Agriculture Bill (First sitting)

Colin Clark Excerpts

Tuesday 23rd October 2018 Public Bill Committees

[Mr Goodwill]

Similarly, I draw the Committee’s attention to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests, particularly my membership of the Country Land and Business Association and the National Farmers Union. I have a family farm in North Yorkshire of 250 acres, which we have farmed since 1850. We are currently engaged in a high-level environmental scheme on that farm.

[Colin Clark (Gordon) (Con)]

Can I declare my interests? I am a farmer in receipt of the single farm payment. I am a member of NFU Scotland and an organic producer.

[The Chair]

I now ask the witnesses to state their names and the organisations they represent for the record.

Gilles Deprez: I am Gilles Deprez, the managing director of Greenyard Flowers. We are a farming operation in Cornwall specialising in the production of daffodils.

Thomas Lancaster: I am Tom Lancaster, principal policy officer at the RSPB. I lead a lot of our work on current and future agriculture policy.

Patrick Begg: I am Patrick Begg, outdoors and natural resources director at the National Trust.

Martin Lines: I am Martin Lines, UK chair of the Nature Friendly Farming Network and an arable farmer in Cambridgeshire.

--- Later in debate ---

[Deidre Brock]

Q Can you give us some examples?

Thomas Lancaster: Yes. We want to see a duty in the Bill to have an environmental land management scheme in England. At the moment, it provides the powers for that, but there is no certainty about whether Ministers will choose to use them. That is one of the few backward steps from the common agricultural policy, which through its rural development programmes requires member states to have an agri-environment scheme. Because of that requirement, there are four agri-environment schemes across the UK.

A second duty that we have called for is an annual assessment of the funding required, particularly to meet the purposes in clause 1. A third is for current and future Ministers to use the powers in the Bill to improve transparency in the supply chain and strengthen the position of the farmer in it.

Patrick Begg: I back up what Tom says. I am not sure that our organisation is worried about the powers, but we will certainly be asking for duties to fill the gaps, such as a duty to create multi-annual payment settlements. That is not exceptional; the Highways Agency do it and the Environment Agency do it for flooding. It is a question of creating confidence and certainty within the farming industry that it will stick and that people can invest with confidence. We would also wish for a duty to get an independent assessment of the quantum of money required to deliver the aspirations set out in clause 1.

Martin Lines: There are lots of powers in the Bill, but the concerns for farmers in the network are about who can use them and how, and what triggers them. Some of those powers should be duties. It is about the long-term view of how we need to manage and be managed as farmers.

Gilles Deprez: My two main concerns are about points that I have highlighted. The first—I am not sure whether it is right or wrong—is about being competitive, not only with UK farmers but worldwide, because we are a very fragmented market.

My second concern is that innovation is not really highlighted in the Bill. In chemistry, for example, there is a kind of mutual recognition: if one country recognises something as an innovation, it goes through the system a lot more quickly. I do not see that in the Bill. We must not block innovation; it needs to be key in business, in order to look at the future and be competitive.

[Colin Clark]

Q ADAS produced a report in 2016 that stated that a

“‘Public Money for Public Goods’ approach…would be a radical change and one that would certainly need to be tested for efficacy before adoption.”

Do you agree that the seven-year transition will be adequate for testing? We have heard from Mr Lines that people already have good practices. Is seven years enough time to activate a policy, considering how long it takes to grow hedges, trees and cover? Or will we have to come up with policies like those that you are already using, Mr Lines, on your farm? Patrick Begg, you mentioned the public good.

Patrick Begg: Yes. Seven years is actually a little bit longer than we have called for, but I can see why that was done; the last thing we need is a cliff edge. If you think about it, it is in fact 10 years from now—a seven-year transition is effectively 10 years from today, give or take a month or two. If you consider change programmes—this might be one—generally speaking, you need to get going with stuff, and the sense of urgency is a good stimulus for things to happen well. I think the balance of seven years is probably about right in the end.

DEFRA has a programme of tests and trials work that starts next year. That will start to land on the ground, and we will be able to test mechanisms. On seeing outcomes, we have plenty of evidence of the things that work; I do not think we necessarily need to test the outcomes. We know how to deliver the things that have been set out in the Bill; the issue is just the mechanisms by which the farmer is adequately supported to make the change and to deliver those in an effective way.

[Colin Clark]

Q This is a question for Mr Lines. I am a practising farmer myself. There have been EU environmental policies that have not worked: the three-crop rule ended up being quite damaging, and even set-aside created an enormous weed bank. Are you satisfied that we will avoid those mistakes?

Martin Lines: I am only satisfied if we are going to engage as farmers and have input into how this will be managed. We want practical farmers engaging in what will be the land management plan, and in what we can achieve. Through stewardship in the last 20 years, we know what can be done, what cannot and what does not work in different areas. The network has a whole number of farmers—me included—who want to get out of the current system as quickly as possible and move on to the new system, because it just does not work for my farming business. It is over-bureaucratic. It measured down to 10 cm around the edges of my fields. Let us have a holistic, balanced approach to how we produce stuff; let us have the environmental measures around the outsides or in different parts of the field that fit my farming system, and let us be flexible on how I want to deliver that farming system—and let us, hopefully, be rewarded well for that by the marketplace for the food I produce, and by the public payments for the other areas. Ten years is plenty long enough for me to get on with that.

Thomas Lancaster: I would agree that the timeframe in the Bill is enough from our perspective. It is welcome that that timeframe is in the Bill. Once it is set, we just need to stick to it, because if we do not, we will get this sort of Brexit drift—there is so much other stuff going on that the temptation will be to kick the can down the road, which will not serve anyone’s interests.

We would like to see a bit more policy richness and detail around the transition, not just on the time and the piloting of land management schemes and how the public good element is going to be provided, but also on how we can transition to a sector that is more market-facing, more profitable and more resilient to market fluctuations. Importantly for us, there are sectors where there is no real culture of thinking about profitability first. The evidence pack that came with “Health and Harmony” showed that there were whole sectors where business planning was down at 17% or 18%. We think there is a role for the Government and for the sort of active state that the Prime Minister has talked about, in terms of investing in business and skills advice, knowledge exchange, research and development and those sorts of areas through the transition, to enable farmers to get to the point where they get a market return for the food they produce, and also a return from public payments for the non-marketable services and goods that they provide.

[Colin Clark]

Thank you.

[Jenny Chapman (Darlington) (Lab)]

Q For better or worse, you have operated within a framework guided by the European Union for as long as probably all of you have been in the business. You have talked about mutual recognition and standards. Do you think the Bill could be doing more about not just undercutting within the UK, which you have talked about, and within different nations of the UK, should they choose to take different paths on some issues, but also about undercutting from overseas imports in the future? How significant a risk do you see that as being, and do you think this Bill is doing anything that could help relieve that anxiety?

Patrick Begg: I would say it is a very significant risk. You would find cross-sectoral agreement that more needs to be done—probably in the Trade Bill—around ensuring that imports do not undercut the environmental standards we already have and are talking about cementing for the future. Without that, it is a huge risk.

Martin Lines: Trade deals are going to be massive. We do not just want to have high standards here and export our environmental footprint; we want to be leading here, exporting those high standards, and buying produce from abroad that matches those high standards. There is a lot of concern around that.

Thomas Lancaster: I would agree, certainly on international trade, standards and imports. As Patrick says, we are speaking with one voice with the National Farmers Union and the Country Land and Business Association and other farming and food organisations on that point. In terms of UK co-operation, agriculture is a devolved policy, and it is right that individual devolved Administrations should have the flexibility to develop policies that are right for their country. We would like co-operation on issues such as how those policies are designed and how we can prevent market distortion. From our perspective, environmental challenges are transboundary—there are shared catchments that span borders within the UK—so how will we secure environmental outcomes across boundaries through future agriculture policy? That is a huge unanswered question.

Martin Lines: I would like to see the Government leading the way in procurement of their own food. Governments throughout the UK buy huge amounts of food. Where are you setting the higher standards in trying to procure that food locally and sustainably, and leading the way? That sets the direction for the rest of the public to follow.