Farming

Debate between Bill Wiggin and Alistair Carmichael

Monday 4th March 2024 Commons Chamber

[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.

Heating Rural Homes

Debate between Bill Wiggin and Alistair Carmichael

Tuesday 13th June 2023 Commons Chamber

[Sir Bill Wiggin]

All I can say is that those 15% of my hon. Friend’s constituents are lucky to have such a champion in their MP—what a hero for rural sensibility. We are truly blessed to have an intervention such as that. Later in my speech, I may touch on the subject of HVO. What he is saying is absolutely right. We need to be much broader in our outlook about what works for people, not through force, but through choice, so that the people who want to do the right thing can do so, rather than being curmudgeonly bullied—

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

rose—

[Sir Bill Wiggin]

On that point, I will give way to my former Whip Friend.

[Mr Carmichael]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for giving way. I should perhaps declare an interest, as someone who owns a house that is also heated by oil-fired central heating, however inadequately. The point he makes illustrates well what happens when Government intervene to set targets and to insist that things must be done by a certain deadline. We see that time and again. I can tell him and others now that one of the biggest problems will be the lack of available skilled, qualified labour in rural areas and in other places to install the equipment for these things. Would it not be better if on this occasion we were to use a little more of the carrot and a little less of the stick, as he and I did when we were Whips together?

Leaving the EU: Live Farm Animal Exports

Debate between Bill Wiggin and Alistair Carmichael

Monday 26th February 2018 Westminster Hall

[Mr Carmichael]

The hon. Gentleman’s question prompts another question: what control is there to be within our domestic boundaries? It is still possible to transport animals for a very long time within the UK. He is right: there is a need for better enforcement across the whole European Union. Part of my unease about some of the arguments that he and others advance is that their attitude is almost, “Well, we’ll be fine—we’ll take the moral high ground and have the best possible standards of animal welfare.” That will not see the end of veal farming in France. That production will go on, but we somehow seem to think we can draw a line on the map and say, “We’re not going to be part of that.”

That also goes to the point I made earlier to the hon. Member for Bristol East (Kerry McCarthy), to which we have not yet had an answer. A ban that does not ban movement across the Irish border is not a ban at all; it is a ban with a most obvious loophole. No matter what terms we may wish to write in about onward transmission, once the livestock has been moved from the north of Ireland to the south of Ireland we have lost control of it. As was said earlier—it might have been by the hon. Member for North Herefordshire (Bill Wiggin)—when market conditions dictate that a significantly better price is to be had for a product in France, that is where it will go. If there is even only one route to that market, that is the one route that will be taken.

[Bill Wiggin]

There is one other alternative. In that scenario, if we allowed live exports to continue, any animals coming from southern Ireland to France would cross through the United Kingdom, where our inspectors could significantly improve the quality of the transport.

[Mr Carmichael]

If the objection is to sea transportation, it strikes me as slightly ironic that one possible consequence for animals from Northern Ireland would be that, instead of crossing of a few miles across the border to the south, they would end up being put on boats to go across either the north channel or the Irish sea. Again, I fear the law of unintended consequences is at work here.

What is important? What should we be looking for as we seek to regulate this whole area better? I say to the Minister that in looking at this issue, which will constantly be under scrutiny, and rightly so, there is plenty of evidence and research. It is that evidence and research—not sentiment—that should ultimately govern the decisions that we make.