Agriculture Bill (First sitting)

Ben Lake Excerpts

Tuesday 23rd October 2018 Public Bill Committees

[Ben Lake (Ceredigion) (PC)]

It would perhaps have been a good idea to have representatives from the devolved Administrations, given that the Bill will inevitably have an effect on each of the industries in turn.

[Mr Robert Goodwill (Scarborough and Whitby) (Con)]

Does that mean, Chair, that when Scotland produces its Bill it will ask for evidence from English farming organisations? Is that the logic of what is proposed?

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Goodwill]

Q Talking of public goods, we have been talking almost exclusively so far about environmental enhancement, but there is one public good that many members of the public would like to see: better public access. That can of course produce conflict, particularly with some of the environmental objectives. Indeed, one of the best bird habitats that I have seen was the oil refinery at Immingham, where not only were there lots of things for the birds to perch on, but the public—and their dogs in particular—were excluded. Do you think we can get the balance right? Do you think public access should be part of this, or if we are to encourage ground-nesting birds such as curlews, do we need to ensure that we do not have as much public access as some would perhaps wish?

Patrick Begg: We live and breathe this every day. This is at the heart of what the National Trust does. It is always a balance, and there will always be trade-offs. There is no blanket policy that you can apply here, but I think we would all agree that more public access that allows people to get the spiritual and physical refreshment that our countryside offers is absolutely critical.

The Bill is incredibly welcome, in that one legitimate area for public investment in future will be increased public access. I could not agree more strongly with what has been done in the Bill on that. Sometimes we can find small examples of disturbance where people and wildlife do not match up very well, and think that it is a universal problem. I think it is not universal. Our experience is that there is a large amount of open countryside in which people can happily co-exist with wildlife. There will have to be some careful thought put into how we make sure that the interface between people and livestock works. Dogs and livestock can be problematic—let us be honest. Again, we have methods for dealing with that. There is public education. It is interesting that the countryside code has gone off the agenda and no longer gets talked about. That can be revitalised, and people can be made to feel engaged in their countryside and feel that they have a shared responsibility for what happens out there, not just as users, but as people invested in it.

Martin Lines: On public access, it is good for people’s health to get out into the countryside, but it needs to be managed because of dogs and the health and safety aspects of people walking around on farms. This is also about access to information. Hopefully, we can deliver environmental land management plans to let the community have that knowledge and make it publicly accessible. The community around me can access what we are delivering as farmers, and put it on their community pages, so when they use the countryside and the footpaths, they understand what we are delivering.

As an industry, we can communicate positive messages, and talk about some of the trouble and hassle we get from public access, how people can use the landscape, and the food and public goods that we produce. That should connect back to society, because much of society is disconnected from what the landscape is used for, the food and animals that are used, and the threats that can come from wandering around nesting habitats or letting your dog run free.

Thomas Lancaster: Access is a good one to talk about, in terms of thinking about how you can have a holistic approach to securing public goods and food, with a solid regulatory foundation. We would not want farmers and landowners to be paid to keep rights of way open. That is a legal requirement, so you would not pay for that through public payments. What you might do is to pay for permissive access where it makes sense to join up rights of way, and where there is a real desire to connect one part of the local community to another part, but currently there is no path to do so. The farmers we work with are almost always passionate about educational access. They really love the support for it that they get through current schemes and agreements.

There will be instances where access is not suitable for biodiversity reasons, or on a Ministry of Defence firing range or whatever. That points to the need to have really good advice and guidance when we develop future schemes, to enable whoever is putting together the land management contracts to do so in a way that balances all the public goods and secures the best net outcome from any given farm or area of land.

Gilles Deprez: My knowledge is not good enough for this question. It is important to have public access. From what I have seen, we have a lot of public footpaths in Cornwall, for example. It is not always easy, to be honest. If you have a public footpath that goes across the middle of your most productive area of land, it is not easy, but we are already doing it today.

[Ben Lake]

Q Some organisations have questioned the legality under World Trade Organisation rules of schemes that would pay for the delivery of public goods, as opposed to those that compensate farmers or other land managers for costs incurred and income forgone. Do you recognise those concerns regarding, I think, annexe 2 of the agreement on agriculture? Quite simply, should we also hold those concerns?

Thomas Lancaster: Generally speaking, we are of the view that the World Trade Organisation agreement on agriculture provides pretty much all the flexibility that you would want to develop pretty much any public payment system that you would want. Some of the concerns that have been expressed are about whether paragraph 12 in annexe 2 of the agreement, which limits payments for environmental programmes to costs incurred and income forgone, limits the ability to provide a fair return, but even within the common agricultural policy, there are examples of other member states that have gone much further and have paid more for those environmental benefits. That is within the CAP, in which the Commission sets some stringent guidance about how member states’ managing authorities can calculate those payments. When we move away from the CAP, there is nothing in the agreement on agriculture that stipulates how you should interpret costs incurred.

In hill farming operations, the income is very low. Some people have expressed the concern that that would mean that payments for environmental benefits would be low. Actually, if a whole hill farming operation is loss-making and a cost to an individual, you can interpret that as a cost incurred, and you can effectively pay to secure that ongoing management, and then tweak that management to secure specific environmental benefits for curlews, water quality, flood risk management or other public goods that you might secure from an upland farm. We are of the view that there is huge flexibility in that.

Even if you were to declare your public payment scheme as green box, and you have done some pretty imaginative interpreting of the rules, you would still have the aggregate measure of support—the amber box—sat there as a sort of hedge against any challenge that might come from another member of the WTO. It has been blown up into an issue, but is a bit of a red herring, really, in terms of how we might go about developing future payments and providing an adequate incentive for the public goods that the Bill lists.

[The Chair]

We have 10 minutes left, and three more Members want to ask questions. Unless anybody really wants to say something, we will move on.

Martin Lines: WTO rules are for DEFRA and the Government to deal with, not farmers. It is your problem. If you are going to design a scheme that will not work because of the WTO, do not do it.