Common Agricultural Policy

Debate between Helen Goodman and Baroness McIntosh of Pickering

Monday 7th July 2014 Commons Chamber

[Helen Goodman (Bishop Auckland) (Lab)]

I congratulate the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee and its Chair, the hon. Member for Thirsk and Malton (Miss McIntosh), on producing a very pertinent report.

On previous occasions I have found the Minister to be a very reasonable, intelligent and empathetic person, and I hope those qualities are going to be on display at the Dispatch Box tonight. I was slightly disappointed when I initiated a debate about the hill farmers in Teesdale that he was not able to respond, but I am going to put the points again in the hope of getting a slightly more sympathetic response than I received previously.

In my constituency, there are a large number of hill farmers who are very much affected by these CAP changes. It is an unusual area, because they are almost entirely tenant farmers farming on common land. They have been farming in the same way for about 500 years, and they have produced a very special way of life and a very special and valuable ecology, so I applaud the remarks in the report and from the Select Committee Chair on common land.

When I went to see the Upper Teesdale Agricultural Support Services, it was particularly concerned because it felt that the European Union had not understood the way commons operate in this country and that the rules at European level were not very sensitive to the needs of English hill farmers for that reason. There was also concern about the change in the payment times in the underlying reforms: payments had previously been made on a six-monthly cycle but people were going to have to wait much longer—sometimes 18 months and in one case as long as nine years. That is a significant problem.

[Miss McIntosh]

I am most grateful to the hon. Lady for giving way, and it allows me to refer to the register, which is out of date. My brother and I have shared a farm in Teesdale, of which the hon. Lady is aware. Does she realise that Teesdale is often cited as the area whose farmers earn the lowest income of any hill farmers in England and Wales?

[Helen Goodman]

The hon. Lady is right. Newcastle university estimates that the average income of a farmer in my constituency is £11,000 a year. Many of them are on working tax credits—or were on them under the previous Government, but I am not sure how many of them are still getting the working tax credits.

The Select Committee report is excellent on the major problem such hill farmers face, which is to do with delivery: the totally inadequate service that the farmers receive from the Rural Payments Agency because of the requirement to apply for money online and because the system is constantly collapsing. The Select Committee report states at paragraph 34 that

“farmers can be heavily penalised for a genuine mistake but not appropriately compensated when it is the Rural Payments Agency who is in error.”

What has happened repeatedly in recent months is that the farmers have gone to upload their data and information, and the RPA computer system has been down, necessitating the farmers to go home and come back another day. That is absolutely absurd. Sometimes they have a round trip of 20 miles to access the computer in the UTASS centre in Middleton in Teesdale. When the system is down, they have wasted several hours and have to go back another day in the vain hope it will be up again. I wrote to the Minister about this, and I really think he should not be penalising the farmers when the RPA is at fault.

The next extremely pertinent recommendation from the Select Committee is recommendation 36, which states:

“The IT system remains, however, one of the standout challenges of this round…Given the lessons of the past we question whether this is the right time to be introducing a new IT system.”

How very right the Committee is. It is not just about a new IT system, with all the risks, complexities and problems that a new system always seems to entail in this country; one of my local farmers calculated that because DEFRA’s systems are so complex, and because he has to apply to so many different things and for each system he is meant to have a different authentication, he is supposed to remember 27 different personal identification numbers. This is absurd. This is grotesque. This is Kafkaesque. I find it difficult to remember my bank number and the number to get into the House of Commons, so how can these farmers, whose real job is farming up on the hill, be expected also to run the sort of complex IT system that would make a banker blench?

The Select Committee’s next point, which is absolutely right, was about the importance of encouraging and supporting people to apply online but realising that

“there will be some for whom such an approach is not appropriate. A paper-based application process must be retained”.

That is absolutely essential. Once upon a time, the farmers got the forms through the post, sat at their kitchen table, had a cup of tea, filled the forms out, put the stamp on the envelope, shoved it in the post box and, boom, the whole thing was done. Now that is not possible and the farmers have to drive to the library or the UTASS centre to get help with the uploading.

The whole thing is completely inefficient because, as recommendation 38 indicates, the rural broadband programme has not succeeded so far. We know that 5 million people in this country do not have access to broadband. Until 100% of people have access to broadband, how can it make sense to have a totally online approach and not have a paper-based approach alongside it? In my constituency, 40% of the farmers have no access to rural broadband, so DEFRA and the RPA are taking an absurd approach. It is essential to maintain a paper-based system. It is not reasonable for the Government to make public spending cuts through a digital-by-default process and pass all the burden back to the farmers for delivering the Government’s own administration system. The farmers experience that as oppressive and nerve wracking; it raises anxiety levels to a completely unreasonable pitch, given the significance of what the Government have to do.