Asked by: Esther McVey (Conservative - Tatton)
Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:
To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what recent discussions she has had with the Environment Agency on helping to ensure that the process for abstraction licences is adaptable and flexible.
Answered by Rebecca Pow - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs)
The Environment Agency has recently invested in significant additional resources to help improve the determination timescales associated with abstraction licence applications and to reduce the number of applications in the queue. Improvements are already being seen. The Environment Agency is also prioritising licence applications and Habitats Risk Assessments which are associated with Rural Payments Agency grants for farm storage reservoirs and has appointed a specialist to help support these applications through the process.
The Environment Agency and Defra are working closely with the sector to help farmers refill storage reservoirs and recover from the 2022 drought, and to improve the sector’s resilience to future drought. This includes improvements to water resources planning, investment in infrastructure, greater collaboration across all sectors of use, and more rapid communications to improve access to water when it is available.
Asked by: Esther McVey (Conservative - Tatton)
Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:
To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, if she bring forward legislative proposals to help ensure that a food risk assessment is made when changes to abstraction licences or restrictions are implemented to ensure that due regard is given to any potential impact on food security.
Answered by Rebecca Pow - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs)
The Environment Agency has a duty to take into account the costs and benefits of its actions. The Environment Agency applies this duty, for example, when considering the need for irrigation restrictions. There is recognition of the devastating impacts that a total ban may have on the yield and quality of crops, so where restrictions are absolutely necessary the Environment Agency looks to introduce restrictions on a voluntary basis first, followed by partial restrictions (e.g., abstraction every other day, or night time only) and then total bans as a last resort. During the drought of 2022, the Environment Agency avoided the need for total irrigation bans by using this approach.
Asked by: Esther McVey (Conservative - Tatton)
Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:
To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, whether her Department has taken recent steps to help support ornamental horticulture nurseries to access the workforce they need to meet (a) market demand and (b) environmental targets.
Answered by Mark Spencer - Minister of State (Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs)
Defra recognises the importance of the domestic ornamental horticulture sector in promoting people’s health and wellbeing, as well as to the economy – UK ornamental production being worth £1.6 billion in 2021. Our highly skilled growers enable us to grow a wide range of top-quality fresh flowers and plants for much of the year. Defra regularly meets with the Ornamental Horticulture Roundtable Group, who last year published their ‘Unlocking green growth: A plan from the ornamental horticulture & landscaping industry’, an action plan which explores opportunities to accelerate the sector's growth and sets out the industry’s potential contributions to the environmental challenges facing the UK. Where Government can help, we will support the opportunities outlined in the plan.
On 24th December 2021, HM Government announced that the Seasonal Worker visa route has been extended until 2024 to allow overseas workers to come to the United Kingdom for up to six months to harvest both edible and ornamental crops.
As announced in the Government Food Strategy in June, an extra 10,000 visas have been released for the Seasonal Worker visa route, with 8,000 of these going to the horticulture sector and 2,000 to the poultry sector. This brings the total number of visas for the horticulture sector, including ornamentals, to 38,000 for 2022. The new Government is carefully considering the position on visa quotas for 2023 and we will say more in due course.
During 2021, Defra undertook a review of automation in horticulture, covering both the edible and ornamental sectors in England. We published the Review on 27 July 2022 and a response from HM Government to the Review’s recommendations will follow soon. The government response will work alongside the extended and expanded Seasonal Worker visa route and Defra’s efforts to attract more residents of the United Kingdom into agricultural work – to support the overall aim of reducing the sector’s dependency on seasonal migrant labour.
All ornamental horticultural businesses are encouraged to advertise roles through the Department for Work & Pensions’ (DWP’s) Find A Job website, where they can upload and manage their vacancies. DWP do not charge for this service and it is available across the United Kingdom.