Neonicotinoids on Crops

Danny Kinahan Excerpts

Monday 7th December 2015 Westminster Hall

[Danny Kinahan (South Antrim) (UUP)]

I am pleased to be speaking today. Like many here, I am a new boy when it comes to learning about bees. However, I followed a wild bee nest at home for about 20 years. Every year it was there; every year it was buzzing. Then, suddenly, it was gone—a badger had climbed up the tree and cleared it out. That is another risk. However, at least that taught me the importance of bees.

I wish you happy birthday, Ms Vaz; I hope you have a more exciting time this evening than you are perhaps having at the moment. I am pleased that those behind the petition have raised the issue before us.

Like everyone else, I want to call for a balanced approach. At home, many farmers come to me saying that the pesticides they use do not work, and that they cannot get the growth they need. On the other side, I have 25 beehives at home—they are not mine—and the man who looks after them is complaining about insecticides, but also about many other things. The neonics are not one of the things he has complained about, although he has complained about the varroa mite among many other issues. We need to concentrate on a whole approach.

I hope the Minister will find a way of balancing what the EU and all the groups here are doing. Equally, I hope he will look at the joint Irish approach being taken north and south of the border; in that way, we will be learning all the time. I am really looking for us to take a dynamic approach so that we are constantly looking at everything, learning all the time, making decisions and, as the hon. Member for Taunton Deane (Rebecca Pow) said, taking no risks. We should make our decisions based on the knowledge we have—if we do not know enough, we should not make the decisions.

[Tristram Hunt (Stoke-on-Trent Central) (Lab)]

The hon. Gentleman is making a passionate speech. Does he agree that this is one area of public policy debate that unites urban and rural? In Stoke-on-Trent, I have a lot of correspondence, particularly from people with allotments. They live in a highly urban area, but they are just as passionately concerned about this issue as people in more rural communities.

[Danny Kinahan]

I certainly agree. I know that both a rural and urban approach are needed, and there are ways of doing that. If we consider what we know today, we can make decisions and move things forward.

I was keen, as a new boy in this place, to set up an all-party group on bees, so I am fascinated to hear that that has been done. I knew very little about the subject, so I started exploring it. When I went to one of its events in September, people from the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds said to me, “Please don’t just go on bees alone; go on all pollinators—the butterflies and everything else. Fine, call it the ‘all-party group on bees’, but we should be looking after all the different insects involved in pollination.”

I had never heard of the solitary bee; what intrigues me about it is that it apparently covers itself in an oil so that it can hide in damp ground. I come from Northern Ireland, where we have lots of damp ground, particularly at the moment, so I imagine we have plenty of solitary bees. The more I got involved in this issue, the more I realised there was to learn.

It has been mentioned today that we have lost 20 species of bee. Let us all learn from that. We need a system that teaches everybody, so that we are all learning about this—children in schools, parents and people in later life, in clubs and in community groups. Let us get everybody involved and learning. That might mean getting councils to use more of their land for beehives and planting the right plants, perhaps at roundabouts and in verges. There are plenty of places we can use.

[Hannah Bardell (Livingston) (SNP)]

Does the hon. Gentleman agree that a key part of this debate is food security and food supply? In Scotland, crop pollination by bees and other insects is of particular importance for oilseed rape, tomatoes and strawberries, which we hold dear. On the matter of engagement and education, would he join me in congratulating organisations such as the West Lothian Beekeepers Association in my constituency, which does its best to support beekeeping at a grassroots level?

[Danny Kinahan]

I certainly congratulate the West Lothian Beekeepers Association. I know there are many such organisations. In Northern Ireland, we have a huge apple-growing, cider-making county in County Armagh, so we know the importance of pollinators.

The petition hardly touched Northern Ireland. I did not have more emails about bees than about Syria over the weekend, but it was pretty close. There is massive interest in the bees issue, but sadly not many people knew about the petition. All of us—including Northern Ireland, Ireland and Scotland—need to work together and learn from one another. There is an all-Ireland strategy; we need to learn from that, and I need to find out more about it.

We need to look at all the other things that affect bees, right the way through to the husbandry and how we all work. I would like to see the all-party group up and running, with us all being part of it, and the Minister using it as a way to sound people out and hear different concerns and ideas. That is the way forward. This is a wonderful thing to be part of. It is nice to have something from Northern Ireland that is not orange or green; if I can make a really bad joke, we did have B Specials, but they are extinct.