National Pollinator Strategy

Bob Stewart Excerpts

Thursday 16th October 2014 Commons Chamber

[Sarah Newton]

My right hon. Friend makes an extremely good point. We owe a huge debt of gratitude to volunteers the length and breadth of our country who are doing so much to protect and enhance natural habitats, for pollinators and for a wide variety of species.

I would like to share with colleagues some of the feedback from the bee summit and ask the Minister to consider incorporating the following points into the final strategy. I am very appreciative of the fact that DEFRA’s bee policy lead, Richard Watkins, came to the bee summit—he is also here today—and I pay tribute to the work he has done. He will be able to give the Minister a full briefing on the summit.

I urge the Minister to put at the top of his to-do list the need to integrate pest and pollinator management on farms and to ensure that there is support to enable farmers to do that in the forthcoming changes to CAP payments. Once he has tackled that, there is an urgent need to ensure that all farmers and land managers have access to education about the pollinator strategy and new ways of managing pest control and their crops.

When we consider research on the management of honey bees, there needs to be a clear understanding that the needs of native honey bees will be different from those of their imported cousins, because many of our commercial beekeepers rely on imported bees. However, the native honey bees are very much part of the solution, particularly when looking at how to tackle well-known diseases that pose a threat to our managed bee colonies, such as the varroa mite. I point the Minister to the excellent work of Rodger Dewhurst of the Cornwall Bee Improvement and Bee Breeders Group to encourage the breeding and use of the native Cornish black bees.

[Bob Stewart (Beckenham) (Con)]

May I ask my hon. Friend, who knows lots more about this than I do, whether there is a risk that the imported bees will attack and kill off our native bees, just as the grey squirrels have done to our red squirrels? Have we got a real problem from abroad?

[Sarah Newton]

My hon. Friend, perhaps without realising it, has hit on an important point, and one that was discussed at length at the bee summit. Importing bees may well have health implications for our native species. One of the things that I will ask the Minister to consider today is conducting research into the relationship between imported farm bees and wild pollinators. It is a serious matter. There are also food security issues, because sadly we have seen some new problems arising in continental Europe, such as a new disease that is being introduced to hives by a type of beetle. Although DEFRA has that under control and we do not believe that it poses a huge threat to our bee hives at the moment, the introduction of disease is always a threat when importing bees. That was one of the findings of our summit, and it is on the list of things I will ask the Minister to consider. Also on that list is the need to ensure that we focus not only on honey bees, vital though they are, but on pollinators that are more difficult to monitor, such as bumble bees, which play an important part in pollination.

--- Later in debate ---

[Roger Williams]

I entirely agree. Co-ordination is needed not just within this country, but in other countries, to ensure that the research is productive and can be applied to encourage more pollinators.

Let me say a few words about the systemic neonicotinoids that have been banned in this country and across the EU for two years. I am not sure what figures are most accurate on the reduction in yield, but I do know that the flea beetle is a persistent offender, which can be detrimental to young crops, particularly to oilseed rape and other brassicas. It has been reported that farmers, rather than have just one application of this systemic neonicotinoid, are in fact spraying three or four times in order to safeguard the establishment of their crop. We believe that some of these sprays, such as the synthetic pyrethroids and the organo-phosphates, can be as damaging to pollinators as the neonicotinoids.

These issues are very complicated, so putting into practice any effective pollinator strategy is going to take money—and most of it is going to come out of the common agricultural policy—so that we encourage farmers to do such things as allowing field margins to remain uncultivated. Even more important is active management of those field margins to ensure that flowers and plants can be used by pollinators, but again that is going to cost quite a bit of money.

Let me raise with the Minister an issue I have raised a number of times before—the measly allocation of pillar two money for the United Kingdom. Normally, in most European countries, the ratio of pillar one money, which is the direct payments, to pillar two is 3:1; in Britain, it is 10:1. Our allocation of pillar two money for the next financial horizon is going to be only about £2.2 billion, which has to be spread between conservation and improving competition and marketing in the farming community and rural areas.

[Bob Stewart]

Is that pillar two money decided in Brussels? Do we have any influence on it? Can we do anything about it, or do we just have to sit and wait for a decision from Brussels?

[Roger Williams]

It is decided in Brussels, but the real problem is that it is decided on a historical basis. We have had low allocations of pillar two money for many years. It is believed that if the allocation were made on an objective basis, such as according to the amount of agricultural land, the number of people involved in agriculture or the number of forests, we would have at least 100% more pillar two money. It is tied up with complex issues such as our rebate and the Fontainebleau agreement. When the CAP was renegotiated, I thought that all these figures would be based on objective factors rather than historical factors. However, we have ended up with a £2.2 billion allocation, while France has £8.8 billion and Germany £7.8 billion. It is no wonder that the farming unions are trying to resist modulation and the green non-governmental organisations are going for higher modulation. If the farming unions had co-operated with the green NGOs and gone for a bigger allocation of pillar two money, we should not have had all that argument.

I am not sure whether anything can be done—it seems that the figures have been agreed to—but I think that that was a real disaster, and one of the programmes that could suffer as a result of it is the pollinator strategy, which desperately needs money. I understand that the new environmental land management scheme that DEFRA is introducing can be used for such purposes, and I hope the Minister will ensure that it is.