Sustainable Livestock Bill

Debate between Henry Smith and Simon Hart

Friday 12th November 2010 Commons Chamber

[Simon Hart]

I do, and that is a very visible shift in subsidy policy that has taken place over the past 10 or 20 years. Instead of subsidy of food production simply for food production’s sake, we have moved much more towards environmental stewardship. The point I was trying to make was that we should not assume for one moment that environmental stewardship is not taken extremely seriously by farmers across all aspects of agriculture, not just food production; they value environmental stewardship and have been part of it because they feel that that is their duty, not only to their farms but to the community. That has always been the case, yet that gets lost in these debates. Somehow, there is the underlying view that we have to make farmers take environmental stewardship seriously. That is not the case. The farmers whom I know take it extremely seriously. The only barrier between them and successful environmental stewardship has generally been politicians, not a desire to make money at the expense of the environment.

If I were to shine a bright light on the Bill I would point out that surely any decent Secretary of State of whatever party would automatically insert into their thinking, if not their legislation, all the checks and balances that we are told are now so essential that they have to be enshrined in law. I have to ask why, over the past 13, 15 or 20 years, successive Secretaries of State at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and its predecessor, the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, did not do that as a matter of routine.

I recall the creation of something called the Rural Advocate under the previous Government. I am not even sure, to my great shame, whether he still exists, but his job was to oversee a sort of rural-proofing exercise to ensure that any legislation—not just that sponsored by DEFRA, but legislation from any Government Department —passed the test as far as rural communities were concerned. My criticism is that perhaps the Bill takes far too narrow a line of attack, at this stage, at any rate.

I want to move on to the vexed question of sustainability. It is difficult to define it as accurately as we might like in this debate. I suspect that it is tempting for Members, particularly new Members, to resist the chance of objecting to anything that has “sustainability” in the title, because we may somehow be seen as regressive or as dinosaurs if we do.

As far as the Bill is concerned, most of us have come under heavy bombardment over the past few weeks from various pressure groups, some of which have had more compelling arguments than others. Three particular people have pushed me as close as I was happy to go towards supporting the measure. One was my hon. Friend the Member for Richmond Park (Zac Goldsmith); I value his opinion on every subject, but we cannot quite agree on this one. I was subject to some late-night lobbying yesterday from Mr Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, but even his persuasive argument, including the promise of a River Cottage hamper for Christmas if I changed my mind, was insufficient. I should also mention the fantastic efforts and unique lobbying skills of Mr Stanley Johnson, who is up in the Public Gallery today, but even the combined heavy bombardment from those three expert individuals, whom I respect greatly, failed to convince me that we are anywhere near defining sustainability as well as we might, for the purposes of the Bill becoming an Act.

[Henry Smith (Crawley) (Con)]

I agree that sustainability is a much abused word, but does my hon. Friend not agree that sustainability involves economic, social and environmental concerns, both in this country and around the world?

[Simon Hart]

I do, and we sometimes forget that there is a strong social and economic ingredient in that definition; it has been missing so far in this debate. I am sure that the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent South will tell us that we have got that wrong, but I have seen nothing, in the hundreds of e-mails that we have had so far, to convince me that the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Crawley (Henry Smith) has been properly addressed.

It is odd that the Bill focuses purely on livestock production. It seems obvious that if we are to talk about sustainable farming, we should not restrict ourselves purely to livestock. I am not convinced that the Bill has been properly considered in that respect. To pluck one example from the sky—no pun intended—let us consider poultry production. It seems odd that we have not properly examined the argument that intensive poultry production has less of an adverse carbon footprint than extensive poultry production. That has not been addressed, nor had consumer purchasing habits until the hon. Member for North Antrim raised them. There is a reference in the Bill to rural resilience. I do not know what that is, in the context of the Bill, but I do know that it is something with which I have been extremely familiar for 10 years. The resilience of the rural community is far from being a satisfactory excuse to increase the burden of regulation on the rural community. We cannot possibly simply depend on the resilience of our friends in the livestock industry for the purposes of the Bill.

We have not discussed in any great detail the Bill’s possible adverse effects on livestock producers. There was one reference, and only one, this morning to profit—a sort of dirty word, it seems, when we talk about sustainability. Unless there is profit in farming, and unless there is the sort of profit that enables farmers to invest long term as opposed to short term, then there will be no sustainability of any sort—no environmental sustainability, no social sustainability and no economic sustainability. There was a famous bumper sticker in America a year or so ago, which quite simply said, “No farmers, no food”.

We overlook the sustainability question and the long-term profitability of farming at our peril. While there has been a bit of a debate about intensive dairy units and what number of cows constitutes unacceptability, it seems interesting that, at long last, there are people out there who are prepared to consider investing several million pounds in UK agriculture. We have been striving for generations to persuade people to do that. The moment somebody comes up with a cost-effective way of doing so, we fall on them like a pack of wolves and try to stop them. We have got to be careful about being carried away by a scare story.