Agriculture Bill

Earl of Caithness Excerpts

Committee stage & Committee: 2nd sitting (Hansard) & Committee: 2nd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Thursday 9th July 2020 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[The Earl of Caithness]

13: Leave out from “production” to end and insert “, forestry, and the impact of climate change on agriculture and forestry;”

[The Earl of Caithness (Con) [V]]

My Lords, I shall speak to Amendment 13, which is a very simple amendment. The noble Lord, Lord Curry of Kirkharle, has made a simple and correct speech about his amendment, but his amendment does not include a reference to “forestry”. However, forestry is included in the Bill, in Clause 1(1)(b), which refers to “countryside, farmland or woodland”. I believe that it is just as important for people to be educated in forestry as it is for them to be educated about farming, the environment and climate change, and that is why I propose to add these words.

I totally support what the noble Lord, Lord Curry, has just said. When I was a trustee of the Queen Elizabeth Castle of Mey Trust, we had a small area that was set aside for children’s visits in order to educate them. The noble Lord was absolutely right to mention the huge disconnect between rural communities and the urban people of this country. However, there is also a disconnect in rural communities, because there were people in Caithness who were living very close to farmland but did not know how the farms worked or about the management of sheep and cattle and why it was so important in terms of the effect that had on the environment. I beg to move.

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees]

I call the next speaker, the noble Lord, Lord Judd.

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[Lord Gardiner of Kimble]

I thank the noble Lord, Lord Adonis. Those are very important points, and I will be happy to provide answers to that further range of questions.

[The Earl of Caithness [V]]

My Lords, I first thank my noble friends Lord Colgrain and Lord Shrewsbury for signing my amendment; that was very kind of them. I also thank all noble Lords who have spoken in favour. I think half the noble Lords who spoke specifically mentioned and approved of my amendment and nobody spoke against it, so that was good to hear.

I spoke only on my Amendment 13, but that does not mean I do not support a number of the other amendments; I do. I have one specific point on another amendment, that of my noble friend Lord Holmes of Richmond. I ask my noble friend Lord Gardiner whether Defra will be able to support vertical farming, because that could be a great and very environmentally friendly source of vegetable production.

I very much like what my noble friend said in reply to my amendment. I was particularly pleased to hear his comment that he would like to see the educational groups that would go to farms go to the wheat, the barley and the sugar beet, and then into the woods. Does this indicate that Defra is now taking much more of a whole-farm approach? Will we see this in ELMS? One of the great drawbacks of the current system is that farming and forestry have been split. Does he now envisage a whole-farm approach in everything Defra will do? That would be a useful answer to get.

My noble friend did not explain particularly clearly to me why he thought the rather vague wording in the Bill was better than the more specific wording of the amendments from the noble Lord, Lord Curry, and me. I think he said that there might be other issues the Government would like to fund that are not covered by a more specific wording. Do I take it that more specific wording will come in regulations that we will debate in the House? Before I decide what to do, I would be grateful if he could give me an answer to that.

[Lord Gardiner of Kimble]

I am getting conflicting advice as to when there should be further questioning of a Minister, but I am happy to answer as best I can.

The tier 1 ELMS will be to the farmer across their farm. My understanding of most people’s farms is that they involve agricultural land and may involve copses, covers and other parts that would be involved in a whole-farm project. Tiers 2 and 3 are on a wider landscape level and may involve a range of either farms or other landowners. We discussed the different tiers before, so I am a little confused as to whether my noble friend thought that a farmer was going to apply for tier 1 for the arable land and work for environmental enhancement and Clause 1 objectives, and then have a separate application for what they might do with their woods and covers. No, this will be a farmer undertaking work on their farm.

My noble friend is right that, as I said—I thought I said this on Tuesday as well—the Government distinctly want to have a broad definition, not to curtail it, because we want to work with the farmers, foresters and growers to ensure that when we devise the scheme we do not find ourselves ring-fenced because noble Lords have decided that they have an important point that they must have in the Bill. That would start to make it more difficult. That is precisely why I have said that our definitions are deliberately broad in order to enable us to work with the farmers, the foresters and the growers to ensure that we get the right schemes for them.

I am not sure whether I was permitted to reply to my noble friend in this way, but I intervene now because it is important that he realises that a lot of what we are going to be discussing is best discussed with regard to the regulations, many of which will be made by the affirmative procedure. Then we will we have more flesh on the bone, having had the result of our work with the important people who are going to make all this happen for us.

[The Earl of Caithness [V]]

I am grateful to my noble friend for what he has said, which has clarified the position. I think that I am perfectly entitled to ask such questions in Committee for elucidation of what he has said—as he will appreciate, I cannot ask him a question about what he has said until he has said it—and that is the great value of Committee stage. With that, I am happy not to move my amendment.

[Lord Curry of Kirkharle [V]]

My Lords, I welcome the support that all noble Lords who have participated in this wide grouping have given. I thought that many of their comments were extremely interesting and helpful on the need for local food, sustainability, productivity, ensuring that our environmental objectives are being met and, of course, diversification. I am particularly encouraged by the support for Amendments 12 and 13.

I thank the Minister for his usual excellent, comprehensive, fulsome and detailed response, a lot of which was extremely valuable. I am grateful for the endorsement of the importance of education and of the educational experience of schoolchildren. I absolutely agree with what he said of his experience of that: it is life-changing for schoolchildren, as he described, to experience running through crops and to experience how milk is produced. I stress to him that this support is provided at all levels within the ELM scheme. It is essential that we maximise the benefits available through farms that are willing to host school visits.

In the interests of brevity in my introduction, I resisted the temptation to mention the senior leadership group on skills and the intention to establish a professional body. I thank the Minister and welcome his comments on that and support for it. As he said, it is a critical and essential development. Through him, I thank his department and officials for the invaluable support, advice and guidance that they have given on this issue. On that basis, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

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Moved by

[The Earl of Caithness]

14: Clause 1, page 2, line 11, at end insert “, and financial assistance to pay compensation for damage and additional costs caused by such access;”
Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment is to highlight the extra costs that farmers and foresters can face and discuss the effectiveness of the Countryside Code.

[The Earl of Caithness [V]]

My Lords, I fear that I might not be quite as brief as I was when I spoke to my last amendment. My concern is that at present the Government give access to farmland without compensation or appreciating the impact on the farm. The coastal footpath is one example of farmers having access rights forced on them and this even goes as far as public access to private beaches free of charge. My amendment simply seeks to rectify that by allowing the Government to pay compensation where there is damage and for public access. I believe that the Bill only makes matters worse and I fear that, if we are not careful, the Government will, sadly, start to alienate the farming community as the consequences of this legislation become more apparent.

On Tuesday we talked about rights and the provision of access. Today I want to discuss the consequences of those rights and the other “R” word—responsibility. It is a word that does not seem to crop up much now in the way that we work and it is often ignored. When we talk about responsibility and the countryside, it is the mess that people leave behind that I want to focus on, although there are other issues that I will mention. We have all seen the dreadful amount of detritus that has been left on recent visits to the countryside and parks: the glass, the laughing gas canisters, the soiled nappies, the plastic bags, the fast food containers and every other sort of rubbish. The 25-year environment plan has a lovely picture of Durdle Door in Dorset. Three tonnes of rubbish were collected in one day off that beach alone. In Morecambe Bay, 25 black plastic bags of rubbish were picked up and 12 tonnes of rubbish was taken off Bournemouth beach.

Litter is a hazard to animals and wildlife as well; it is not just an ugly sight for us human beings. In Port Meadow in Oxfordshire, five horses and 10 cows needed treatment and a cow died from eating plastic. We are talking about people’s livelihoods. Sadly, what is not being left on the land is now being washed out to the ocean. We saw yesterday comments about the number of face masks that are being washed out into the seas as people chuck them away after use to try to combat the virus. It was rather dismaying to read that one face mask alone could kill a whale. It is we human beings who are making all this mess and putting such a hazard in wildlife’s way. The RSPCA receives over 7,000 calls a year over litter-related incidents.

The removal of litter costs a lot of money. In the last month it has cost Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens nearly 20% more than at the equivalent time last year to pick up the amount of litter that has been thrown down.

This is not a recent aberration and it is incorrect to blame it on the excitement of being able to get out after lockdown. A survey last year showed that one in five visitors to the Royal Parks left litter behind after their visit. The LitterAction group tells us that the problem in rural areas is more than it can contend with. Worst of all, the Hygiene Council has proclaimed us the dirtiest developed country in the world. That is a bad record to have.

Fly-tipping is a cause of litter, and the Defra figures published last November show that local authorities dealt with over 1 million fly-tipping incidents in the 12 months to the end of March 2019. That was another annual increase, this time of 8%. What should be done about this? I was delighted that my noble friend the Minister said on Tuesday that

“dropping litter should be an anti-social behaviour.”—[Official Report, 7/7/20; col. 1104.]

I hope my noble friend who replies will not use the facile comment that there is going to be another anti-litter campaign. We tried that in 1987, when I was Minister for the countryside. The Secretary of State, Nick Ridley, persuaded the Prime Minister to get involved and there was a great photoshoot in St James’s Park. It helped for a bit, but we seem to have an ingrained ability to forget about these things and to continue in our bad, old ways. Will my noble friend the Minister consider on-the-spot fines or an alteration of the law to increase fines—and to not only increase them, but to enforce them?

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[Baroness Bloomfield of Hinton Waldrist]

I think many noble Lords will have every sympathy with the noble Baroness, Lady Mallalieu, and her experiences on her smallholding. Damage, theft, poaching and the theft of diesel are all criminal acts. If the perpetrator is caught, they can, as the noble Lord, Lord Addington, correctly suggested, be charged with trespass, which can be brought by farmers and owners for damage done while trespassing. The criminal justice system already has these things at its disposal.

My noble friend Lord Northbrook makes an interesting point about the difference between direct damage to livestock by dogs off leads and such things, but I do not believe that fly-tipping has a place in the Environment Bill. It is already covered in legislation. The key to all this, as many noble Lords have said, is better enforcement and perhaps more video cameras installed by landowners so that some of these perpetrators can be caught.

[The Earl of Caithness [V]]

My Lords, I thank all noble Lords who have participated in the discussion of this amendment. I am delighted that I degrouped it from the group that we discussed on Tuesday because it was well worth a discussion in its own right.

Let me first say to the noble Lord, Lord Rooker—I am delighted to see him back with us—that I am not against access. As I said on Tuesday, access to the countryside was essential in getting better after my accident. I was on footpaths in a wheelchair and then on crutches and on sticks, so I am a great believer in public access. What I am trying to balance is the right for us to go to the countryside and get all the benefit from it and what is going to happen to people’s livelihoods and property.

We heard from the noble Baroness, Lady Mallalieu, of some of the problems that she faced. The Minister’s reply was “Well, they’re criminal offences anyway”, but they are not being enforced. Rural crime is rising, and there is great concern among those in rural areas that they are being left out. There are not enough police to go around, and the police are too busy to take rural crime seriously. There is a fundamental problem here that the Government need to address. I hope that the Minister will take this a lot more seriously than she appeared to do when she replied.

The noble Lord, Lord Addington, said that there is going to be no fly-tipping on footpaths. Let me draw his attention to the Defra statistics. In the 12 months up to March 2019, fly-tipping on footpaths and bridleways rose from 164,000 cases to 187,000 cases. That is a substantial increase. Footpaths and bridleways cannot be ignored in this problem. If there is a place that people can fly-tip or drop litter, they will do so. As the statistics from the Royal Parks show, one in five people is prepared to do that. Yes, we are talking about a minority, but it is a minority that can cause severe damage and impinge on people’s livelihoods.

This comes back to enforcement, and I hope that the Minister will spare time between now and the next stage to meet me to discuss this. I think the Government’s intention is right and that their hearts are in the right place, but action is not going with it. I am very frightened, as, indeed, are a great number of farmers, that the provisions of the Bill are not going to help. Yes, they want public access, and I am against farmers who do not give that access and embrace it enthusiastically, but it is only fair that the balance is set out in a better way than it is at the moment.

I thank the Minister for her reply. I hope she will write to me on the questions that she did not answer, such as about what has happened to the fire severity index, and a number of other questions that I posed to her. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 14 withdrawn.

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Therefore, I commend Amendment 77 to your Lordships’ House in its own right, as animal welfare is hugely important to the British public. I agree with the noble Earl that there is no doubt that welfare and health are inextricably linked. These are issues that the British public are gravely concerned about. We need to consult with them directly as the Agriculture Bill is rolled out, put into practice and adapted according to circumstances and events; indeed, that should apply to all elements of the Bill. The Whips will probably be pleased to know that I am going to stop there.

[The Earl of Caithness [V]]

My Lords, I would like to support Amendment 26 in the name of my noble friend Lord Shrewsbury. When I read the Bill, I was surprised to see that

“health or welfare of livestock”

is mentioned in Clause 1(1)(f). Welfare and health have always gone together. When I was a land agent and was much more involved in farming, it was always health and welfare, not health or welfare. My noble friend Lord Shrewsbury was absolutely right to point out that the terminology is important.

There is a doubtless a very good reason why the legal eagles and the department have used these words, but it is going to change how we look at animal welfare. If it is now “health or welfare”, a cultural change will need to take place throughout British farming. This will not take place easily, because that is not how farmers look at their livestock. They look not at one aspect, but at the whole situation.

My noble friend Lord Shrewsbury was also right to raise the question of making us more resilient against disease and health problems. We are susceptible to more diseases as a result of climate change. This is an area on which the Minister, with his biosecurity hat on, is particularly knowledgeable; it would be useful to hear his opinion. What further action is being taken to update our defences, particularly once we leave the EU, against further diseases coming in? I think bluetongue came here from Europe, so defence against disease is going to be important to any livestock farmer and to the health and welfare of our animals. I look forward to hearing what the Minister has to say on this; it is a problem that needs to be addressed.

[Baroness Hodgson of Abinger (Con) [V]]

My Lords, I speak to Amendment 26, in my name and in the names of my noble friends Lord Caithness and Lord Shrewsbury. They have—[Inaudible]—so I will not repeat what they have already said. [Inaudible]—and thus need more health interventions, and I am thinking particularly of indoor poultry and pigs.

I hope that we can transpose “or” with “and” to ensure the highest welfare for poultry and livestock.

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[Lord Greaves]

My Lords, during the last two, three or four months, like everyone else I have had quite a lot of spare time on my hands and have been able to get out into the countryside around where I live, which is on the edge of an urban area where you can walk straight into Pennine pastures, fields with gritstone walls and, beyond there, rising up to the moorland massif of Boulsworth Hill. Two valleys run down from the hills to where we live; they are really contrasted at the moment, as I will briefly explain.

Before I do so, I am sorry that the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, is not in his place. He talked about going out of Sheffield on to the Peak District hills and delighting in what I think he called the song of the curlews, which are one of the evocative birds of the Pennine moorlands. The others are the skylarks and the lapwings, which locally are traditionally known as “tewits” after the sound they make.

During the past three or four months, I have been woken up every morning by the sound of curlews, which is wonderful, but when we first lived there 40 or 50 years ago, we were woken up by flocks of lapwings. I have not heard a lapwing from our house for a long time. Lapwings have declined most in that kind of area up on the moors, particularly in what the amendment refers to as “semi-natural grasslands”.

For us, the grasslands are pastures and fields; they have got tall, quite coarse, natural native grasses, and some better ones. We have some of what the amendment calls “dicotyledonous herbs”, although that really refers to lowland meadows rather than the sort of meadows we have, and lots of clumps of rushes, which are important for giving cover, along with the tall grasses, to ground-nesting birds such as curlews and lapwings—the tewits.

Over the years, the fields have been improved. Those nearest to us used to be buttercup meadows. They have long gone, and now a lot of the coarser semi-natural meadows have gone as well. The farmers scrape off all the vegetation which has been growing there and seed it with one or two species of much richer and, from their point of view, more productive grass, mainly for the sheep but also for mowing, haylage and so on.

The landscape has been transformed. The fields in spring, instead of being a greyish green—natural, as they were, or semi-natural—are now sparkling bright green, and no doubt some people find them attractive. The two valleys, however, are contrasted. One is the Wycoller valley, which largely belongs to Lancashire County Council—Wycoller Hall is thought to be Ferndean Manor from Jane Eyre—and the other is the Trawden valley, which has the old mill village of Trawden it and lots of farms around. The Trawden valley is bright green and the Wycoller valley is still very much as it was. How do you know where you are? If you close your eyes, in the Wycoller valley you can hear the tewits and in the Trawden valley there are none. It is as simple as that.

So it is not just lowland meadows that the amendment is talking about. I hope the new regime will stop farmers turning even more of the pastures into modern bright green pastures and driving away the tewits, which is still taking place at the margins and the moorland margins. The tier 1 or tier 2 deals that come about, whichever they are, encourage a reversion of at least some of the fields to what they used to be. If you have a farm of six or 10 fields, you do not need a lot of it to revert to the traditional pasture that it used to be to provide a flock of lapwings with a habitat; you might need one or two, and that is all. As you walk through that area, you can plot the flock of lapwings to the fields that are still traditional.

I hope that kind of thing will be part and parcel of the new regime, not to destroy farmers’ livelihoods in any way but to provide them with some finance to provide a natural, or semi-natural, environment that superb birds such as lapwings and tewits require.

[The Earl of Caithness [V]]

My Lords, before I go on to talk to the amendments, I want to reiterate the point that the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, made earlier today and make a plea to the Minister and the Whip to talk to the Chief Whip about the groupings. Can we please go back to the old way that used to happen in Committee, whereby the movers of amendments spoke first and then the other signatories spoke afterwards? All the signatories to my amendments have spoken before me, and on the next group of amendments I am a signatory to an amendment from the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, but she, as the mover, is speaking after me. It really does not help proceedings unless we get back some sort of structure like we had in the old days.

I turn to the amendments. This is a hugely important group because I believe that the only way that farming will survive in this country is if we work with nature. All these amendments are designed to help farming to do just that. There is considerable overlap between them. I shall speak to Amendments 39 and 96 in my name, which relate to nature-friendly farming. Not everything that nature-friendly farmers do is covered in the Bill. For instance, what about the creation of new habitats, ponds and wetlands? That leads to another problem, because the creation of some ponds will require planning permission. Therefore, as I said, you need dedicated farmers who are very keen to help nature to carry out such work. A farmer taking these schemes solely to get money from the taxpayer is not someone who is going to apply for planning permission for a new pond. There is no mention in the Bill of field margins and hedgerows. These are hugely important as wildlife corridors, and nature-friendly farming is a great help in that respect.

It is tragic that we have seen the decline in 600 farmland species over the last 50 year. Of course, none of us now has the problem of having to wash our windscreens having driven through the countryside, particularly at night. That is long gone. When I first started driving, one had to wash one’s windscreen after every drive because of the number of insects that got stuck on it and impeded the view. It would be nice if we could go at least half way back to the situation that we were in.

I will just make a point on what the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, said about lapwings. I know a farm in Caithness where the farmer has farmed organically since he took over the farm—gosh—it must be 30 years ago now. He has farmed in a nature-friendly way, but the number of lapwings has decreased hugely. There used to be lovely big flocks, but now there are very few. The problem is, it is not the farming system—that is not totally responsible—but the fact that we do not control the predators of lapwings and lapwing eggs and nests, such as the hooded crow. When I was a boy, the hooded crow was a very scarce bird; it is now very common. When I last lived in Caithness, about four years ago, I remember seeing five hooded crows on the lawn outside my little cottage. They just would not have been there when I was a boy. Unless we get to a stage where we can control the number of corvids and the abuse by corvids of ground-nesting birds, there will be a continual decline, whatever system of farming one operates.

I have also put my name to the agroecology and agroforestry amendments, because these are hugely important too. They are slightly different ways of farming from nature-friendly farming, but they of course work on exactly the same principle of working with nature.

I pay tribute to the work of the Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust, Nature Friendly Farming and Agricology, which have been working together for five years. The Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust, the Organic Research Centre and the Daylesford Foundation have together done a tremendous amount of work in this area and I can tell the Minister how grateful they are for the financial support that Defra has given them. It is exactly from institutions such as this and the demonstration farm at Allerton that other farmers can learn how to carry out these works and the benefit that they can contribute to their own farms. I hope that, when responding, my noble friend will say that this funding will continue.

I turn to Amendment 224, which is on soil. It requests that the soil metric index is instituted. This was of course in the 25-year environment plan, from which it is worth quoting:

“Farmers and land managers can struggle to monitor the quality of their soil, which in turn makes it difficult to improve. We will develop a soil health index (including indicators such as the level of humus and biological activity in the soil) that can be used on farms to check whether their actions are having the desired effect. At the moment, data on soil health is held piecemeal by different institutions and businesses. It is not easy to access or use. Defra will invest at least £200,000 to help create meaningful metrics that will allow us to assess soil improvements, and to develop cost-effective and innovative ways to monitor soil at farm and national level.”


Can the Minister say what is the result of that work? Is there any progress? What is the progress? Can she please update us on it?

It was encouraging to hear the Secretary of State respond to the Environmental Audit Committee in the other place recently, saying he was considering a combination of approaches to address soil problems, and a more sustainable approach to grade 1 and grade 2 agricultural land, focusing on soil health and crop rotations. What is this going to involve? Can the Minister shed some light on these very encouraging statements?