Agriculture Bill

Earl of Caithness Excerpts

Report stage & Report: 2nd sitting (Hansard) & Report: 2nd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Thursday 17th September 2020 Lords Chamber

More than anything else, my polite advice to the Government, who breached the red wall in precisely those kinds of mixed rural and former mining communities, is that if these mining communities do not get sufficient assistance, their economies will be strangled, and the Government and the party in power will pay a very high price for that misjudgment.

[The Earl of Caithness (Con)]

My Lords, I welcome these amendments. I have only two questions for my noble friend.

It concerns me that these amendments have been tabled at this stage. Why did we not know about this problem before? Why has it only just come to light on Report? It worries me that we might be letting other issues through.

Are there any other related programmes affecting other industries where primary legislation might be needed to cover the gap, as my noble friend is covering it for agriculture in this instance?

[Baroness McIntosh of Pickering (Con)]

My Lords, I am pleased that my noble friend has tabled this group of amendments to clarify the legal situation in what seems a potentially vexatious area.

I want to place on record how dependent many heavily deprived rural areas have become on parts of the European rural development fund. To quote the noble Lord, Lord Mann, I want to place on record a bid to make sure that any offerings from the shared prosperity fund will include a heavy element of rural development and grants.

I also want to put a question to my noble friend the Minister. What will the natural end of these schemes be? I assume that they will be phased out. If the schemes are rolled over in the specific circumstances to which my noble friend referred, will they reach the natural end of their life by 2023? Will the LEADER programme and the other programmes that fall under the current rural development schemes—they have obviously had much funding from both EU and domestic funds—continue to benefit from the new ELM schemes? Is that the Government’s intention?

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[Lord Marlesford (Con) [V]]

My Lords, I speak in support of the amendment tabled by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of St Albans. What we are talking about is very important and it is heading in the right direction but the approach should be much more about management by exception, as they say in the private sector. Crucial targets and standards should be set and there should be reporting when things go wrong. It should not be a matter of waiting a year, two years or three years. There should be indicators and then the Government should report to Parliament when things are going wrong. It means doing that at the earliest time and saying what is being done to put it right. That is slightly similar to how, in the private sector, companies are required to give profit warnings if the track they indicate they are following is being deviated from. There should be a much more dynamic approach to this question. I would like to see standards set and reports produced when the standards are not being met.

[The Earl of Caithness (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for bringing forward his amendments on this issue. I would still prefer the reporting to be annual, but he has made a move towards us, and I will not dispute his suggestion of three years.

My noble friend Lord Dundee made some interesting and useful points about animal feeds and the damage caused when growing them in other countries, particularly in Brazil, as we have seen recently on television in the Attenborough programme. It is a matter of concern.

More generally, I am concerned about getting too detailed about food security. We must remember that a great many British farmers rely on exports, and if we are restrictive on our imports, it is going to be very easy for other countries to be restrictive on our exports. As the situation stands, I fear the EU could be extremely difficult about our lamb and beef exports in the not-too-distant future. That would have a profound effect on farming, and it is something my noble friend will have to be aware of. Overall, we are not doing too badly on producing our own food. We import an awful lot we do not need for our own diet, but we are lucky to be rich enough to afford it.

[Lord Whitty (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, I added my name to Amendment 53, of the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, in this group because it relates to food insecurity. The point I want to make today, when shortly we are to debate the whole of the food strategy with the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, is that the issue of food insecurity for our poorest households—but not exclusively poor households—is a whole food chain issue. That is why I was a bit disturbed on Tuesday, when it was suggested that this Bill was about the agriculture sector’s relationship with government and government subsidy or support to deliver public goods, expressed primarily in terms of farming’s relationships to the environment, the countryside, biodiversity in the countryside, animal welfare and, perhaps, the wider rural economy.

Those are all vital issues, but arguably the biggest public good is the contribution to the delivery of a safe, accessible and healthy diet to our population. That involves the relationships of farmers not just with the Government or the environment but the whole apparatus of the food chain with which farming trades. Together, they need to deliver an effective food strategy to improve our population’s diet, drastically reduce obesity and other food-related disorders and make healthy food available to all at affordable prices. Food insecurity exacerbates poverty and disease and explains, in large part, the escalating dependence on food banks. That is why we need a national food strategy.

Like others, I served on the Select Committee chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Krebs. The work of that committee, together with that of Henry Dimbleby’s food commission, will hopefully form the basis of that new government strategy. But it will if society recognises the crisis of unhealthy diet is an important one we are all facing, which has to be addressed, in part, through the relationship between farming and the other key players in the food chain.

Much of the regulation on food focuses on farmers, who are generally small businesses, and final outlets—restaurants, cafés, food shops and takeaways—which are also, largely, small businesses. But the nature of the food chain—the economics of it and, to some extent, its whole regulatory structure—is determined by the substantial companies in the middle of the journey from farm to fork, such as processors, wholesalers and supermarkets. These sectors are highly oligopolistic, but their decisions affect the price and standards to which farmers produce, as well as the tastes of consumers and the price and availability of food. They influence via their advertising budgets and their store displays in a way that affects price, diet and the availability of healthy food. These industries spend 20 times more on advertising highly processed food and confectionery than they do on fresh fruit and vegetables. Farmers and consumers need fairer, more balanced, greener contracts as we trade throughout the food chain.

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[Lord Rooker (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, took less than three minutes to move the amendment. I hope to copy that and avoid some of the Second Reading-type points that I have just been listening to.

The new clause is titled “National Food Strategy” and I think the word “national” is important. I shall touch on only three points. Subsection 2(d) concerns public procurement. We do need central control to do something about public procurement. We have devolved so much to bodies such as schools, prisons, the MoD and the NHS in terms of the budgeting. Trying to get national policy without dictating the detail to them is very difficult and needs a cross-government effort. I know how difficult it is to do because I tried and failed. So that is one issue.

My second point concerns paragraph 3 and “developing an assurance scheme”. There needs to be a good government kitemark assurance scheme. To be honest, what we have is not satisfactory, whether it is Red Tractor or the RSPCA. They are all over the place. The public need to have something they can be absolutely confident about, and I therefore think that an assurance scheme that the Government have developed —in consultation, obviously—would carry an awful lot of weight.

My third point concerns the fourth paragraph, on marketing and promotion. Something like 40% of the food in the supermarkets is on promotion. On restriction, I am also in favour of the voluntary changes in reformulation. When I joined the Food Standards Agency, it was almost at the end of its programme to launch the reformulation to reduce salt, which was on a voluntary basis and was incredibly successful. The UN supported it at its conference in London because of the work of the FSA. That work was then removed to the Department of Health behind closed doors by the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, and that was the end of it, in a way. The reductions we have had are nowhere near as good as in the past.

That brings me to my final point. Much of what was required on obesity, and changing the attitude to promotion and marketing, was set out years ago. I only reluctantly mention the names of civil servants, but they have said things in public. Dr Alison Tedstone of Public Health England, who was formerly at the FSA, had all this planned out. She spoke to all-party groups about it when Theresa May was Prime Minister. Theresa May dumped it all—absolutely dumped the programme in terms of advertisements before the watershed and the obesity programme for children. So it is all there; we do not have to invent anything.

My final point ties in with what the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh, said. I have been in the Minister’s place, getting up to say to the House, “Well, it’s in the Bill, we’re going to do it, you’re pre-empting something”, when deep down I really know that if I can get this in the Bill, it will be so much easier when I am back in the department to actually get the policy through. Because I do not believe the timetable that has been set out following Dimbleby 2 can be maintained unless there is a real parliamentary push, and the way to do that is to adopt Amendment 58.

[The Earl of Caithness (Con)]

My Lords, I too had the privilege of sitting on the committee chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Krebs—the Food, Poverty, Health and Environment Committee—and I am grateful to the Government for their response to our report. I would classify it in English as “disappointing,” in Scottish as “peely-wally,” and I think the amendment before us goes a long way towards implementing what was unanimously agreed in the report. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, that to have it in the Bill now is the right way forward to help Defra in the future.

The quality of the food we eat is costing us all billions—costing this country a great deal of money, and unnecessarily. We are the processed food capital of Europe, and that is a number one spot that we should not be holding. It was the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, who said that we want to encourage the production of good, healthy food. I argue that the farmers do produce good, healthy food now: it is the industry, as the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, said on the previous group of amendments, that turns decent, good food into the poison that we are fed by supermarkets—all this ghastly processed food. Some of it is absolutely delicious, and you have to go for a second helping, but it is poison: it is doing us no good and it is costing the NHS, in due course, one heck of a lot of money.

So it is the industry. I remember that on one occasion we were interviewing Judith Batchelar of Sainsbury’s and then the British Retail Consortium. I pressed hard and it took a long time to get a final answer from Judith Batchelar, but she did finally say that Sainsbury’s would not sell chlorinated chicken. The British Retail Consortium, on the other hand, said, “Oh, no, we have no control over our members”. In other words, “We are not going to say anything, and we are certainly going to produce the cheapest food that we can find on the market.” The industry will be called to the table kicking and screaming against any change.

As so much of the food we eat is either fast food or from restaurants, we have absolutely no idea what we are being served. It is one thing to buy something with a label on it in a supermarket or a shop, but it is quite another when we eat outside our home and have absolutely no idea where the food comes from.

On a point of nitpicking detail with the amendment, I would have liked in subsection (4)(d), on food labelling, to have included the effects of climate change. I mentioned this quite a lot in Committee, and I hope my noble friend has read the book by Professor Bridle that I recommended to him, or at least his officials have and given him a precis of it.

Another point we raised in Committee which is hugely important to the whole of our national food strategy is what I would term Whitehall governance. It is not just Defra; there are numerous departments within government that are all involved in the food we eat, whether it is education—through schools—or the National Health Service, or whoever it is. Whitehall governance has also got to improve. It was quite clear from the number of Ministers we had to interview to get any sort of idea of what the Government were trying to do that it is not a joined-up process.

I believe this amendment would go a long way to push that in the right direction. I do not think my noble friend Lady McIntosh is right in saying that it will pre-empt part 2; it will strengthen the Government’s hand when part 2 is published. By that stage, the Government will be a little bit more ahead of the game than they are at the moment.

[Viscount Trenchard (Con)]

My Lords, this amendment would include in the Bill a new clause introducing a national food strategy. I understand that Henry Dimbleby’s team will publish part 2 of their review before the end of the year, and that the Government have committed to publish a White Paper within six months of that. I therefore believe this is the wrong place and the wrong time to try to legislate, as proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Krebs. However, I do agree with many things he said in his introductory speech. In this instance, I tend to agree with my noble friend Lady McIntosh rather than my noble friend Lord Caithness.

I believe that the best way to encourage people to improve their diet and reduce the problem of obesity—which seems to me also worthy of being described as a pandemic—is to produce policies that will maximise prosperity for all. The lower the proportion of household income that basic necessities such as food account for, the more people will choose to buy higher-quality and healthier food products. The creation of another non-departmental public body with powers to influence food policy, including the reformulation of less healthy foods by fiscal means, would run the risk of creating a vast, unaccountable bureaucracy, which would cause distortions in the market.

As noble Lords are well aware, the economy has been badly hit by the Covid-19 pandemic, and unemployment is rising. Does my noble friend the Minister not agree that it is the wrong time to restrict the marketing, promotion and advertising of what the amendment calls “less healthy foods”? Surely it is not good for your health to eat large quantities of certain foods, but modest consumption of many foods containing salt does not harm most people in any way. I worry that a new body, or an existing organisation, that the noble Lord wishes to have oversight of these matters might overstep the mark, besides the obvious risk of tempting the nanny state to be overzealous, which would reduce personal responsibility for matters such as choice of diet and possibly even have counterproductive results.

I think that Henry Dimbleby’s national food strategy can make an important contribution to public understanding of the importance of diet. However, the best way to ensure that a wide range of healthy food is available at reasonable prices is to ensure that our food markets will be free of the distortions that exist today as a result of our membership of the common agricultural policy.