Dairy Industry

Bill Wiggin Excerpts

Wednesday 5th November 2014 Westminster Hall

[Simon Hart (Carmarthen West and South Pembrokeshire) (Con)]

I welcome the Minister to Westminster Hall for the third time in two days. He must be getting used to the warm welcome.

The debate is about one of the most important industries in the UK, the dairy industry, which affects every household in the land. Someone said to me recently, “If we’re lucky, we might need a doctor, an accountant or a lawyer once or twice a year, but we need a farmer three times a day.” That is the background to the debate. The industry has a huge impact on the local economy of constituencies around the land and the health of the industry has a far deeper effect than simply on agriculture. For example, the dairy industry has a huge knock-on effect on the tourism industry in my part of the world in west Wales. The whole UK landscape, in particular in our part of Wales, is heavily and positively influenced by the contribution of dairy farmers and other livestock farmers, often at their own expense.

Agriculture may be a devolved issue—the Minister will come to that—but world markets are not, nor is the role of the groceries code adjudicator or the dairy code of practice. The problem is a UK one, not simply a devolved matter for the Welsh Government. We bring the debate to Westminster Hall this afternoon on behalf of the dairy industry—our friends, our colleagues, our constituents who derive their living from it, our members of the Farmers Union of Wales, the National Farmers Union, the CLA or Country Land and Business Association and Farmers for Action, and many others, some of whom are not members of any union.

Fluctuating prices, tensions between farmers and processors, and criticism of retailers, especially supermarkets, are nothing new in agriculture, but I do not want the debate simply to be a long list of complaints. That is not the purpose of the exercise. We need to understand what is going on in the world market and the relationship between farmers and processors, which has been raised in the House and outside Parliament on many occasions.

[Bill Wiggin (North Herefordshire) (Con)]

My hon. Friend is quite right, and I am looking forward to the rest of his speech, but four pints of milk for 89p cannot be right. Something surely needs to be done.

[Simon Hart]

I will be coming to that in due course, but it is particularly galling for a producer to see that kind of offer in some retailers.

I also want to go into the role and powers of the groceries code adjudicator and the voluntary code of practice, which is subject to a review at the moment—or I think it is—and into the role of Government, if indeed they have a role at all, which I believe they do. What is completely unsustainable for the dairy industry, however, is the long-term prospect of having to sell its product for less than the cost of generating it in the first place, and the extraordinarily short notice that some producers get of significant price changes, about which they can do nothing but sit back and take the pain.