Agriculture Bill

Baroness Neville-Rolfe Excerpts

Committee stage & Committee: 1st sitting (Hansarad) & Committee: 1st sitting (Hansarad): House of Lords
Tuesday 7th July 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con) [V]]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to be here today and to contribute to a debate on this wide-ranging group. I was quite taken aback to be balloted out of speaking at Second Reading. I could barely be more steeped in agriculture. I was brought up on a family farm in Wiltshire and used to stand in gateways from an early age to help my father keep the cows in order; I even knew their names. My Civil Service career was mainly at the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, where I was responsible for the farm woodland scheme and the Food Safety Act. I spent more than 15 years as a director at Tesco and devoted a lot of energy to farming matters and green issues. I was a director at 2 Sisters Food Group before joining the Government. Now, to declare my current interest entered in the register, I am chairman of Assured Food Standards—Red Tractor, as we call it—which is responsible for assuring some £15 billion-worth of British food a year from all four nations of the UK.

In my view, anyone should be able to speak at Second Reading, and I hope the powers that be have learned from the unjustifiable exclusion of several of us. I also express my concern that my noble friend Lord Dobbs was excluded from proceedings in Committee today owing to the loss of an email and the deadlines laid down by the House under Covid. All this underlines the need to get back to normal working, as Peers on all sides of the House are beginning to say. However, I put on record my thanks to my noble friend Lord Gardiner for the courtesy of a meeting to discuss my thoughts.

I turn to my Amendment 82 on impact assessment. This Bill, especially Clause 1, represents a huge change in farming and countryside management in the UK; just look at its extraordinarily long title. This needs to be quantified. We need to look at the economic costs, benefits and risks that the new framework will entail, so it is a perfect candidate for an impact assessment at the Bill stage, when the parameters are being settled.

Interestingly, the Regulatory Policy Committee, which has the important responsibility of independently—I emphasise that word—vetting the quality of government departments’ impact assessments, agrees. From its relatively narrow perspective, it advised on 20 February that the Bill will have “significant impacts on businesses”. I cite the radical changes to financial assistance and its tiers and conditions, and the shift in marketing standards and carcass classification, which we will discuss next week.

The fact is that impact assessments should have been submitted to the RPC for independent scrutiny, seen by Ministers and provided to Parliament. I know how valuable this can be to us. For example, DWP did a high-class job on the Pension Schemes Bill, which eased its passage. The RPC added value to an MHCLG assessment on plans to exempt extra floors on housing developments, pointing out the need to provide for the cost and risk of moving telephone masts—vital to HMG’s important plans for digital connectivity. Data, cost and risk assessment are essential to good government—allegedly one of the reasons why the Prime Minister and his consigliere Dominic Cummings are reforming the Civil Service.

Although the subject of my amendment is the framing of the financial assistance scheme itself, that stage would be far too late. I believe the Government could help themselves and Parliament by submitting an impact assessment for this scheme—and, indeed, for this whole Bill—now, and promising to act similarly for future Bills on the environment and trade. They might even adapt the assessment framework to encourage the sort of data analysis favoured by Mr Cummings. I hope the Minister will seriously consider my request before I return to the matter on Report.

[The Earl of Caithness (Con) [V]]

My Lords, I will pick up a theme started by the noble Earl, Lord Devon, when he mentioned the importance of this Bill. This is an absolutely vital Bill—a watershed Bill in British agricultural terms. It is going to be a template for the future, very much as the 1947 Act was a template for farming for about 50 years. It is a privilege to be allowed to take part in these proceedings, which demonstrate how important it is for the Government to get the Bill absolutely right, because it will set the tone for farming for many years to come.

The noble Earl, Lord Devon, was also right to question the wide spread of the Bill because the wider the Bill is spread, the less money there will be to go around, and important projects could well fall by the wayside. I too urge the Minister to clarify exactly how far this Bill is going to spread, whether reservoirs are to be included and whether the whole of forestry is to be included. There is a definitional problem here as far as I can see. In Clause 1(1) we talk about woodland and in Clause 1(2) we talk about forestry. Do these mean exactly the same things? I hope the Minister can be clear about that before we move to the next stage.

I added my name to two amendments in this group and I will first talk to Amendment 37, moved by my noble friend Lady McIntosh of Pickering. I was attracted to this amendment because it refers to

“protecting or improving the management of landscapes”.

Farmers do not exist in isolation but within a landscape, and farming is absolutely crucial to that landscape and its productivity. I am a great believer in multi-functional landscapes. There is no such thing as the average farmer: farmers vary hugely, as does the soil on which they farm. What is able to be grown in one field could be very different from that grown in an adjacent field, perhaps because the soil has changed from green sand to heavy clay and there are two different products to deal with it. Farming is therefore a much more complicated business than a production factory.

The idea of landscapes is gaining momentum, as the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, said and I agree with him on this point. The key factor in making landscapes work sensibly is to work on a big, cohesive basis. The Minister knows a lot about the great success of the Northern Devon Nature Improvement Area, which is a template for how such projects could work. It is working on a water catchment area, as the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, said, and it brings farmers and other users of the countryside together to get the right policy for that area.

Amendment 7, which is a probing amendment, concerns growing crops for biofuel. There is potentially a very big future market for farmers growing bioenergy crops such as miscanthus for carbon capture and storage. I would not want them to be unable to obtain taxpayers’ money, considering the public good they would be doing. Can the Minister confirm that bioenergy crops are also included in this ambit?

Turning to Amendment 67 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, I like the idea in principle of trying to attach the rewards of this Bill to the Environment Bill. Of course, there is a fundamental flaw in the noble Lord’s proposal. If, for instance, he had a farm that was subject to a tier 3 grant in a nature recovery area, he could well be signing up purely to get the money. If I were farming outside that area—not a nature recovery area—but wanted to increase my songbird population, I would be excluded by the noble Lord’s amendment. I hope the Minister will take up this point because it is key to the success of this Bill. We have to enthuse the farmer: I would much rather the farmer was enthusiastic about biodiversity and improving the ecology and the soil—wanting to spend the time doing it—than in the scheme purely in order to get the grants.