Pig Farming

Graham Stuart Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd March 2011 Westminster Hall

[Dr Poulter]

I thank my hon. Friend for that, and I look forward to the Minister covering that that in his concluding remarks.

[Mr Graham Stuart (Beverley and Holderness) (Con)]

My hon. Friend is making a powerful point about the need for a level playing field. Pig farmers in my constituency are not asking to be given any artificial support; they are asking to compete on a level basis. They go to other countries and see farmers putting in new sow stalls when they themselves spent hundreds of thousands of pounds per unit replacing their stalls 10 years ago, and they are rightly upset. Does my hon. Friend agree that other countries should not be allowed a derogation in due course? If our farmers have had to make that investment, so should farmers elsewhere and they should not be allowed to import their meat into this country unless they follow the same rules.

[Dr Poulter]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right and makes the point very powerfully. The fact is that there is not a level playing field, particularly in the European Union. Stricter EU animal welfare laws for pigs have been agreed, but they will come fully into force only in 2013. As he forcefully argues, we need those standards to be applied in Europe. However, it is not just a question of standards being applied universally; our supermarkets must also show corporate responsibility. If overseas food producers do not produce food to the same high standards of animal welfare and traceability as British farmers, our supermarkets should not buy food from them. We need to see that corporate responsibility from the industry.

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[Mr Graham Stuart]

I do not know whether the hon. Gentleman, from the rural idyll that is his seat, will be able to answer this question. He said that he wants the Government vigorously to act on food labelling. Why was so little done during the 13 years of the previous Administration, although I know he was here for only a little while during that time?

[Mr Bain]

I am grateful for the hon. Gentleman’s intervention. I remind him, as I did the hon. Member for Christchurch (Mr Chope) during a debate on the Sustainable Livestock Bill some months ago, that there are three arable farms at the very top of my constituency. I am hoping to visit them during the Easter recess. Indeed, I have had a good discussion with the National Farmers Union Scotland on a range of issues in the past few weeks.

The hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness (Mr Stuart) raises an interesting point. We can bat around what did or did not happen during the past 13 years, but what will certainly be most effective is cross-EU standards in this area. He knows that the food labelling directive is before the European Parliament, and that it may have a Second Reading by early summer. We should focus our efforts and show unity across the House on getting decent standards that will protect the pig industry and other parts of our arable and livestock farming industries.

I want to address the anomaly that the hon. Member for Central Suffolk and North Ipswich pointed out—that is, food that is processed in the UK can be labelled as produced in this country. We need reform and clarity across the EU through regulations to deal with that issue.

The third area in which we seek Government action is in respect of a plan for the food industry. The previous Government commissioned the report “Food Matters”, under the auspices of the Cabinet Office, and the study “Food 2030”, under the auspices of the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, but circumstances have moved on. The Foresight report sets out new challenges for better use of water and soil. It also sets the global challenge of feeding 9 billion people by 2050, but with potentially fewer resources—increasing food production by 50%, but in a sustainable way.

To meet the challenges of sustainable food production, which the pig industry will be involved with, and to show that we can meet our climate change reduction commitments, the Opposition and the NFU call on the Government to adopt a proper plan for food, which should include the pig industry. If there is to be a plan for growth arising from today’s Budget, the UK’s largest manufacturing industry—namely, agriculture—cannot be left out. The plan should contain strong proposals for a groceries code adjudicator with the statutory power to tackle unfairness and inequity wherever they are found throughout food supply chains. As hon. Members have pointed out, such an ironing out and levelling of the market would be enormously beneficial to our pigmeat producers.

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[The Minister of State, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Mr James Paice)]

I too, welcome you to the Chair, Mr Bayley. I genuinely congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for South Norfolk (Mr Bacon). During his time here, he has been a stalwart supporter of the pig industry, and I am sure that that is not because of his name. His Bill, to which I shall return, is being presented to the House for the fourth time, which shows his determination. I have attended innumerable breakfast and other meetings that he has hosted on the pig industry, and it is fortunate to have someone who is so determined to support it and the pig producers in his constituency.

On one occasion, most of the Suffolk and Norfolk MPs were in the Chamber, which demonstrated not just the importance of the concentration of the pig industry in those two counties—[Interruption.] My colleagues from east Yorkshire also joined us. Those are the main pig producing parts of the UK, and the fact that so many hon. Members decided to attend demonstrates the importance of the pig industry to them, and it reflects the lobbying that has taken place. As a former pig producer in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Central Suffolk and North Ipswich (Dr Poulter), I entirely understand its importance.

As my hon. Friend the Member for South Norfolk rightly said, the industry is vital. He said that its total value is £8.7 billion, which is a significant sum in the retail sector. Others hon. Members have referred to the collapse of the pig herd since the mid-1990s. It is impossible to say precisely how much of that is attributable to the unilateral ban on stalls and tethers that we introduced, but it is obviously a significant part.

One of the changes over 20, 30 or 40 years has been rationalisation into specialist pig units. Years ago, pigs were one unit on a generalised farm, and a rise in grain prices had less impact, because farmers were feeding their own grain to their pigs, so they lost on one side and gained on the other. Now, more and more farmers are specialist pig producers, and must buy all their feed, so they can only lose from rising grain prices.

I shall try to address some of the issues that have arisen during the debate. My hon. Friends will be aware that there has always been pig a cycle. Pigs have a relatively short gestation and growth period, so the rise or fall in supply is a reasonably short-term phenomenon. They were always muck or money as supply and demand fluctuated slightly, but the level of fluctuation has become much worse, and the £20 a pig loss to which several of my hon. Friends referred reveals a dramatic downside of the cycle. It is unfortunate that the cycle was already beginning to drop off when feed prices were hiked up because of the grain price. That exacerbated the problem, but we are there, and the situation is horrendous.

My hon. Friend the Member for South Norfolk referred to some of the costs that our producers incur. Stalls and tethers were first phased out in the early 1990s, and were banned completely by 1999. Tethers were banned in the rest of Europe in 2006, and stalls will be banned by 2013, although, as my hon. Friend correctly pointed out, it will be permissible to keep sows in stalls for up to four weeks after service, and that brings me to the question asked by the hon. Member for Glasgow North East (Mr Bain). I assure him that the Government are absolutely opposed to any extension or derogation. As with battery cages for chickens, countries have known for a long time that the change was coming, and farmers have no excuse for not making the transition.

The hon. Gentleman asked me quite rightly about enforcement, and the fact that farmers will be allowed to have stalls on their farm in which to keep sows for four weeks will create a big challenge. Responsibility for enforcement will rest with the competent authority—usually the Department of Agriculture in member states—and I recognise the issue. We must keep pressing the Commission to ensure proper enforcement, because that is a worrying loophole.

[Mr Graham Stuart]

Will my right hon. Friend say whether the Government have consistently made the case that there should be no derogation after 2013, and whether he has any idea of when the Commission might publish details on enforcement? The earlier we see the proposed enforcement mechanisms, the more we will be able to influence them before they are introduced, when they will be harder to change.

[Mr Paice]

The answer to the first part of my hon. Friend’s question is that we constantly tell the Commission that when a rule is introduced, every country should comply with it, and that there should be no derogations. He is right in saying that we have not seen any proposals for enforcement, and I am not aware that we have seen any assessment of what stage other countries are at. There were efforts to do that with conventional battery cages, but there were difficulties. The matter is important, and I will chase it up to see whether there has been any assessment of what other countries have done. To be fair, we know that many countries with a significant number of pig farmers, such as Denmark, which is a major pig producing country, have converted, but I cannot tell my hon. Friend precisely what the proportions are and how many remain to convert.

The hon. Member for Glasgow North East challenged me on whether we would support an intra-EU ban on those countries that have not introduced the measure. I shall be completely honest, as I always try to be. We have not considered that yet, but he makes a valid point. I made the point about eggs, and there is no logical reason why we should not do the same for pigmeat. However, we want everyone to convert, and until we see some sort of assessment, we cannot speculate too much, but I entirely accept the hon. Gentleman’s point.

I have just been passed a note saying that no official information is available about how far EU countries have moved towards complying with the directive. Denmark and the Netherlands have said that they will comply, but the situation in some other countries is different and vaguer. There are different rules on castration and tail-docking in different countries, and there is a competitiveness issue. Some hon. Members referred to supermarket specifications and, as my hon. Friend the Member for South Norfolk said, claims by Tesco and others about their supply sources. It is reasonable and acceptable, of course, for retailers to ensure that their supply chains comply with British standards, and it is not in the Government’s gift to check whether they do. There is no doubt that tail-docking and castration rules are different in other countries, and it is only right and proper that they should insist on the same standards. I shall return to the supermarket issue.

That leads me to my last point on welfare. My hon. Friend the Member for Suffolk Coastal (Dr Coffey) referred to pigs being kept outdoors. Anyone who drives through Suffolk and South Norfolk will see that tens of thousands of sows are kept outdoors, even through the recent winter and the snow before Christmas. There is no doubt that keeping pigs outdoors is more expensive in production costs. Productivity is lower, there are not so many pigs a year from the sows, and growth rates are slightly affected. Those systems are being adopted because the drive for better welfare from retailers has pushed them that way, but higher management standards are required and farmers do not receive the price for their pigs that that higher standard demands.

I was with a group of Agriculture Ministers in Belgium before Christmas, and we were taken to a modern, highly efficient Belgian pig farm operated in totally enclosed buildings, where the hygiene must have been incredible, as there was no disease. Nevertheless, there were just spartan, bare shelves with a few rubber balls hanging on chains for the pigs to play with. Those pigs compete with our pigs, which are reared outdoors. Apparently, British consumers prefer pigs that have been reared outdoors, but they are not always told about it.

My hon. Friends referred to the overall issue of supply, and to dioxins, which was a problem from Germany that we had in January. The Commission introduced a private purchase scheme for a short space of time, and some pigmeat was taken off the market, which helped for a while. What concerned me was the allegation—I say only that—that certain supermarkets were dropping their British suppliers because the European mainland market was awash with cheap pigmeat as a result of the dioxin scare. To me, that undermines the claims made by my hon. Friend the Member for South Norfolk about supermarkets looking after our sector.

Public Forest Estate (England)

Graham Stuart Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd February 2011 Commons Chamber

[Guy Opperman]

Each year, 475,000 cubic metres of timber are felled to supply local wood as fuel and to provide timber-intensive local businesses, such as Egger, which is the largest employer in Hexham. It has more than 400 employees. Kielder is a working forest, unashamed of its clearings and felled areas which, while not always postcard pretty, are replanted to provide a continuous cycle on which much of the employment and way of life and the whole ethos of the area are dependent. It is also the biggest employer in the north Tyne area.

I have worked closely with Northumbria Water, which is responsible for Kielder Water, the largest artificial lake in the UK. It sits at the heart of the forest. The development of these vast resources is already subject to a 25-year investment plan which has outdoor activities and all manner of other aspects of the environment at its heart. I find it hard to believe that that will be undeveloped and not taken forward, with a FTSE 100 company at the heart of the development.

Fundamental to this issue is ongoing access to walkers, cyclists, horse riders and a host of others. I hope that these plans will see an additional £31 million boost to the local economy, and several hundred new jobs in the next 10 years in an area where employment is far from guaranteed. I have genuine concerns that all that will be put at risk. I strongly urge the Minister to look closely at the proposals and to consider the many representations that I have received from my constituents who share my scepticism, and to reflect on the possible effect on this special place at the heart of my constituency.

[Mr Graham Stuart (Beverley and Holderness) (Con)]

Like my hon. Friend, I have had many constituents expressing concerns about the Government’s plans and the consultation. Does he agree that access and the maintenance of biodiversity are the crucial components, and we should not have dishonest misrepresentation about the proposals? People deserve to be dealt with honestly. I do not mind opportunism, but I cannot stand dishonesty—

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)]

Order. We have heard quite enough. We need very short interventions. This debate will otherwise be very disappointing for constituents who are affected by the issue that we are discussing. Hon. Members should know better.

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[John McDonnell]

As I have said, we need to recognise that these forests have been preserved for us by staff who have worked for us for generations over the last century. In my view, failure to discuss the staff undermines the Government’s duty of care to those people who have served us so well.

[Mr Graham Stuart]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[John McDonnell]

Will the hon. Gentleman allow me to continue? Other Members wish to speak.

The consultation document contains only one paragraph that deals with staff. It states that the Transfer of Undertakings (Protection of Employment) Regulations will apply to the transfer of any of them. However, as we know from other privatisations and sell-offs, TUPE does not prevent a new employer from laying off staff in due course. It does not protect pay and terms and conditions in the long term.

[Mr Stuart]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way on that point?

[John McDonnell]

No, I will not.

TUPE does not even protect pensions. There is nothing to prevent a new employer from laying off staff while also undermining their conditions and pensions. I urge the Government to address the issue of their future. When I looked at the impact assessment to see whether there was any reference to it, I found that the only reference in the first seven pages related to redundancy costs. It reads as follows:

“Transition costs of redundancy, TUPE and possible further professional fees have not been quantified.”

That is repeated six times. It appears on each of the first seven pages of the document.

There are real anxieties among this group of expert staff about their future. There are anxieties about a transfer to the voluntary sector. Most Members have been involved with charities—most of us have served on their boards—and we know how difficult it is to maintain a charity. In any charitable or voluntary organisation, about 30% of the time is spent on trying to find funds for future years.

Energy and Environment, Food and Rural Affairs

Graham Stuart Excerpts

Thursday 27th May 2010 Commons Chamber

[Chris Huhne]

I agree that the committee has an extremely important role to play. However, the hon. Lady must be aware of the financial legacy that this Government have inherited from the Labour Government. We have inherited the largest budget deficit in Europe bar none. It is even larger than, for example, the budget deficit of Greece, which, as we know, has experienced a substantial loss of market confidence in recent weeks. For precisely that reason, I do not think it would be wise for anyone to suggest that we should continue to seek all possible ways of ensuring that we can live within our means. If the hon. Lady looks at the manifesto on which she stood for election, she will observe that no such commitment was made in that manifesto; and it was not made in ours either.

[Mr Graham Stuart (Beverley and Holderness) (Con)]

I congratulate my right hon. Friend on his new post, in which I am sure he will serve with distinction. What are his views on carbon capture and storage? He will recall that in 2003 the last Government stressed the urgent need for action. I have seen no plan to move forward to 2050 that does not include carbon capture and storage if we are to meet our ambitious targets, and yet that Government failed to make any real progress on that when they were in office. The demonstration projects were endlessly delayed. Will my right hon. Friend supply the commitment and drive that were so sorely lacking when the Labour party was in power?

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[Malcolm Bruce (Gordon) (LD)]

It is an honour and a privilege to speak under your presiding eyes, Mr Deputy Speaker, and I congratulate you on your new role.

I welcome the Queen’s Speech and the commitments to a green economy, which is essential for the restructuring of our economy, which has been so dependent on the financial services that have failed us so badly. However, I thought I might give the House the benefit of my personal history of engagement in energy issues. I worked as a young research and information officer for the North-East Scotland Development Authority in Aberdeen in the 1970s. At that time, it was struggling to find 16,000 new jobs for the area simply to stabilise the decreasing population. I doubt whether we would have succeeded in that but for the serendipity of the discovery of huge quantities of oil and gas in the North sea.

There was an unseemly scramble to get the oil and gas into production against the background of the first oil crisis and the foundation of the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries. It also coincided with the first miners’ strike and the three-day week. A few weeks after his defeat as Prime Minister in the February 1974 election, Ted Heath came to Aberdeen, and I and others briefed him in our offices about the scale of development activity in oil and gas that was taking place in the North sea. He was duly amazed. I am not sure that he appreciated it when I told him that had he come before the election he might still have been Prime Minister, but it certainly brought home to him that we needed a strategy. The value of coal, as well as of oil and gas, had been dramatically changed by the OPEC crisis.

People may remember that at that time there was lively discussion about the need to reduce the industrialised world’s dependency on oil and gas, while trying to maximise production from our own resources, where they had been discovered. I wrote pamphlets on the subject with Ross Finnie, who distinguished himself for eight years as the Environment Minister in the Scottish Administration. We called for a drive for greater energy efficiency and for policies to develop alternative technologies using smaller-scale generation, moving away from dependency on fossil fuels. Somehow, as the oil price fell and the crisis diminished, all those high ideals fell away, and I find it extraordinary that 35 years later we are still talking about how we might implement them to any significant degree.

As someone who had, and has, no visceral objection to nuclear power, I became increasingly aware that far from being the cheap option that we were promised, nuclear power was economically unaffordable and we had been lied to big time by the industry. However, the problem of trying to develop alternatives was made much worse by the fact that the Atomic Energy Agency was put in charge of supporting and evaluating alternative renewable energy. I might say to the shadow Secretary of State that that too was like putting a vegan in charge of McDonald’s, because the result—predictably—was that if anything looked as if it might become remotely commercially viable, the plug was pulled on further development. So, although Britain developed the first large-scale wind turbines, in shipyards on the Clyde, we had no policy for deployment. It was therefore left to the Danes, who did have a policy for deployment, to become world leaders in that technology. I do not know if Salter’s ducks would ever have generated electricity commercially from marine sources, but I know that the technology was never allowed to prove that it could, because the AEA was determined to ensure that there was no alternative. I wonder whether we are being subjected to the same propaganda today.

At the time it was also argued that we needed large generation stations to power the national grid and, given its format, we probably did. But even then it was clear to me that we should be thinking of moving to smaller-scale generation. Over the years, high-energy manufacturing—of which we have less in any case—has increasingly provided its own power generation as an integral part of its operation, requiring only top-up flows in and out of the national grid. So when I was first elected to this House in 1983 I joined what was then known as PARLIGAES, the parliamentary group for alternative energy studies, and I am currently a vice- chair of its successor, PRASEG or the parliamentary renewable and sustainable energies group. They are not very snappy acronyms, but they are important all-party groups.

All of this predated any inkling of the threat of climate change. It was about reducing our dependency on fossil fuels and finding cleaner, more diversified and more sustainable ways to generate energy. We have wasted at least 30 years getting to this point. As a young researcher in 1972, I compiled the first directory of oil and gas operators and supply companies in north-east Scotland, which included an estimate of the number of people employed and a forward job projection. Interestingly, at the time there were several dozen companies employing a few hundred people. I projected that the number could rise to as many as 5,000, with the same number of jobs indirectly generated, and I was accused of gross exaggeration. Today, the Gordon constituency sustains more than 65,000 oil and gas-related jobs. They are not all based in the constituency, but they are payrolled out of it, and the industry employs an estimated 450,000 people across the UK.

As I said in my intervention on my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State, I was very pleased that last week, in his first week in office, he visited the All-Energy exhibition in Aberdeen, covering companies engaged in all aspects of renewable energy technology. He saw for himself the impressive emerging technology for offshore and marine renewable energy, and the useful overlap between the technology and systems required by oil and gas and those required by renewables in an offshore environment. Installing a platform, sub-sea connectors, pipes or cabling requires the same equipment and engineering expertise, and there can be a crossover. The important point is that if we can run the second generation of North sea development—which probably has as much oil and gas again to be extracted, although in much more challenging conditions—alongside an expanding offshore renewable industry, we could benefit from huge economies of scale and efficiency by using the same equipment.

[Mr Graham Stuart]

My hon. Friend is, as ever, making a powerful speech. Not only do we have renewable energy and oil and gas, but carbon capture and storage. We have the skill sets and the ability to store carbon, and I hope that the failings of the previous Government will not mean that we lose the opportunity to be a world leader in that area, because it could produce jobs and wealth if we can sell that technology instead of having to buy it from others.

[Malcolm Bruce]

My hon. Friend makes a pertinent point. As I have said, we missed the boat 35 years ago, and we must not do so again. There is a real risk that that might happen, if we do not get the policies right.

[Malcolm Bruce]

I completely agree with my hon. Friend.

I hope that the Secretary of State took away several points from the exhibition. Exciting as the development of renewables is, it will not replace oil and gas soon in investment, jobs, tax revenue or exports. That will take some years—but if we run them in tandem, we can build one up as the other declines. Renewable technology will require a number of push-and-pull measures to realise its full potential. For both of them, we require substantial onshore investment in ports and transport infrastructure. As a representative of part of the city of Aberdeen, I am concerned that our infrastructure is not appropriate for a city that claims to be the energy capital of Europe. Our promised bypass has not happened, our commuter rail service has been postponed indefinitely, our city finances are in a considerable mess and we have the two most underfunded councils in Scotland, with money being diverted to other parts of the country. In those circumstances, my message to the Secretary of State—and my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Scotland—is that it is the UK Government who stand to lose if that infrastructure is not right, because some of the investment will go out of the UK altogether.

I welcome several of the proposals in the Queen’s Speech to promote marine energy and to support home energy efficiency, which can help move us away from dependency on the national grid and huge power stations, and make microgeneration genuinely part of the national grid, rather than just a domestic alternative to current generation. As I keep asking at every event I attend, when will we get micro combined heat and power? What steps will be taken to provide an easy way for people to take up feed-in tariffs? I defer to the point made by the hon. Member for Southampton, Test (Dr Whitehead) about renewable heat, which is part and parcel of that issue. What can be done to help people with hard-to-heat homes—a question asked earlier by my hon. Friend the Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark (Simon Hughes)? We have many such in Aberdeen, and they are expensive and difficult to tackle.

I would like to address the international dimension. I am a vice-chairman of GLOBE UK and GLOBE International, which played an invaluable role in testing potential policies and negotiating positions in the run -up to the various climate change summits. In fact, in advance of Copenhagen, GLOBE clearly identified China’s concerns, through the climate change dialogue that we run.

[Mr Graham Stuart]

indicated assent.

[Malcolm Bruce]

My hon. Friend acknowledges that point.

Unfortunately, had they been properly addressed, we might have mitigated the fallout in Copenhagen. GLOBE gave the UK Government the opportunity to ensure that what happened would not happen, and to see that Europe played a part in the process rather than being marginalised, so GLOBE has an important role to play.

It is unreasonable for developed countries to tell developing economies that they cannot enjoy the same development opportunities that we did—development that led to the climate danger. It is also realistic to recognise that China will not give up its commitment to double-digit growth, which after all has helped 400 million people out of poverty, although hundreds of millions are still left behind. It is also right to acknowledge, however, that China knows the damage that pollution and climate change are causing for its people and environment, and wants all the help it can get to grow sustainably. That is why I and the International Development Committee, which I previously chaired, do not want an abrupt end to the UK’s aid programme for China. It is on the climate change front that we can work together most constructively. We have to give China space, share technology and innovation and recognise that many of the poorest countries are the victims of climate change, not the perpetrators. As the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change has already acknowledged, China may well get ahead of us if we do not participate in initiatives with it, so it is in our interests to partner it as much possible.

Poorer and developing countries must be helped to adapt and mitigate the impact of climate change, be given the means to grow sustainably and not find the anti-poverty aid hijacked to fund climate change measures. The previous Government put in place a 10% limit on money being diverted in that way, and I hope—I will hold them to account—that the current Government will not weaken that commitment. Britain can lead the world on climate change policy, and in many ways, despite the criticisms that have gone back and forth across the House, it is fair to say that we have made significant progress, although it has been more about ambitions than delivery, so we now have to deliver.

Only if our targets are turned into policies for practical action can we demonstrate by our results and developing technology what we can offer the world. I would suggest—if I can put it constructively—that we should build on the initiatives of the previous Government and recognise that we can take them forward. If we do that, we will deliver credibility and prestige abroad, and jobs and exports for our domestic economy, and it will give us a new dynamic sector to take up the slack left by the abuses that damaged so much of the financial services sector, which I suspect will never make as big a contribution again. The lesson is quite simple: we can help save the world from climate change disaster, but only if we first save ourselves.