Draft Food and Farming (Amendment) (EU Exit) Regulations 2019

David Drew Excerpts

Tuesday 26th March 2019 General Committees

[Dr David Drew (Stroud) (Lab/Co-op)]

I am delighted to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Gray. We are at it again—now we are revising the revisions. Mistakes were made in earlier Committees, so we have had to come back and review them. In correspondence with me, and I am sure with the Minister, the Green Alliance has said:

“The pace at which draft legislation has been processed has been relentless, with many different areas covered each week. Parliamentary scrutiny has been creaking at the seams with MPs and peers often admitting they haven’t had enough time to review the legislation thoroughly.”

I strongly concur, because we are here doing it morning, noon and night. This is the second of my three SI Committees today; no doubt the Minister and I will be engaging later, unless he is being given time off for good or bad behaviour.

The pace is a worry, because the legislation has been so rushed that mistakes were bound to be made, as we have been saying. As much as we love and trust the civil service, the rate of knots at which it is having to work begs the question of what will happen if some of it goes wrong. In this case, some of it has already gone wrong and we must correct what we did.

The Minister says that these are minor amendments—amendments of amendments—and I understand that. On 5 March, however, which is not that long ago, the European Statutory Instruments Committee noted that the explanatory memorandum says that the instrument

“will, as far as possible, provide that retained EU law has the same effect as current legislation, ensuring that consumers and businesses are able, after exit day, to provide and make use of the same information, presented in the same way as before”.

I am not sure whether that is legal, political or something about interpretation, but it does not give me the greatest confidence that what we are doing will be completely right. It may be that some of it is not right and that we will be back here again next week amending the amendments.

In many respects, the regulations are fairly technical. I will not argue with my right hon. Friend the Member for Warley, who may have different views on GM. In fact, as we are not changing the policy—at least, I do not think we are—we cannot have that argument, as the Chair would tell us.

[The Chair]

I most certainly would.

[Dr Drew]

Such an argument would be unseemly, particularly within the Labour Benches, and this would not be the appropriate place.

I have several things to say to the Minister, because some points need to be brought out, including on minor amendments. Although he has said time after time—we have been here before—that there is no change in policy, the implication of the instrument is that there could be, and to some extent it opens the door to what the future policy changes could be. It is interesting that we are doing this now. As he said, we would not necessarily disagree with the direction of change, but the rate at which change is happening is significant.

I ask the Minister again what the implied costs are of the instrument. It is always said that there is no cost, which is why we do not have a regulatory impact assessment, but according to the European Statutory Instruments Committee, which scrutinised the instrument and moved it from negative to affirmative on 5 March,

“a significant new duty is being conferred on the Secretary of State.”

We cannot all be right. Either significant new duties—not powers—are being imposed on the Secretary of State, or they are not. I would welcome it if the Minister said something about that.

Again, the problem is that there has been little engagement with other organisations. By chance, I had a meeting with the RSPB this morning. I said, “We’re not getting much from you about SIs. We rely on you being the eyes and ears because you are dealing with how this will be implemented in practical terms”. The answer was, “We just can’t keep up with them. We have no capacity.” That was the RSPB, which has 2 million members. It has a fair number of staff and they cannot keep up. The NFU cannot keep up. It says something when the Opposition have to struggle through the policy issues and the organisations working on them with lots of specialists cannot keep up with the rate of change.

There have been some comments from the Nature Friendly Farming Network, which makes a point about the complexity of layers of policy changes, and the different way of looking at things. We are extracting things from EU legislation and bringing them into UK law. This may be a consolidation, but the Nature Friendly Farming Network implies that the changes afoot need to be scrutinised in much greater detail. Its biggest concern is the lack of requirement for independent scientific evidence and input in respect of the replacement of the European Food Safety Authority by competent authorities. I assume “competent authority” means our own Food Standards Agency, but does it have the capability, capacity and interest to be able to take on some of these great changes?

I may disagree with some aspects of GM, but my right hon. Friend the Member for Warley is right that those who believe that the agricultural industry has to change are looking at the science and technology—not necessarily genetic modification, but other ways of looking at how plant breeding takes place.

We have discussed pesticide regimes in a separate SI; those are very important in the regulation of GM. The Nature Friendly Farming Network argued that there should have been much more consultation with farmers and scientists on what is happening and how.

The major concern of the NFU is with no deal and its implications for British farming. It worries that some of the changes have been made in such a hurried way that the impact of a no-deal exit will create uncertainty; I know the Minister will lecture us on why we could have a deal, but we have to look at the uncertainties. The reason why they matter is that this legislation could be enforced sooner rather than later. If it is not right, somebody somewhere is going to pay for the consequences. It is very important that we continue to ask these questions; I have not asked many today, because this legislation is more straightforward and we are revising the revisions.

However, the regulations are important. I am not impugning the civil service, which will understand them, but others who are involved in the issues have to understand them as well. It is vital that we get this right. I am worried about how this issue has come back. Are we getting it right, and what do we do if we get it wrong?

--- Later in debate ---

[David Rutley]

I will reiterate what I said, because these are important matters: the UK Government have not announced how EU GIs will be treated if the UK leaves the EU without a withdrawal agreement in place. I also said that we look forward to further negotiations on the UK’s future economic partnership with the EU. All these things will be considered in that round.

[Dr Drew]

I apologise, but I meant to mention that the annexe of geographical indicators is where most, if not all, of our specialist branded goods appear. What will happen to those? Will we have our own annexe to some future piece of legislation? Will we still be able to go to the EU and ask it to put various UK products on its list? I do not know if the Minister has a ready answer to that, but that issue was picked up by the Committee.

[David Rutley]

We will create our own UK GI scheme, which will protect UK GIs within the UK. We will publish guidance on the day that we leave. I talked about how we will recognise EU GIs in answer to the hon. Member for Edinburgh North and Leith. All those things will need to be negotiated and reviewed as we go further forward. However, I assure Committee members that we are working closely with key stakeholders, not least the SWA, as we take this work further forward. I promised the hon. Lady that I will meet her to discuss this in more detail. We will fix that up shortly. I know that this is a key interest for her, both in her role as a spokesperson and as a constituency Member of Parliament.

Once again, I am grateful for the contributions that have been made. This SI sets out operability changes that are technical in nature, important as they are. As a result of what has been said, I once again commend this SI to the Committee.

Question put.