempts will be made to promote this idea of geographical indicators and to promote the new system, which, we are told, and hope, will be simpler for people to access. We must make sure that it is indeed accessible by very small-scale local producers, who may be producing some exciting and, indeed, healthy new things—and, of course, who face such high levels of multinational competition, given the nature of our current food system, that they really need support to stand up against that.

I join the noble Lord, Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth, in celebrating the fact that working-level agreements have been agreed with the devolved Administrations. I really think that we can hope to see such an approach take hold across government much more broadly.

Finally, I want to comment on the second set of regulations that we are considering. On natural mineral waters, I suspect that I would be accused of venturing too far from the topic if I asked questions about the bottle deposit scheme, so I will not do that. However, I will note that this whole area of industry needs an enormous amount of work in terms of its environmental impact, particularly its unnecessary environmental impact. We are a very long way from any kind of circular economy set-up; of course, we have perfectly good, healthy tap water across the UK so this is an area where I hope we will see a lot more action from the Government very soon.