Local Government Finance (Rural Authorities)

Debate between Graham Stuart and James Paice

Monday 11th February 2013 Commons Chamber

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

It is a pleasure to take part in this debate.

I chair the Rural Fair Share campaign with my hon. Friend the Member for North Cornwall (Dan Rogerson) and the hon. Member for Workington (Sir Tony Cunningham). The campaign has support across the House, as the hon. Member for Bishop Auckland (Helen Goodman) suggested in her powerful speech, which I hope Ministers listened to closely.

The hon. Member for Bishop Auckland highlighted the cost of delivering services. One does not need to be a public service economist to understand that point; one just needs to look at a map. If one adds to that the fact that rural areas have older populations than urban areas—populations that are ageing quickly—and the costs of domiciliary care, one can feel the immense pressure that there is on the system in rural areas.

As has been said, rural areas have been poorly funded for a long time compared with urban areas, despite the fact that the costs of delivery are often higher. Overall, rural residents earn less than people in urban areas, but pay council tax that is £75 per head higher. Therefore, rural people, having paid more out of a lower income base, have a level of spending power for services that is lower than that in urban areas. There is no evidential base for that fundamentally unfair situation. That is the point that I hope Ministers will take on board.

There is a rural penalty that sees urban areas get 50% more per head in central Government funding than rural areas. That position is indefensible. If it is not indefensible, we would like the Government, who must have done the analysis, to explain to us why it is just and reasonable for people in rural areas, many of whom are elderly and on low incomes, to be so unfairly treated.

[Sir James Paice]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for giving way. I know that I am not on your list, Mr Deputy Speaker, but I want to challenge my hon. Friend because he has rightly referred to the Department’s statistics and comparisons. Over the past few weeks since this has become a topic of such serious concern, there has been a lot of dispute between Ministers and sparse rural local authorities. Will my hon. Friend spare a minute or even half a minute of his speech to explain what that difference of opinion is and why those of us who represent rural local authorities differ seriously from the Department?

[Mr Stuart]

I thank my right hon. Friend. I will explain the position. A year ago, a delegation went to see the Prime Minister to deal with this issue. In the summer, the Department consulted on a new way of looking at things that recognised the increased cost of sparsity in the formula. It came out with a figure that looked very promising in respect of reducing the 50% rural penalty. It then damped 75% of the gain away so that there was a 2 percentage point closing of the gap from a 50% rural penalty to one of merely 48%.

When the December settlement came out, our first analysis showed that that 2 percentage point gain had been wiped out. In fact, it had been entirely reversed and we were looking at a 2 percentage point increase in the rural penalty. We met the Under-Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, my hon. Friend the Member for Great Yarmouth (Brandon Lewis), who is responding to this debate—he has been most helpful in having meetings—but we struggled to get the position of the officials on the numbers that the Rural Services Network had come up with. It turned out that 500,000 people had been added to the population of London. When that information is put in, the 2 percentage point increase per head turns into a 0.2 percentage point narrowing.

The good news, which I can share with the House, is that the Government’s settlement takes a 50% rural penalty and reduces it by 0.2 percentage points to 49.8%. As I understand it, that is why technically the Government can claim that there has been a narrowing of the gap. It is pretty minuscule and nothing like the closing of the gap that we were talking about in the summer, which even then was derisory. Ministers are right, if they are doing so, to hold their heads in shame at that situation. [Interruption.] Was that too harsh?

I say to those on the Front Benches that Members participating in this debate come from across the House. We are looking for a fairer settlement and we hoped and expected that the Government would look at the issue on an evidential basis. We are not seeing that and it is not good enough. There will be a vote on Wednesday, and I hope that those on the Front Benches will consider carefully the speeches made this evening. All Government Members support the need for austerity and strict control of the spending envelope, and we do not argue for greater Government spending. We are saying, however, that at a time of limited resources, the allocation of those resources is more, not less, important. It may be politically more difficult and challenging and take some courage, but if less resource is around, we cannot afford to punish further those who have already put up with too much. That is our message to those on the Front Benches, and I sincerely hope they will listen.

Pig Farming

Debate between Graham Stuart and James Paice

Wednesday 23rd March 2011 Westminster Hall

[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.