Agriculture Bill

Earl of Erroll Excerpts

2nd reading & 2nd reading (Hansard) & 2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 10th June 2020 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Erroll (CB) [V]]

My Lords, I have an interest to declare as I am now running my late wife’s farm until we get probate, and maybe for a bit longer. I am very glad to see in this Bill that there will be continuing support for farmers, as many have a very low net income. People always point at the ones who are bigger and better off, but they are also probably very efficient.

Many noble Lords have spoken most eloquently about standards and their intentions are good, so I want to make some observations about the barriers that put many farmers off the environmental schemes. We have had environmental schemes here since the early pilot schemes and the stewardship schemes, so we have been doing it for a very long time. Environmental protection is important, but it must be balanced with food production. The Secretary-General of the United Nations said yesterday:

“Our food systems are failing, and the COVID-19 pandemic is making things worse.”


That is at the global scale, but it is something we need to remember. If we get this wrong, we will not be able to feed people.

The real trouble is that compliance with rules costs money. Our producers need protection from competition from countries where they cut corners and to which we have effectively exported our consciences, so that we do not see where they are broken. We think we can do this by having strict rules on imports, but people launder import papers—it is amazing how things can move around so that they appear to be okay. Most realistically, we must continue to support our home production and underpin it in some way, as we have been doing with the basic farm payment system.

If we want to see good environmental outcomes—we all do; I do very much—we must remember that rules do not often recognise weather. They are very inflexible about certain operations, because very often they just look at one single issue of what is being protected. They also do not take account of local variations in flora and fauna and the normal behaviour of these things. Blanket provision for the whole country, from the lowlands of the south of England to the northern Scottish highlands, are often too crude—seasons move and things ripen at different times.

Inspections should establish whether a land manager is trying to get it right overall or whether they are taking the mickey. Inspectors ought to look at the environmental objective, rather than focusing on minor issues where a mistake, usually accidentally, has been made. Some rules actually hinder achieving the intended objective and we need to work out how to get around that. Inspections should be interactive, and advisory where this would be helpful.

My general theme is to get a good take-up of ELMS. It is important for systems to verify compliance work simply, too. I have been filing our cropping electronically since 2004 or 2005, when it was IAX, so I have some experience of this, and of running digital mapping. The online systems must work reliably and simply. Even now, the BPS is unreliable. It regularly loses one or two fields for us most years—I believe that they are called “parcels in the system”—and I cannot see why. The land use codes do not take proper account of the farming and environmental schemes that are overlapping one another, which can cause confusion. It is quite hard to get your EFA declarations right. Remapping is exhausting and disruptive, and causes problems between schemes, but thank goodness the helplines are very helpful.

I hope that in future the inspectors can also be helpful advisers.