Baroness Byford
Main Page: Baroness Byford (Conservative - Life peer)Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Bill
Baroness Byford Excerpts
Lord Cameron of Dillington
My Lords, first, I declare an interest as a farmer. We have all received much evidence, both for and against, on this amendment. It seemed right to consider all the evidence and facts afresh, including my own knowledge of the industry, and to re-examine the case for and against abolition.
I think everyone acknowledges that agriculture is very different from 60 to 65 years ago when the current Agricultural Wages Board was introduced. I know that some of the work can still be very tedious and repetitive, such as riddling potatoes for hour after hour or even driving up and down a field all day, albeit in an air-conditioned or heated cab, either with or without sat-nav assisted steering. Of course, now no weights are lifted because instead of bags coming in at 1 hundredweight or even 2 hundredweight as they used to, they come in weights of 1 tonne. So you automatically jump into the forklift truck, do things much quicker and save yourself from exposure to the weather.
I admit that some of the work with livestock can be pretty full-time. You are always on call, particularly at certain times of the year, such as during lambing or calving and, even more importantly, when quietly walking up and down your dairy buildings at night to check which cows might be on heat in order to maintain or to avoid your calving index slipping. I also know that work with livestock can sometimes take place in fairly fresh and rugged conditions, both wet and cold. It has always seemed to me that shepherds and dairymen really should be flock or herd managers and paid an annual salary with bonuses paid on targets achieved. As I understand it, that is not specifically allowed under the current rules of the AWB—or at least it does not count.
On our farm, including in our dairy, we do not pay much attention to that or to any Agricultural Wages Board rates. We pay much more than the AWB rate. We would not keep staff very long if we did not. As I have said before, why would one pay a minimum wage to people responsible for operating machinery costing up to £500,000 or more, and whose skill at operating it can sometimes be the difference between profit and loss on the farm?
However, the Agricultural Wages Board is—everyone has mentioned this and I have admitted it before—a very convenient benchmark to use in the annual wage adjustments. On our farm, all wages across the farm go up by the 2%, 3% or whatever the AWB rate is. In addition, we usually round it up. Incidentally, in the consultation evidence I received from Unite, I noted that by far the most common reason—again, it has been repeated in the debate today—from farmers for opposing the abolition was the helpful benchmarking service that the AWB provides. However, as I have also said previously, this is a service quite easily replaced, and indeed promised, by the NFU and others on a non-statutory basis. Therefore, I am afraid that I have to discount all that evidence. I do not think that it is relevant to the debate.
The question really is: why should we get rid of the safety net? If most farmers pay no attention to it, does it really matter whether we have it or not? After all, it is only a small cost to the taxpayer in the general scheme of things. It is the last of many wages boards and councils, and therefore has a historic role, if nothing else—the last vestige of post-war socialism. I admit that I have only limited knowledge of the horticultural industry, where it is claimed that the national minimum wage—a full 2p per hour less—would apply if the AWB was not there. Furthermore, the rightly generous overtime rates of the AWB would no longer apply in that industry, which I believe is a valid point. But perhaps that is a fault of the national minimum wage rules rather than a plus point for the AWB.
I paused in my thought processes here. What harm is the AWB doing? After all, agriculture is no longer a poorly paid industry, so it must be being successful. The hourly average pay in agriculture is higher than in hotels, restaurants, shops and even local authority administration. Why dispense with all that gain? I like to think that I care about farming families, both employers and employees. I have spent most of my life trying to promote wider businesses and jobs in the countryside outside farming, because agriculture represents less than 4% of rural employment. Therefore, one of the reasons for my passionate promotion of the wider economy is that many farming families, both employers and employees, depend on having a non-agricultural wage earner in their family to maintain their lifestyle or, if they are the employers, their presence on the land.
I asked myself whether it is helpful to overall employment in agriculture that there should be a state-controlled wage structure over and above the minimum wage which the other 96% of the rural workforce does not enjoy. I asked myself whether the rest of the rural economy was ruined by the abolition of the other 100 or so wage councils. Or is it spoilt now by having a free market in wages, subject of course to the national minimum wage?
Are lorry drivers disadvantaged by not having a lorry drivers’ wages board? I take that as a good equivalent because they, too, spend long hours in cabs, driving up and down—not fields but roads. I thought that they were not disadvantaged. The rural economy is flourishing better than ever before, including lorry drivers. As an aside, obviously any reform of the CAP should put more money into Pillar 2 and less into Pillar 1 but that is not the subject we are debating today.
My next question to myself was whether UK agriculture can adapt and grow better, including providing more overall employment up and down the whole food chain, with or without its own centrally controlled, state-run wage order. All my experience over the past 50 years suggests that state interference in an industry is not very helpful to any of the participants in that industry, apart from the need for a national minimum wage structure and having a strong Health and Safety Executive, in which agriculture is not its finest field.
While I understand the safety net argument, I fear that the AWB is at best somewhat of an irrelevance in this day and age, and at worst is preventing new practices of salaries and well targeted bonuses that could reignite our farming industry as a career path for those who love the countryside and the healthy working life associated with it. I do not always support the Government but on this issue I fear that I must.
Baroness Byford
My Lords, in Committee we had a long discussion about whether the Agricultural Wages Board should be continued. Although the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, implied that a majority was in favour of retaining it, that is not quite a true reflection of those of us who took part.
Tonight, we have had the extra bonus of looking at Amendment 83A in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Whitty. It is within that context that I want to pose one or two questions. Amendment 83A proposes that,
“every agricultural wages committee … in England is abolished”.
However, it adds the requirement that “the services formerly provided” should be transferred to,
“the Agricultural Wages Board for England and Wales”.
I hope that the noble Lord will explain to the House what is involved and what he expects the board to do. Perhaps he might also tell us what caused so many of those committees to cease to function. Were they no longer needed or were they being dealt with in a different way? His amendment requires detailed examination.
Subsection (3) of Amendment 83A proposes that,
“any minimum rate of pay contained, or to be contained, in an Order of the Agricultural Wages Board may”—
I repeat, “may”—
“where the Agricultural Wages Board considers it convenient to do so, be fixed by reference to any periods during the currency of employment”.
Therefore my question to the noble Lord is: will he please tell us what “convenient” means, or how it is defined, or how it would work? It seems a very unusual way for an amendment to be expressed.
Lord Whitty
My Lords, nobody is disputing that, at present, after years of operation of the Agricultural Wages Board and the economics of the industry, a lot of agricultural workers are paid above the minimum rate and above rates in some other industries. To that extent, I agree with him. My point is that the Government have refused to do what the House asked them to do under the Public Bodies Bill and present us with a full explanatory memorandum with arguments for the abolition and arguments against any other alternatives. They have tried to cut corners on this, but their own experts tell them that the net effect of this will be a substantial cut in rural workers’ incomes.
If the House votes for the Government’s amendment and defeats my amendment to that amendment, that is what they are voting for tonight and they had better recognise it. That is the message they will be sending out to rural areas. I am looking perhaps particularly to people on the Liberal Democrat Benches who were not committed by their manifesto to this abolition, as the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, said. I do believe that the Government have got this wrong. We could have had a more coherent debate had we gone down the route of the Public Bodies Bill and the Government had produced their range of statistics and we could have had a sensible argument. Instead, we have a minimalist consultation, minimalist information and the Government sticking to an ideological position, supported by some elements of the farming industry but by no means all, and prepared to try and push through something which has an impact on the incomes of a lot of rural workers and their families. My amendment would allow a better way forward, a modernising way forward, and a reduction of bureaucracy, but it would retain the central protection that those agricultural workers have had and which they deserve to retain.
Baroness Byford
My Lords. I will be very brief. Three times the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, has referred to the rural workforce. This is nothing to do with the rural workforce; it is to do with the Agricultural Wages Board and he is misleading colleagues if he keeps using that phrase.
Lord Whitty
My Lords, the right reverend Prelate said two things. First, the agriculture workforce is a smaller proportion of the rural workforce than it used to be, but also the Agricultural Wages Board is taken, either in its substance or in the rate of increase, to a lot of other rural workers, so it does affect a wider range than those who are legally entitled to Agricultural Wages Board rates. It is not the whole of the rural workforce, but it is nevertheless taking £250 million out of the rural economy, ostensibly giving it to the farmers, but actually giving it to the supermarkets. If that is what the House wishes to vote for tonight, they had better be clear that that is what they are doing.