Agriculture Bill

Baroness McIntosh of Pickering Excerpts

Committee stage & Committee: 2nd sitting (Hansard) & Committee: 2nd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Thursday 9th July 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness McIntosh of Pickering (Con) [V]]

My Lords, I declare my interests as set out in the register and in particular that I sit on the rural affairs group of the Church of England. I apologise if I failed to mention that on Tuesday. I support Amendments 12, 13 and 62. My comments are more in the form of questions.

We have before us the policy statement. What is its status in relation to the Bill? In responding to this group, will my noble friend the Minister bring us up to date?

On Amendments 12 and 13 regarding educating children, from which budget should that come? I am a great supporter not just of farm visits but of visits of schoolchildren to country shows. When I was at school in Harrogate I had the great good fortune to visit the Great Yorkshire Show. We had a day off for the purpose. Will my noble friend use his good offices to liaise with his counterpart in the Department for Education to ensure that such visits continue? I am a member of the Yorkshire Agricultural Society and know that it is very keen to receive those visits. For the first time the show will be online, like a number of rural shows across North Yorkshire. It is a wonderful opportunity to engage children without them having to leave school or their home. However, I think it should more properly come out of the education budget.

My noble friend Lord Holmes referred to crops under glass, on which our noble friend Lord Taylor of Holbeach is obviously a great expert. Will my noble friend the Minister liaise with BEIS to ensure that, if we are to benefit from energy from waste, we educate the public about its benefits, even though it means using incinerators? In Denmark, Germany and Holland this is not a problem for the public, and we should not hold our farmers and horticulturalists back by a lack of understanding in this regard.

I pay tribute to the work of Fera at Sand Hutton and the Rothamsted institute. Will that type of research fall under the new financial assistance proposed in Clause 1 or should it more properly come from R&D budgets elsewhere? That clarification would be most helpful.

I support Amendment 62 in the name of my noble friend Lady Rock. Diversification lies at the heart of our future farm policy. I hope that my noble friend the Minister will take this opportunity to identify those who can advise our farmers, particularly smallholders and tenants, about the best thing to use.

In supporting Amendment 101, which relates to new entrants, I refer to the policy statement, which points out most helpfully on page 39 that regrettably those farmers

“after the reference period are unlikely to be eligible for delinked payments.”

Will my noble friend do what is set out here by making it easier for farmers who wish to retire to do so and who, by delinking, will free land for new entrants? We have to support new entrants as far as possible. This, together with the expected reductions in rent prices we are told about, should help them to get a foothold in the industry. That links to the amendments I will move later relating to tenancy holdings. This could be very useful. We need a bit of flesh on the bones in the policy statement.

[Lord Mann (Non-Afl) [V]]

My Lords, I speak in support of Amendments 12 and 13, and I endorse what was said by the noble Earl, Lord Devon, and other noble Lords, on the importance of robotics in agriculture. I well remember being involved in this in the 1980s. We were the world leaders in new robotic developments, but of course, constrained by the state subsidy rules of the European Union, we lost out to Japan and the United States, where, in particular, the use of contract compliance with state orders for the military gave them the competitive advantage to protect their fledgling industry.

My appeal to the Government as we leave the European Union is this. In this country, state aid is generally seen as protecting old, dying industries, but, at its essence, it is to protect fledgling industries that need link-ups with universities and the ability to experiment to get products that work to market. In robotics and artificial intelligence, not least in the area of agriculture, our potential is huge. If we were to win that battle, we would be more self-reliant and more competitively advantaged internationally. We should grab those opportunities before it is too late, not least because China is doing the same thing; it is leading the market and getting that market advantage.

At the same time, we should not copy the Chinese model for GM food. One thing that most surprises me about the debate on agriculture in this country is how we have allowed a form of quasi-communism to run it. Look at the role of the supermarkets: every strawberry and carrot must be identical in size and taste. This is specified by supermarket contracts, which farmers struggle to meet and make a profit under. The answer is not to move towards GM food—the ultimate communist dream of every product looking the same and tasting the same—but to go in the opposite direction. Something far more radical than farmers’ markets is needed, although they are a good starting point, conceptually. The whole basis of the tax incentive system for local food needs radically overhauling in his country. The incentives should be for real production, as the farmer sees it taken to the local market, to take out the food miles and to challenge directly this communism of the supermarkets in making everything the same. Again, in leaving the European Union, we have the opportunity to give that incentive to those local markets, and we should be doing so in a very big way.

Finally, I have a comment on trees and forestry. Pit timber used to grow alongside the collieries of this country in a very big way. We failed to learn the lessons of that in our forestry planting. Forestry planting has been seen as the preserve of the rural economy, yet on former coalfield sites we have huge swathes of reclaimed land, once brownfield and often still laid to waste. It would be ideal for reforestation as an industry, exactly as was done for those pit timbers 100 and 150 years ago—the remnants of which still exist. That would also give an amenity to local communities over the next 50 years. We should rethink precisely where our forests are being planted.

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[The Earl of Shrewsbury [V]]

My Lords, I support my noble friend’s amendment. I believe it to be an extremely important one and I congratulate him on the way in which he moved it. It is a very wide-ranging subject. I have no problem at all with public access to land, so long as no damage is caused to property or to livestock. I believe firmly that if such damage is caused—not everyone who benefits from access to the countryside acts in a responsible manner—it is only fair that the owner or tenant of the property in question is compensated for the cost of that damage and its reparation.

To give an example, during the recent very hot spell, and with lockdown and social distancing in force, a field on the River Dove, very close to where I live in an idyllic part of the world called Dovedale—an area of outstanding natural beauty—was invaded by a large group of people, who picnicked there and swam in the river. The litter they left, both in Dovedale and by the river down in Mapleton, was like a carpet of detritus. It was atrocious—bottles, plastic bags, human waste and all sorts. It was cleared up and disposed of by the landowner at his own expense. Under the terms of my noble friend’s amendment, that landowner would have been reimbursed for his trouble. That seems to me to be only fair and right.

The other day, at Questions in your Lordships’ House, I asked my noble friend Lord Goldsmith whether it was the case that the landowner or the tenant should not be responsible for paying for the clearing of fly-tipping on their land. The answer that I got was less than satisfactory. My noble friend told me—to paraphrase—that the landowner or the tenant should pay for this because it was part of his responsibility of farming the land. That could not be further from the truth, and I think that is a pretty rough statement to make.

I support my noble friend’s amendment and I look forward to listening to what my noble friend the Minister has to say in this regard.

[Baroness McIntosh of Pickering [V]]

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend on this amendment. I shall be brief, because it covers many of the points that I made on the third group. I also thank the Minister for adding Clause 1(1)(b), but I have questions for him. What form might the compensation take? Is one of the problems perhaps that rural crime is not taken as seriously as it might be?

I believe that such prosecutions come under the Environment Agency rather than the police. Should there be a wider use of cameras in rural areas believed to be prone to this? Where there is shared access between, for example, a county council as well as a different user of the land, should there be some arrangement to negotiate between them about who is responsible for policing this? How does my noble friend intend to police the current provision under Clause 1?

[Lord Cormack (Con)]

My Lords, I am glad to take part in this brief debate, and it is nice to have a debate on one specific amendment, dealing with a particular problem or series of problems.

I do not suppose there is a single one of your Lordships who was not totally disturbed and revolted by the photograph of that wonderful, 500 year-old oak tree burnt down last weekend in Herefordshire as a result of irresponsible barbecuing. That is a totemic picture and shows—alongside the graphic descriptions by my noble friend Lord Caithness, who moved this amendment splendidly—what we are up against.

I have a specific suggestion to make to my noble friend the Minister. I was taken by the explanatory statement of the noble Earl, Lord Caithness, on the Marshalled List:

“This amendment is to highlight the extra costs that farmers and foresters can face”—


he has done that graphically and splendidly—

“and discuss the effectiveness of the Countryside Code.”

I understand that the code is in the process of being revised, which is good. However, I do not suppose that very many of those people who created squalor in Dorset or who burnt down that beautiful old oak in Herefordshire have a clue what the Countryside Code is.

My suggestion to the Minister is this: I have spoken in your Lordships’ House before on the subject of citizenship, and I believe that every young person leaving full-time education should go through a citizenship ceremony, having studied the rights and responsibilities of citizenship for a year at least. One of the prime responsibilities of being a good citizen is to help to look after and enhance the environment.

There should be compulsory education on the Countryside Code and looking after the environment, which we have inherited and have a duty to pass on to successive generations. I would very much like to see, as part of the graduation process from school, the issuing of a countryside passport that young people are proud of and can carry with them. If they transgress—of course, it is not a problem of young people only, but one has to start somewhere—there should be exemplary fines and penalties. A cancelled passport should be one of these, because those who have shown that they do not appreciate and care for their environment and for the countryside should not be allowed to trespass and transgress upon it. I do not use “trespass” narrowly.

If we really mean what we say, and if we really want to strengthen the Bill in the way in which the noble Earl, Lord Caithness, has suggested, we must have not only compensation but, at the forefront of our mind, the creation of a culture where compensation will not be needed because people will not despoil and damage their environment. I recommend to my noble friend Lady Bloomfield, and to my noble friend Lord Gardiner, who has been meticulous in his attendance, devising some sort of system along these lines.

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A number of Peers have mentioned beavers. It is worth just putting on the record that in Scotland, we have had quite a bit of experience with them. At first, it was with people privately keeping a few beavers in a fenced area; almost inevitably, some of them escaped so their formal introduction by Scottish Natural Heritage took place in 2009. Scottish Natural Heritage now supervises all releases and controls the management. A recent report by the Scottish Wildlife Trust contained the information that the river catchment of Tayside currently has 450 beavers, and the damage to watercourses in the arable areas has been so bad that it has issued licences to cull 87 beavers. At the same time, about 40 have been rehoused in other places. I hope that my noble friend the Minister will pay attention and watch out for the unintended consequences of a policy of unbridled rewilding.

[Baroness McIntosh of Pickering [V]]

My Lords, I am delighted to follow my noble friend the Duke of Montrose, who speaks with great authority and knowledge on these issues. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, for introducing this little group of amendments and for the opportunity to discuss native—and, perhaps I might say, non-native—species. I will limit my remarks to Amendment 19. The biggest threats to native species, as I see it, are the uninvited, unwelcome guests of non-native species. For example, I have seen first-hand the damage that Himalayan balsam can cause, particularly along the length of a stream; how difficult it is to eradicate; and the time and expense taken up by land managers in this regard.

When I was on the Select Committee on Environment, Food and Rural Affairs in the other place, we looked at this in a report on Chalara, which causes the ash tree dieback. I hope that when my noble friend the Minister sums up she will confirm that the practice by which, for some bizarre reason, seeds used to be exported from this country to others such as Denmark, Poland and others where the disease existed, and then we reimported those trees as saplings from those countries, has been stamped out and will not be repeated. It brought a high level of infection to this country. We now have a number of endemic diseases in the horse chestnut, which I fear may go the same way as elms did. We heard only this week in the Lords of a new threat, particularly to lavender and other plants, from Xylella fastidiosa.

I again commend the work of Fera—I know that it has changed its name, forgive me—which does great work in this regard, as well as on ash tree dieback. If the Government were to look favourably on this little group of amendments, I invite my noble friend to consider whether farmers and land managers could be reimbursed for the work that they do in trying to protect our native species from these unwelcome and uninvited non-native species.

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees]

The next speaker is the noble Lord, Lord Marlesford. Lord Marlesford? If the noble Lord does not wish to speak, we will move on to the noble Lord, Lord Randall of Uxbridge.

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I know there have been reductions, but I agree entirely with Amendment 68. I do not think we should pay farmers to produce food following the practices listed in Amendment 68. They have to be eradicated. However, I would not want this to be used to say, “Well, this is the case, therefore we should have everything outdoors, everything free range, nothing inside a building”. If that is the case, we will not be able to provide for our people, inside or outside the EU.

[Baroness McIntosh of Pickering [V]]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to welcome back the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, who is on such fine form. I thank my noble friend Lord Shrewsbury for bringing forward this excellent amendment. I will ask my noble friend the Minister one specific question, which follows on directly from what the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, just said. I am conscious that many livestock producers, predominantly pig producers, have cut down heavily on the use of antibiotics, at some considerable expense. As I understand it, the alternatives are a great deal more expensive. Will the Minister confirm that Clause 1(1)(f) will enable alternatives to be covered by the provisions of financial assistance under that clause? I entirely endorse the thinking behind what my noble friend Lord Shrewsbury said. It is absolutely right to see animal health and welfare as interdependent.

[The Duke of Wellington (Non-Afl) [V]]

My Lords, I had intended to withdraw to speed up proceedings, but now that I have been called I will simply say that I support the principle behind Amendment 44. It is in my opinion desirable, where the terrain and climate admit, to winter animals outside. It is good for their health. Therefore, I totally support what is behind that amendment. I need say no more.