Farming

Bill Wiggin Excerpts

Monday 4th March 2024 Commons Chamber

[Sir Bill Wiggin (North Herefordshire) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Croydon North (Steve Reed), although I suspect that he has more customers or consumers in his constituency than farmers. In North Herefordshire, we have 1,715 of probably the best farmers in the world. [Interruption.] Oh, no, there’s no doubt about that. The joy of Herefordshire is that we grow every crop that the UK produces; whether it is raspberries, which come from Scotland usually, or hops from Kent—we do it all. No other county can make that claim. As a result, I have had to spend an awful lot of time with a variety of highly expert and very skilful farmers as they explained their particular element of the industry.

I agree with all Members who have said how important farmers are, but their troubles do not seem to be seen as such. The worst case, of course, is bovine tuberculosis. It has been 10 years since the badger cull began to tackle the transmission of TB—and it has been an enormous success. TB plagued the agricultural sector and, by 2020, as many as 30,000 cattle were dying each year from this terrible disease. I lost my bull to it, so I know how devastating it can be for farmers across the country.

Thanks to the culling of sick badgers, which carry the disease to cattle, 24% fewer cattle were killed in 2022-23 relative to the preceding year. In fact, the number of deaths was the lowest it has been since 2008. The beneficiary is not just the farmers and their cows, but a healthy badger population that is therefore less likely to be exposed to this fatal disease. With that rate of success, I fear the Government’s move away from culling to a badger vaccination programme is premature and potentially disastrous. A reactive cull just will not work, because once DEFRA has decided that there is TB in the badger population, all the cows are dead; it does not work, it is not good enough and it will not cut the mustard. The Department needs to rethink very carefully what will happen. We have seen a 54% reduction in this disease, and we have learned from covid that we should not take away the precautions that are working before we are ready to bring in the new DIVA test—the differentiating infected from vaccinated animals test. That test allows the BCG vaccine to be applied to cattle, and for the cattle that are vaccinated to be separated from the cattle that are infected.

Until that test is ready—a written answer indicated that that might be in 2027—we cannot take our foot off the culling programme or allow our defences to drop. We cannot risk a 54% increase in TB, which is what will happen if we continue to do the wrong thing, as I think the Government are doing. We need to protect the healthy badger population and the healthy cattle population. Most of all, though, this is a disease that reaches human beings too; and because of antimicrobial resistance, there are not that many drugs that tackle tuberculosis. If we allow this disease back, there would be a serious risk to human health, particularly as there is now an increasing desire to buy green top milk, which is unpasteurised. Considering that TB is a serious disease—consumption, as it used to be called—that would be extremely dangerous.

It costs a farm about £14,000 when a bovine TB breakdown takes place. It could also cost the taxpayer up to £1 billion over the next 10 years—and I have already mentioned the risk to human health. I urge the Government to think again about their reticence to allow the cull to continue, until the DIVA test is proven, active, working and successful, which I am sure it will be. That point was stressed when the Minister for Food, Farming and Fisheries, my right hon. Friend the Member for Sherwood (Mark Spencer), visited my constituency. It breaks people’s hearts when their cows are taken away, and it is wrong that their health is threatened too; worst of all, the healthy badger population will be diminished as the disease spreads.

The rural economy is brimming with £43 billion-worth of economic potential. We need to cut back on the regulations and procedures that burden the sector. Farmers can spend over 15 hours a week on administrative work. A recent survey found that 86% of respondents believed that levels of farming administration have increased, and I agree. I filled out my SFI form and countryside stewardship forms, and they are extremely complicated. Worse, they cannot be changed very often. An individual can submit a form only once a year. That is fine if they are not going to change anything, but this is a dynamic industry. As a result, we need much more flexibility. A DEFRA tracker found that, when taking account of regulatory and payment changes, over 50% of farmers have a negative view of their farming future.

The transition from the basic payment scheme to the sustainable farming incentive is riddled with problems. Even though the new scheme is supposed to add flexibility to the system, farmers need to wait a year to amend their applications. Fundamentally, the problem is that we have moved from a scheme under which people were given money for the land that they owned, which they considered their income, to one where they have to fill out the SFI form and agree to do things that are not in their interest. Every single rule has a disadvantage to it, which is why we have to pay farmers to follow them. The problem is that when they compare their income as it was under the basic payment scheme with their income as it will be under the SFI, they find that it will be lower. As a result, farmers feel extremely unhappy and put upon.

That is one reason why the underspend by DEFRA is more complicated than the hon. Member for Croydon North suggested. He was right to touch on it, but it is much worse than that, because £200 million every year not reaching the people we are subsidising to provide us with food security is a proper problem for our country. This money is not there to ensure that we do not compete with the French; it is meant to ensure that we can. We really need to ensure that we are not providing public money for public goods alone, but are ensuring that the incomes of the people doing the work are maintained. It is about not just the good of the industry and of nature, but ensuring that the people doing the work get paid for it. That is going seriously wrong. I get a text message from the Animal and Plant Health Agency telling me about bluetongue—that seems to be going on all the time—but I am not getting messages saying when the vaccine for it will appear.

We need to be much more supportive of our farmers in every sector they deal with, because they confront so many issues, not least the consumer market. A recent report found that the retail share that farmers receive is down to 0.03%. Some farmers have decided not to grow carrots anymore because the margins are so small. According to research by the University of London, the University of Portsmouth and Sustain, a kilo of carrots priced at 45p costs growers 14p to grow, yet they make only a negligible profit. Beef farmers make a profit of only 0.03% on a £3.50 pack of beefburgers, even though each pack costs them 90p to make. Dairy farmers will make only a 0.02% profit for each £2.50 pack of mild cheddar, despite it costing £1.48 to make.

Those margins are far too small, and competing with foreign counterparts is a secondary challenge, particularly for poultry farmers, who have to compete with imported chicken. Some chickens may be treated with antibiotics, but the real problem for poultry farmers is the square footage that they are limited to producing on. The one thing that most people do not know about chickens is how long they live for. A chicken will probably be 31 to 36 days old when it goes to be processed, so the square footage that it lives in is fairly dynamic. It changes as the chicken gets bigger, which it does extremely quickly. Because the Americans allow the use of chlorine washing, American chickens can be squished into a smaller square footage than British ones. That is not much good for the chicken, it is much better for the farmer, and the chlorine washing hides the risk to the consumer of salmonella, E. coli and various other chicken-transmitted diseases. It results in lower animal welfare and is bad for farmers in the UK. We have not squared the circle. I am sorry if I have not explained it well enough, but a poultry lesson is always available for anybody who wants one. At the end of the day, we insist on much higher animal welfare standards, and as a result our farmers are suffering and are being outcompeted by those in less scrupulous countries.

Therefore, the most important thing the Government can do is to ensure honesty in food labelling so that customers, whether they live in Croydon or Leominster, can buy chicken that has been properly brought up, properly looked after and kept clean. I say to the Government: please, please—food labelling is really important. “Pasture fed” should mean that the animal has been fed pasture for its entire life, not for the last six months. The benefit is that when the customer eats it, they will have a far better ratio of omega 3 fatty acids to omega 6 fatty acids. Omega 3 fatty acids are what the body uses to make cancer-fighting gamma linolenic acid, so customers need to know what they are buying because it can be good for their health.

We all talk about a food strategy for the UK, but we should really be talking about a health strategy. We should feed our people not just the best food in the world, produced to the highest standards, but the best food for them. In that way, we would not have an obesity problem, we would not spend so much on our health service, and we would give our people what they really want: a happy, healthy and long life. That is my most powerful plea.

But things are not so bad. French farmers’ dissatisfaction with the increasing amount of red tape and greater competition from imports led them to descend on Paris to disrupt a food distribution hub that feeds 12 million people. Belgian farmers blockaded the EU building in Brussels in February, and water cannon were used. In 2022, a Dutch farmer was shot at during the protests in Holland. Fortunately, the bullet just missed him.

The French Government’s response to those protests was to lower environmental regulations. That is wrong in every direction: the farmers should not be rioting, and the Government should not be lowering environmental standards. We have not done that in this country and we do not have revolting farmers—in fact, mine are anything but—so we should look at our withdrawal from the common agricultural policy as one of the great successes of Brexit. The Government must do more to help farmers producing local produce, such as by promoting the “Buy British” button from the campaign that encourages supermarkets to sell British products.

The one tragedy of public procurement is that our armed forces do not get enough British beef and lamb. Of course, supporting British food in schools and hospitals would boost local farmers, but it is very difficult to still get local food from a local abattoir because, thanks to the veterinary regulations, there are not very many local abattoirs. There are some very big ones in Wales, but there are essentially only three major companies slaughtering at any sort of scale. We should therefore look at the regulations that hold local abattoirs back. Most of them are to do with veterinary inspection. The problem with veterinary inspections is that the vets need to be there when the animal is opened up, because it smells different if it is not right inside. The idea of having video vets watching what is going on does not work as well as I wish it did, so we need to go back a step to make local abattoirs competitive.

[Tonia Antoniazzi (Gower) (Lab)]

Hugh Phillips Gower Butcher in my constituency has just closed its abattoir, which is a disaster because Gower salt marsh lamb was slaughtered there. There is a lack of support for abattoirs, and it is hugely costly for butchers to train their staff—it is a very skilled job—and keep their licences, even if they have to close for short periods, so more and more abattoirs will close. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that that is a disaster?

[Sir Bill Wiggin]

I definitely agree that it is a disaster, and it is the cost per animal killed that would have put the abattoir owner out of business. That happened in my constituency as well. One of the biggest problems is that the burden is too high. Of course, for Gower lamb, Hereford beef or any of the wonderful things that are killed and processed locally, without the abattoir those animals have to travel considerably further, so there is an animal welfare problem, and there is a human health risk to not having proper inspections.

However, the qualifications required in the UK are of a much higher level. Very often, when one visits an abattoir, one will see that the veterinary inspectors are from Spain. That is because the qualifications are different and they are paid less. There is no reason why we should not insist on UK food inspectors being qualified differently from the six years it takes to become a fully qualified vet, but that is what we use here, and it seems to be a cornerstone of the problem with abattoir closures—over-regulation and over-qualified meat inspectors.

[Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown]

My hon. Friend is making an extremely knowledgeable speech about agriculture, as I would expect. One of my constituents was prepared to invest a considerable amount of money in portable abattoirs. As far as I know, the initiative has been stalled because of excessive regulation.

[Sir Bill Wiggin]

I am delighted to say not only that I am aware of the portable—or mobile—abattoir, but that a model of it appeared in my house for me to have a look at, courtesy of one of the people supporting the initiative. That is why a more sensible, practical and affordable veterinary inspection regime is what is needed. Then, we could have the mobile abattoirs back.

[Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown]

I gently say to my hon. Friend that it was not only the veterinary inspections; it was the planning, the hygiene, the safety—every sort of regulation under the sun has made the initiative stall so far.

[Sir Bill Wiggin]

Indeed, but the mobile abattoir did not require planning because it was mobile, and cleanliness and hygiene are essential for confidence in human consumption. However, there is at least some margin for improvement on the veterinary bit. When I looked into slaughtering through that particular abattoir, the cost was very high because of the veterinary inspection rather than the other things, although those of course must be dealt with. I completely support the project that my hon. Friend refers to, and I hope to see far more little abattoirs popping up, be they mobile or fixed like the one that closed in Gower.

[Mr Alistair Carmichael (Orkney and Shetland) (LD)]

rose—

[Sir Bill Wiggin]

I would be delighted to give way to the man with the answer on abattoirs.

[Mr Carmichael]

If only. I should remind the House that my wife is a practising member of the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons, and my younger son is three rent cheques away from following in her footsteps.

The hon. Gentleman makes a good and significant point about the nature of the regulation of abattoirs, but there are other forces at play here, particularly market forces. The reason we have seen the consolidation of abattoirs is that it produces a lower unit cost for throughput. That comes back to his earlier point about the demands of the supermarkets and their determination to drive down farm-gate prices. Does he agree that this is another area where the Groceries Code Adjudicator could perform a significant role if it had sufficient powers? If he is interested in that, he may wish to join me in the Adjournment debate tomorrow evening.

[Sir Bill Wiggin]

I can think of nothing nicer than to join the right hon. Gentleman in all sorts of debates. He was a first-class Deputy Chief Whip in the coalition Government. Of course, he absolutely right in what he says about abattoirs. I congratulate his son on being three cheques away from qualification—it is no small achievement to become a vet, so he deserves our congratulations.

One thing that the Government have done right, and about which I am really delighted, is to establish the statutory food security index and make it an annual event. Whether Members agree that we should have a health index or a food security index, all of that will come together, and we will see that our 60% figure is too low. Sixty per cent of the food that we eat is produced here—that is 60% of the food that we could produce, so there is potential for farmers to fill that 40% void. If we look at the world price of wheat, they are not going to be doing it at this rate. It is very, very difficult for some of our farmers to make any money. In 2022, the value of imports of feed, food and drink was £58.1 billion, over double the value of exports of feed, food and drink for the same year. That is an enormous sum, which could be directed towards British farmers if we supported them to feed our country.

The other thing I would like to see is tax breaks as well as grants. Grants are very limited; tax breaks are a much more efficient way of getting farmers to cut their costs and compete with farmers abroad. The Government recently announced a £427 million grant for farming, which is welcome, but it fundamentally misunderstands the sector. We like to use second-hand machinery in farming, but the grant system does not permit that. A better solution would be to offer tax breaks to farmers, allowing them to keep their hard-earned capital to invest as they wish. That capital would also go towards new technologies to generate efficiencies, increase yields, and combat the negative impacts of extreme weather. One of my constituents wanted to buy a hop-drying machine from Germany, so she applied for a grant. It was such an expensive machine—more than half a million pounds—that it blew through the system. There was no way that that grant could be approved, so in the end, she bought it herself.

The hop sector is tiny, but that is why these grants cannot just tick the boxes; they have to be much more comprehensive. When we talk about farming in this place, we talk about it generally, but each sector is completely different on the ground. A hop-drying machine is completely different from a blackcurrant-picking machine. That is all very well, but a cattle crush nowadays is very different from the one that I could afford to buy, and much more impressive. There is a desire to bring in robot fruit-pickers, and that would be great. We already have robot milkers, but the robot milkers we need are the ones that work on a rotary parlour instead of individually. Give us the tax breaks, and we will do the work. Do not tell us how to spend our money, because the grant system is not efficient.

Some 70% of land in England is managed by growers and farmers, and the work that we could do and do to combat flooding is often overlooked. One of the lowest pieces of low-hanging fruit is to allow local authorities to let their farmers clear flood blockages. Most farmers have a digger, and most farmers have a bulldozer of some sort. They have the kit, and that is where the flooding is, but they are not allowed to do anything because they are not insured. That is just mad. Let us make sure that local authorities can authorise a farmer to get in his tractor, put the snowplough on and clear the road. It is not that hard, but it does seem to be for my local authority—mind you, to be fair, almost everything is very hard for Herefordshire Council.

The Environment Agency could also do a great deal more. One little thing that would really help is that the River Wye has phosphates in it from chicken muck, and there is a man in my constituency who has spent a lot of money on building a phosphate-stripping plant. The chicken muck comes in, it goes through the anaerobic digester, the digestate is stripped of its phosphate, and then the muck can go back on the fields. At £300 a tonne, nitrogen fertiliser is very expensive; at £18 a tonne delivered to your farm, chicken muck is a much better alternative. If we want to stop the pollution, we need the Environment Agency to permit activities such as phosphate stripping, so that people can get on with putting on proper fertiliser—muck—instead of buying in fossil fuel-based fertiliser from countries such as Russia. There are all sorts of little things that the Environment Agency could do instead of putting my constituents in prison.

Diversification would benefit from a less rigid planning system, which of course the Government are thinking about at the moment. That rigidity is counterintuitive when a development would be helpful, so I welcome the Prime Minister’s recent comments about allowing greater diversification in farming. I look forward to seeing that legislation in April.

One or two Members have already talked about the need for connectivity. Some 46% of rural deprived areas are notspots for 5G, including most of my constituency. The NFU found that 79% of respondents did not have a reliable mobile signal on their farms. How can we possibly fill in our forms and drive our tractors using GPS when we cannot get a mobile phone signal?

We also need better digital mapping. At the moment the maps the Rural Payments Agency is using are not accurate for hedgerows, and the work needed for hedgerows is even harder because by the time we have filled out our digital map and put in our sustainable farming incentive forms, then, oh dear, we are not allowed to do anything for our hedges because of the wild birds. Then we have to wait, and then the patch comes up again when we can do stuff to our hedges, but we cannot do the same thing for hedge laying as we can for hedge cutting, so it is hard and complicated. Then some bright spark thought we would plant trees in the hedges, and that is absolutely fine until someone crashes into one and then we have a fatality. Hedges are very helpful for many reasons, but not many of them are quite right in the SFI at the moment.

Lastly, there are the issues of transport infrastructure for rural communities and livestock worrying. There has been a 63% decrease in the percentage of under-25s managing farms. That has to change; we are all getting older and that knowledge is needed. We saw it on “Clarkson’s Farm” when Kaleb calved a cow. It is not easy; if you do not know what you are doing, you cannot do it, and you will then have to call a vet and that will spoil all your economics. We have seen it again and again on television; people need to know what they are doing with agriculture. It is exceptionally dangerous. If you get your fingers in the power take-off, you will lose your whole arm. If you try and do things that do not work and turn your tractor over, you will die. And even if you do all right, if you are on your own for weeks on end with very little contact, you may well choose to take your life. I have lost six farmers in my constituency in the past 12 months. Things are not all right and there is no room for complacency, but some of the good things the Government are doing are so welcome.

While I am on a cheerful note, my right hon. Friend the Member for Suffolk Coastal (Dr Coffey) has the Dogs (Protection of Livestock) (Amendment) Bill coming through. We really need it; there is nothing more miserable than lambing a Schmallenberg lamb and then coming back and seeing the remains of your flock torn to bits by one of these pit bulls. It is absolutely appalling, and that is why I support that private Member’s Bill. The damage done to livestock in the midlands alone was £313,000 so this is a really serious problem, and I am delighted my right hon. Friend is doing that.

I am delighted the Government are maintaining their £2.4 billion annual budget, but they should be increasing it. That is the money that keeps us standing still; it is not going to be sufficient to compete with our European competitors or other countries. We need more money, we need it delivered through tax breaks, and we need to make sure that British farmers are supported at every level by honesty in food labelling.

[Several hon. Members rose—]