Common Agricultural Policy and Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board (Amendment etc.) (EU Exit) Regulations 2019

Debate between Earl of Erroll and Lord Beith

Wednesday 20th March 2019 Grand Committee

[Lord Beith (LD)]

My Lords, far from going round the houses, the noble Baroness, Lady Byford, has done us a service by going through the instruments so thoroughly and raising some really important questions—the Minister will have quite a lot to answer. I will say something about these instruments, but I do not want to forget to thank the Minister and his officials for the extremely helpful briefing they gave to opposition parties.

There are five instruments, and their titles are so confusingly similar that the only way to deal with them is the way in which the noble Baroness, Lady Byford, did—as first, second, third, fourth and fifth, which is the order in which they appear on the Order Paper. They deal with very important matters related to farming and rural communities, particularly funding issues. They are interrelated, which is why I think it was sensible to take them together.

The instruments are also interrelated with the Agriculture Bill—the elephant that is not in the room, because we do not have it yet—which interacts with these instruments in a number of respects. The Agriculture Bill gives huge and unacceptably wide order-making powers to Ministers. Some of those duplicate some of the powers exercised in these statutory instruments, so it is quite difficult to view them separately. If the Agriculture Bill ever becomes an Act, it will come into force probably in the middle of a period in which these instruments are in force, or while we are still waiting for the instruments to come into force at the end of an implementation period.

We accept that these instruments are a necessary means of ensuring that we have continuity in what would otherwise be an even more difficult situation for the farming community. They are no-deal instruments primarily; the Minister explained that they will still be necessary even if there is an agreement, but that would not be until the end of the implementation period. They would therefore lie dormant during an implementation period, and that would have to be achieved in the withdrawal agreement Bill, which would be necessary in those circumstances. Of course, we do not know when exit day will be—whether it will be next Friday, 30 June, or some other date—or indeed if it will be. By the time we get to it, these instruments will need to be amended because things will have changed, either during the delay, or during the implementation period, or both. It is hard to imagine that the form in which these instruments are now will serve all purposes in perhaps 20 months’ time, as would be the case after an implementation period.

What on earth are farmers supposed to make of all this? It is bad enough when your work is at the mercy of the weather and fluctuating market prices; but, frankly, it has been easier to forecast the weather—and even market prices—than the Government’s management of the Brexit exercise. That adds another huge dimension of uncertainty and these five instruments would at least provide continuity in the event of a no-deal Brexit.

There are a few issues I want to pick up. The Minister mentioned an intriguing point on the first instrument: the red meat levy paid on imported animals slaughtered within two or three months of import would be extended from EU states to the rest of the world. That sounds like a policy change, and a policy change ought to be dealt with differently, or at least drawn to our attention. Its significance diminishes, however, when you discover that—in the words of the Explanatory Memorandum—the amount of the levy currently collected is “probably nil”. That is a rather interesting phrase to use; perhaps the Minister can explain why it is only “probably nil”, as though nobody knows whether it has been collected at all.

The second and fourth instruments puzzled me—and officials when I asked them—for a different reason. Unlike all the others, they do not necessarily come into force on exit day, whereas most EU exit regulations do come into force on exit day—whenever that turns out to be. If the Minister chooses not to lay either the second or the fourth instrument until some later date, they will not come into force until the day after that. Why the difference, and do the Government envisage the orders not being brought into force at the same time as the others?

The third and fourth instruments abandon the mechanism known as the EU crisis reserve. That relies on deductions from the direct payment pot to create a central reserve for times of crisis in EU agriculture. It is another mechanism that has never been used; farmers have received reimbursement for the deductions in the funding scheme. It clearly makes little sense in a UK-only context—I suppose one could have a scheme for the four jurisdictions within the UK, but it makes a great deal less sense. We have to refer to a different statutory instrument, the next one in the group, to see the accountability mechanism for dealing with it.

It is also in the third instrument that we find that euros will remain the currency on which the whole system of agricultural support is calculated and accounted for. However, I understand that provision may be included in the Agriculture Bill for a switch to sterling. We need to clarify that; I was reassured when I received briefing from officials that neither farmers nor the taxpayer would in the long run be placed in a very different position by currency fluctuations because support is decided at a fixed point in the year. However, it would be helpful to have clarified the Government’s intention in relation to a later switch to sterling.

The fifth order is essential to continue the exemption of various agricultural and fisheries projects and funding streams from EU state aid rules. To the extent that state aid rules continue to have effect post exit, such an exemption is necessary. It of course begs the question of how many state aid rules we will have post exit. The Minister could perhaps clarify; there will be rules that extend because they are in the withdrawal agreement—there may be things which we decide to continue and do not remove because we want to restrain undesirable interference with the market by various forms of state aid. It left me slightly puzzled as to the extent of its impact.

The decision about the future of state aid rules is one of the hundreds of policy decisions which we will have to come to later if exit goes ahead. The battle will then be between those who thought that Brexit meant a bonfire of rules and those who see that many issues in the rules have been developed while we have been in Europe and are valuable to us and we do not want to lose them. That again creates more uncertainty for farmers, because they have been told by the ardent Brexiteers, “Oh, we’ll get rid of all those EU rules; you don’t have to worry about them”, whereas in practice, as the Government have indicated on many issues already, a lot of the things we observe in Europe are things that we believe to be right, and that we advocate and intend to do anyway.

We have had a foretaste of the problems and uncertainties with the publication of the tariff regime only two weeks before it was planned to come into force. While the sheep sector, which is so valuable in areas such as that which I come from, has retained its tariff protection but still faces the problem of potentially heavy tariffs on its exports, eggs, cereals, fruit and vegetables will have no tariff protection. Farmers Weekly called it policy devised on the hoof by a Government struggling to cling on to power.

My last point was raised the noble Baroness, Lady Byford, but it looks forward. Can the government machinery cope with the complex transfer of functions provided by these orders? The noble Baroness raised the question in the context of the Rural Payments Agency and delays to payments. The RPA and Natural England have 14,000 historic environmental stewardship payments outstanding. The RPA says that it is concentrating not on the 2018 so-called advance payments—we can hardly call them advance in 2019—but on the 2017 final payments. Its target is still only to complete 95% of them by July. Tenant farmers with rents to pay need those payments to be made in a timely fashion, and they have a big impact in rural communities on suppliers of farm machinery and materials for agriculture. The system cannot cope at present, so a series of quite complex changes gives rise to worry as to how the system will cope.

The complexity of this is illustrated by the Minister’s admission that there is a small error in one of the sets of regulations before us today. That can obviously be corrected, but one has to bear in mind that this extremely complex process is taking place in an industry that faces a great deal of uncertainty and many other complexities. It is pretty worrying.

[The Earl of Erroll (CB)]

My Lords, I want to say just a couple of things. I am married to a farmer and in the evenings I have to try to sort out some of the paperwork, mapping, basic payment systems—