Agriculture Bill (Thirteenth sitting)

Chris Davies Excerpts

Tuesday 20th November 2018 Public Bill Committees

The issue of cross-border properties and farm holdings applies particularly to Wales; I am glad to see that the hon. Member for Brecon and Radnorshire, my friend and neighbour, is here. Again, there needs to be a little more clarity so that we know exactly how these will operate post Brexit. If there are disputes on the Welsh or English side of the border, how can those farms take up those issues? Will they have to resort to costly legal action? Will both Governments be arguing and playing politics? My contention is that, if we were to have some sort of an oversight—an overarching body, an independent council of UK Ministers—that would at least afford us the opportunity to take the matter out of politics and have independent arbitration, which would, I hope, ensure that a particular farm on the border of Brecon or Radnor, for example, did not lose out.

[Chris Davies (Brecon and Radnorshire) (Con)]

The hon. Gentleman has given me a great opportunity to come in. I sympathise with a lot of what he is saying, and my hon. Friend the Member for Gordon, sitting in front of me, has been nodding in agreement on various things. However, does the hon. Gentleman not have concerns, as I do, about certain things that come out of the DEFRA Department of the Welsh Government as a result of having too much authority in cases such as this? I understand his request for a framework, which we are all working towards, but if we give that Department too much power, Brecon and Radnorshire, and Ceredigion, will be in hot water indeed.

[Ben Lake]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention. I acknowledge and accept what he is saying: there is always a danger that we may not agree with what the Welsh Government want to do, particularly with regard to agriculture. I share that concern. However, I assure him that he need not worry and wait for too long—before long, my own party will be in government.

I fear that I have rambled on for long enough. This is a probing amendment, so I will not be pushing it to a Division—

--- Later in debate ---

[George Eustice]

Well, they are similar. Neither has to have a dispute resolution process. Some do and some do not. We have a number of concordats in the fisheries sphere. A concordat tends to be slightly more formal than an MOU, which is a looser agreement.

Let me turn to the points made by the hon. Member for Ceredigion. On subsection (1) of the new clause, we envisage concordats and MOUs pulling Ministers together in the way that I have described. On subsection (2)(d), as I said, we already have processes for managing cross-border cases. On subsection (3), we already have, as I said, the devolution settlement. On subsection (3)(b), about maintaining,

“as a minimum, equivalent flexibility for tailoring policies”

to that which we have in the EU, that is not saying very much—we do not have a lot of flexibility, to be honest, and we would like to give more.

One of my most memorable experiences in DEFRA has been being informed of a dispute that the Welsh Government were having with the EU about ear tags. In Wales, where there are hedges, ear tags can sometimes be pulled off by the brambles in a hedge, so animals used to have one small tag—a metal clip tag—and one larger tag that could be read, but the EU said that that was not good enough and the two tags had to be the same size, so that there were two dangling tags. The matter ended up going to court, and we had to get involved to support the Welsh Government in arguing their case. That is the kind of flexibility that we have in the EU—not very much. We would like to have far more.

My final point is this. Yesterday I was in Cardiff: the occasion was a joint ministerial meeting with the DEFRA Ministers. The meeting was hosted by Lesley Griffiths of the Welsh Government. Lesley put forward a proposal, which we agreed yesterday, that we should put that group of, in effect, the Agriculture and DEFRA Ministers on to a more formal footing, with clear terms of reference established, so that it could manage the EU exit process and possibly have a role thereafter, but also work up a memorandum of understanding about how we approach some of these issues together. Therefore, in addition to the Joint Ministerial Committee process, which itself is being reviewed to try to iron out some of the difficulties and make it more effective, we have a memorandum of understanding under development through the meeting that has been convened with the DEFRA Ministers. As I said, I was in Cardiff discussing that only yesterday.

[Chris Davies]

I thank my hon. Friend the Minister for updating us. May I ask which organisation will take precedence?

[George Eustice]

Always, in a memorandum of understanding or concordat, we are in effect talking about issues that are devolved. They are issues that are technically devolved but on which we all recognise that there is sense in having common frameworks, so we voluntarily come back together for a concordat—to reach an agreement. We do that already in the veterinary sphere, for instance, in agriculture. There is a veterinary concordat whereby all parts of GB sign up to an Animal and Plant Health Agency surveillance programme, and it works very well, so we have demonstrated that we can do this. But ultimately these are areas of policy that are devolved and devolved provisions of the Bill.