Agriculture Bill

Bill Wiggin Excerpts

Consideration of Lords amendments & Ping Pong & Ping Pong: House of Commons
Monday 12th October 2020 Commons Chamber

[George Freeman (Mid Norfolk) (Con)]

I rise as a Member of Parliament for a very agricultural constituency, and as the product of a farming family—in fact, I think I still have a place on offer at Harper Adams if this career does not work out—as well as a former Minister for agritech, former trade envoy, and chair of the all-party parliamentary group on science and technology in agriculture.

This is a major moment, when we take back control of our farming policy from the EU after 40 years, and of our trading destiny and sovereignty. It is on a par with 1947—the last great reset of agricultural policy—or, indeed, the corn laws. I welcome the Agriculture Bill, and the work of DEFRA Ministers and officials in setting out a framework that supports commercial British farming—a great British industry that is leading in the world—and recognises that its important environmental work, which involves managing 70% of our land area, requires additional support. In broad terms, I strongly welcome the Bill.

I welcome even more strongly the Conservative party’s commitments, both in our manifesto and over the last 18 months from the Prime Minister, the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and my right hon. Friend the Member for Chipping Barnet (Theresa Villiers), who was the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs at the time of the general election. I also welcome everyone who asked about our commitment to ensuring that we do not in any way undermine those standards. The Prime Minister put it beautifully when he said,

“we will not accept any diminution in food hygiene or animal welfare standards… We will not engage in some cut-throat race to the bottom…We are not leaving the EU to undermine European standards”.

He could not have been any clearer.

For that reason, I welcome the comments of my friend and neighbour, the Secretary of State for International Trade, my right hon. Friend the Member for South West Norfolk (Elizabeth Truss), her agreement to the Trade and Agriculture Commission and her personal commitment to ensuring that we do not negotiate away any standards. This really matters: to the great industry of British farming and agriculture; to consumers watching today, who want to know that we are looking after their interests; to voters, to whom the Conservative party gave those solemn commitments last year; and, dare I say it, to this party, which I have always seen as a party of the countryside, of stewardship, of rural community, and of high standards in animal welfare and environmental farming. That is what is on the table when we vote tonight. Either we are that as a party, or, in the countryside, we are very little.

This should be a hugely exciting opportunity for us to set out an ambition and lead globally, to use our trade leverage to promote fair trade around the world, to give our farmers a level playing field, to embrace variable tariffs, and to ensure that we support growers around the world to follow the standards that we need them to embrace. We have to double world food production on the same land area with half as much water within 20 years. That is a massive opportunity for our agritech industry. Imagine if we used our tariffs variably to say, “We won’t accept food that breaches our minimum standards. We will lower tariffs on decent food, but we’ll zero tariff food produced in ways we know we need as a global community.”

But there is a major problem: the Government, despite endorsing all of that vision, are today stripping out the proper establishment of the commission that the Secretary of State for International Trade herself agreed to, carefully negotiated in the House of Lords. They are asking us to rely on CRaG—a process agreed decades ago that was not designed for this purpose, and which will mean that this House will not have a say on trade deals—and asking us to rely on the WTO, which specifically prohibits animal welfare and food production standards as a legal basis for any trade restrictions. We are saying that we defend farming and the standards that we support, but denying this House the means to guarantee them.

[Bill Wiggin (North Herefordshire) (Con)]

What else has my right hon. Friend done about how he feels about this matter? Has he written to anyone about it?

[George Freeman]

I am grateful to my distinguished hon. Friend. The truth is that we can talk about standards, but if we expose UK farmers and growers to imports coming in at a lower price because they are not fulfilling those standards, they will not be able to compete and we will be throwing away the opportunity of having a great industry that leads the world. Lord Curry, who tabled the amendment in the other place, said:

“Under the current terms, the commission will set up for six months and will submit an advisory report to the Secretary of State, which will be presented to Parliament. It will then be disbanded and disappear into the mist. There is no obligation on the Secretary of State to take its recommendations seriously”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 28 July 2020; Vol. 805, c. 145.]

If we, as a Government and as a party, are seriously committed to honouring our commitments, I would like us to go further. Why do we not commit to enshrining our standards properly in some form of schedule—the standards that we will not undermine or allow any Minister of any Government to negotiate away? Why do we not give this House the power to ensure that it can scrutinise properly? Why do we not embrace a trade policy that is fit for this 50-year opportunity, which puts the British flag at the top of the mast for standards, and go out into the world and say, “We’ll use our trade leverage and variable tariffs to support the good, benign practices that the world urgently needs”?

--- Later in debate ---

[Dave Doogan (Angus) (SNP)]

In following the hon. Member for The Cotswolds (Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown), I will try not to resort to impolite comments such as that which he directed at the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas). He could not see the embarrassment on his colleagues’ faces when he made that comment.

I rise to speak in favour of amendment 16. The clarion voice of the people is at issue here and it is our responsibility as MPs to convey the horror with which our constituents view the Bill and its in-built opposition to their ambitions for food safety that respects the environment and safeguards the welfare of our animals.

The people of Scotland have spoken clearly in rejecting the Bill and its aims, and Ministers would do well to listen. If the Minister is listening for the voice of Scotland, I can assure her that she will find it over here on the SNP Benches, not over there on the Tory Benches. Scottish Tory MPs do not even speak for Scottish Tory voters, 95% of whom backed calls for food standards to be maintained, according to Which? People are asking why the Tory Government and the majority of their Back Benchers do not listen to the people—[Interruption.] That includes those who are chuntering from a sedentary position right now. Perhaps if the risk was of chlorine-washed chanterelle mushrooms or hormone-injected foie gras, Tory Ministers would have less of a deaf ear than the one they have turned to those of us who are happier dining on chicken fried rice and mince and tatties.

So much for taking back control, the newly independent, yet strangely impotent UK cannot specify the standard of food we will import going forward: John Bull under the heel of Uncle Sam right enough. That pitiful transatlantic asymmetry rings truer now than at any stage in Anglo-US history. The Tory Government have demonstrated in the most humiliating and unedifying way possible that nothing will get in the way of a US trade deal—in and of itself a highly questionable negotiating position.

The Government have betrayed civil society across these islands and ignored valid evidence and well-documented concerns about the Bill and its shoddy back door, leading to a food standards horror show. The will of the people of these islands is ignored by a Government who have purposely allowed the DIT tail to wag the DEFRA dog on food standards.

That highlights a betrayal that will take some beating—all in the name of breathing life into the Brexit myth of no global trade without Brexit. Meanwhile, Mercedes, Zara, Airbus, Heineken, Volvo and L’Oréal all sell big from within the EU to the US without the need for European Governments to betray their populations and farmers through the food that they produce and feed to their children.

The Government are capable of listening to industry as we saw during covid, when they listened intently to the supermarkets about food supply and to the private supply chains about food distribution. So why will they not listen to farmers on this issue? Farmers have been very clear on matters of provenance, the risk to their business of an any-price trade deal, and the supply of seasonal labour.

Why do the Tory Government seem to hold our farmers in such contempt? The question is rhetorical. We all know that it is because of the twin Tory totems of Brexit and immigration, which, for the hard of thinking, are one and the same thing. On a post-Brexit trade deal, the DIT speaks for Government. The Home Office speaks for Government on immigration, specifically their disastrous approach thus far to access to seasonal labour from abroad. No wonder many are beginning to ask what exactly DEFRA speaks for.

If the Government persist in proscribing the most basic protections for our food supply from the Bill, no amount of watery, weasel words will hide the simple fact that a Government that cannot act as guarantor for the food we eat cannot act as guarantor for anything. Scotland is taking a different route.

[Bill Wiggin]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Angus (Dave Doogan), just as I did after his maiden speech. May I say that he needs to allow a little more of his Scottish charm to seep into his speeches? I need to declare my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests, particularly as a breeder of Hereford cattle. Some 88% of Herefordshire is farmland, and 10,200 people work on our 2,812 farms.

On amendments 12 and 16, let me say that farming is not a religion; it is a business. We need to increase farm incomes, cut NHS expenditure on obesity, lose the need for food banks, and ensure that we behave towards our livestock in the way that we behave towards one another: with respect, kindness and, most of all, understanding of the huge challenge all this presents. The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, the Green party, Extinction Rebellion and many others have their own agendas on how to run the landscape, so their contribution is not surprising, but the NFU’s is surprising, because it has gone far too far in trying to wrongly frighten people. We must remember that the Agriculture Bill is primarily a continuation Bill. The amendments would put strict conditions in place when the EU negotiates a free trade deal, whereas when we, as part of the EU, negotiated free trade deals with other countries, none of those restrictions were in place. If we impose strict food requirements, America will challenge and win at the WTO. Opposition Members may rejoice at that, but the EU will not be able to accept those terms either.

[Robbie Moore]

Does my hon. Friend agree that the whole House wants to achieve better standards across the board, but we must look at the detail that amendment 16 brings?

[Bill Wiggin]

I agree not only with my hon. Friend but with my hon. Friend the Member for The Cotswolds (Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown), who said he made an excellent speech—he did. Our two largest trading partners would be gone, threatening £22 billion-worth of exports of food, drink and feed—everything we are selling. The EU has already threatened to ban animal products, a trade worth £3 billion, only last year. That should be no surprise. Trade deals with non-EU countries would be gone too: the hard-fought trade deal with Canada and 43 trade agreements with 70 other nations. We think that our food standards are very high, yet we allow religious slaughter, we are gassing pigs in our abattoirs, we do not insist on catering or welfare standards labelling, and we fudge our grass-fed labelling—

[Chris Loder (West Dorset) (Con)]

In 2018, 25% of the sheep slaughtering in this country was done without stunning. Does my hon. Friend agree that that is totally unacceptable and that, before we start preaching about other nations, we should look at our own animal standards after animals have left the farm?

--- Later in debate ---

[Bill Wiggin]

Rightly or wrongly, it would become illegal, if we follow these rules, to bring anything from the EU that did not allow that into this country. My hon. Friend is right to raise that; it is wrong. Food labelling is the solution, and to have a grass-fed label that allows 49% of the feed to be grain is just not right.

We need to be an outwardly global, free trade-friendly but sensible country. These amendments are much more to do with stopping subsistence African farmers rather than Texan ranchers. It might surprise some of the supporters of these amendments to learn that we are already importing illegally produced food through the EU. Supermarkets sell Danish bacon—with English-sounding farm names, to fool customers—from pigs whose mothers are kept in sow stalls, which were banned in the UK in 1999, on the grounds of cruelty.

[Neil Parish]

Does my hon. Friend also accept that when we banned those sow stalls and tethers, Europe did not, and it decimated our pig industry in the meantime? Therefore, if we do not get the trade considerations right, we will trade away all our food production, like we have already.

[Bill Wiggin]

I do not get any extra minutes for that intervention. I ask Members also to think about our stocking density for chickens, which is 39 kg per square metre, as opposed to 42kg in the EU. German hop growers use chemicals that would not be allowed in this country, and apparently the French will give a derogation for neonicotinoids so that their farmers can produce oilseed rape. That is outrageous. Where are the objections to buying Danish bacon? Where are the people kicking off to protect our pig farmers? My hon. Friend the Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Neil Parish) is absolutely right: when we did the right thing, we were decimated.

I want us to achieve everything that my hon. Friend the Minister talked about. We should have proper food standards and better labelling. The people we should be putting our faith in are the consumers. They do not want hormone beef; they want to know that what they are buying is good, clean and proper, and they are grown up enough to make their own decisions.

There is room for everybody. We produce 61% of food eaten in this country and 75% of that which we are able to grow here. The remainder—more than £47 billion-worth—is all imported. We have the capacity to pay our farmers more, import from international markets without substitution for lower standards, and ensure that we produce the best and healthiest food at a cost-effective price.

The Prime Minister has called on us to find the inner, or thinner, hero inside us and shed those pounds. That is spot on. If we can lower the price of healthy food in this country, we could not only see our nation lose weight but address the need for food banks. With better food prices, innovation can progress in the agricultural sector, and we can have what we always wanted: farmers receiving public money for public goods.

I want the Minister to commit to ensuring that farm incomes grow on the back of the environmental land management scheme, and not be diminished. I want the Bill to allow us to protect the environment and produce food, while ensuring that our food producers’ incomes rise, consumers buy healthier food and the need for food banks goes. These amendments will not achieve those goals or what our great farmers, consumers, constituents and future trading partners want: prosperity and a better diet.

[Several hon. Members rose—]