Common Agricultural Policy (Cross-Compliance Exemptions and Transitional Regulation) (Amendment) (EU Exit) Regulations 2022

Baroness McIntosh of Pickering Excerpts

Tuesday 28th June 2022 Grand Committee

I beg to move.

[Baroness McIntosh of Pickering (Con)]

My Lords, I greatly enjoyed my noble friend’s presentation of the instrument before us. I think that paragraphs 7.7 and 7.8 set out exactly what my noble friend said. I would just like to ask for a point of clarification. We were informed last week about this dashboard. I have had great amusement trying to find the dashboard and identify the 570—I am told—Defra regulations, of which I assume this is one.

Is my noble friend of the view that this instrument will come back before us within the next year? That would greatly help me. A close reading of today’s House of Lords Business will show that I have tabled a Question to help me to understand. If 570 Defra items are listed on the retained EU law dashboard, published on 22 June, which relate to phytosanitary, plant or animal health, welfare and hygiene measures? Presumably we will have the opportunity to consider each in turn when they come before us, but as a general rule many of them will fall because, like this one, they fall within a transitional period. As the CAP comes to a close and Brexit kicks in to a greater extent there will presumably be retained EU legislation such as this that will fall. Will we come back to this particular instrument in the next year or two for those purposes?

There must be other pieces of retained EU legislation that we spent hours going through in this very Room or remotely to see how they would apply, many of which I imagine we would wish to retain. Do we have to wait for the Brexit freedoms Bill—I am not quite sure what it is called—to come before us, or will we approach this on an ad hoc basis? It would certainly help me to understand, since I committed so many hours to my greater knowledge and understanding of what the EU retained legislation was at the time, what the situation will be with this and other instruments.

It strikes me that it will take up an inordinate amount of Defra officials’ time to go through this exercise. If such instruments will fall anyway, will we have to meet physically to confirm that they are redundant and that they have fallen out of use or will that happen naturally? Will we be required to go through every single regulation that we adopted as part of our retained EU law that we wish to keep on the statute book?

[Baroness Jones of Whitchurch (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for his introduction to this SI and for the helpful briefing beforehand. I accept that the majority of these changes are technical in nature.

First, although it is not ideal, I understand why the changes to EU regulation 2020/2220 could not be made at this time, given that it was passed so close to the end of the transition period. It therefore makes sense to take this opportunity to remove the provisions to minimise ambiguity and potential confusion. I also accept that it is helpful to remove redundant references to the EU and member states where they no longer apply in UK law.

Secondly, with regard to the changes to cross-compliance regulations, I can see why it might be necessary to widen the scope of the existing cross-compliance exemptions as set out in Schedule 3. However, I have some specific questions about this. These new exemptions to the schedule are very specific and refer only to the specific changes we made to Section 98 of the Environment Act 1995 and Section 1 of the Agriculture Act 2020. Can we be sure that these two provisions are the only two occasions where exemptions to the cross-compliance rules should be necessary?

I am struggling with some of the detail here, but I do not think many farmers will be operating exclusively under those agreements. That raises the question of what happens if, for example, their environmental work is, say, 20% but also has a direct impact on other activities, such as food production, at 80%. Would they be penalised, or is there an element of discretion? If so, what would that look like? In other words, what is the interface between the old cross-compliance and the new arrangements? How much discretion is there in all that or is it absolutely fixed in stone?

I still do not feel, having read the SI several times, that the application of the cross-compliance rules is clear, notwithstanding double negatives and so on. I would not relish being a farmer and having to try to understand and apply them. To be absolutely clear about this, are they to be applied only to claims under the old basic payment scheme? Therefore, will the cross- compliance rules be phased out as any claims under the old CAP scheme are phased out?

Given that there is wide acknowledgement that the CAP was too rigid and the financial penalties for non-compliances were too onerous, why are the Government not taking this opportunity to introduce the lighter-touch regime we were promised when we debated the then Agriculture Bill? Can we be assured that the roll-out of ELMS and any future UK agricultural and rural payment schemes will be assessed without cross-compliance penalties? How is that all going to work in future?

I look forward to the Minister’s response. I also look forward to the Minister’s response to the very interesting questions from the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh, which I would like to know the answers to as well.