Common Agricultural Policy

Geoffrey Clifton-Brown Excerpts

Monday 7th July 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr Spencer]

I recognise that new technologies may be able to assist, but there will always be not spots—those little black holes—where people are left out of the system. We need to find a way to help those farmers.

I think that the three-crop rule is one of those well-intended European Union rules that will have unintended consequences. My right hon. Friend the Member for South East Cambridgeshire (Sir James Paice) has referred to the fact that many areas are block-farmed. Large contracting companies that help their neighbours with farm contracts and that block-crop from farm to farm will no longer be able to do that, which will lead to a number of extra road miles, inefficiency and environmental damage as a result of the amount of fuel burned and road traffic. That is not a desirable consequence and it will not benefit the environment at all.

[Geoffrey Clifton-Brown (The Cotswolds) (Con)]

I draw attention to my declarations in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. Does my hon. Friend agree that a solution to this problem would be that every single piece of land eligible to claim should grow three crops in three years, which would eliminate the problems of the mono-cropping of maize in Germany and, as I saw last week, between Paris and Strasbourg?

[Mr Spencer]

If I could extend my hon. Friend’s proposal to three crops in five years, that would allow for a normal cropping rotation of two weeks for oil seed or pulse, followed perhaps by a spring crop. We do not recognise some of the challenges that face UK agriculture today as we take more and more agricultural chemicals out of our toolbox. The rise of resistant black grass, certainly in the midlands and East Anglia, is a real challenge and we are going to have to allow spring cropping to deal with it.

On the 5% greening, I am glad that the Government are allowing hedgerows to be used. We must, of course, move as quickly as we can to incorporate stone walls and other environmentally beneficial margins at the same time. If the mapping has to be digital, I remind Members of the challenges the previous Administration faced while trying to move to a mapping system. If I may use a Sherwood expression, the Minister must make sure his ducks are in a row and that, when we get to that system, farmers can get their payment as soon as possible. If there are delays, and if the system is complicated and farmers have to wait for their single farm payment, will the Minister engage with the banking sector to make sure that the banks support farmers through that break in cash-flow and that there is other such support?

In summary, three things matter to this nation: that we are well fed; that the environment is maintained and protected; and that, in order to deliver those things, we have profitable farmers. At the end of this monumental process of CAP reform, I hope that we can deliver all three of them.

--- Later in debate ---

[George Eustice]

Well, I think there was quite a degree of consensus. I suppose we have to recognise that the last Government gave up a chunk of our rebate supposedly in order to get CAP reform, but that did not work either. I want to stay on the substance of the issue before us this evening, however.

In terms of applying this basic approach of keeping the pillar one payments as simple as possible, when it came to greening we were clear we wanted to have the flexibility to allow farmers, for instance, to use hedges to count towards their environmental focus areas.

[Geoffrey Clifton-Brown]

The inclusion of hedgerows as being eligible for pillar two payments is one of the Government’s successes. On that point, while many areas of the country have hedgerows as field boundaries, there are other areas, such as the Cotswolds, that have stone walls as field boundaries. May I ask him to press the Commission hard that those sorts of landscape features should also be included for payment?

[George Eustice]

There were serious administrative difficulties in terms of allowing hedgerows and all landscape features to count towards the environmental focus area, because each one has to be mapped, and we took the decision in the end that hedgerows were so important to many parts of the country that in the first year we should include those hedgerows and endeavour to get the mapping done, and where it could not be done in year one—we have three years to complete the mapping— farmers would self-declare the hedgerows. We do not rule out adding things like stone walls in years two or three, once we have got hedgerows in place. The task of mapping every single individual feature on every farm is an enormous one, however, and we therefore wanted to start first with hedges, before moving on to things such as dry stone walls.