Common Agricultural Policy

James Paice Excerpts

Monday 7th July 2014 Commons Chamber

[Sir James Paice (South East Cambridgeshire) (Con)]

May I start by reminding the House of my interests, which are in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests?

It fell to me as the then Minister to start the negotiations for what is now seen as the reform of the common agricultural policy. I never know why we use the word “reform” because that is the last thing that we actually have. We have ended up with a complete mish-mash, which is really unacceptable in today’s world. The CAP is about to be implemented. The subject of tonight’s debate bears all the relevance and the power of initiation by the Commission and reflects the impossibility of 27 Ministers managing to agree on any suitable alternative. For the Commission to claim that it represents a stroke of common sense is clearly nonsense. We have ended up with a very complicated system that will not help farming move forward and that does not face up to the changed realities of the world in which we live—a world in which, in the next 30 or 40 years, the supply of food may well not meet demand. European agriculture will not reform as it should to meet those challenges.

I welcome the fact that the Prime Minister negotiated an overall reduction in the CAP spend—the first for many years. I am sorry that it necessitated what can only be described as “handsome bungs” to France and Italy to get their agreement to the cut, and that we therefore ended up with a reduction to pillar two funding, which is unfortunate.

The Government are absolutely right in the way that they have gone about implementing much of these reforms. I particularly welcome the measure to help young farmers. I suspect that deep in the belly of Government, particularly in the Treasury, there is some resentment that that decision has been made compulsory. It is something that I have always believed should be part of British policy, and it is something that has been commonplace elsewhere in Europe. I am delighted that it is now part of the system.

The Government are also right to continue the same entitlements and regions, and I strongly support the moving of support uphill—the increased funding for moorlands—for all the reasons that we have heard. Of course I entirely support the move towards simplicity and the way that the Government have tried to reduce some of the burdens. Getting rid of the soil protection review, for example, is one measure I strongly welcome. None the less, I have a few comments to make.

My first comment relates to the three-crop rule that has now been imposed. I understand why it arose. I believe that it originated from the problems in Germany where there has been constant mono-cropping of maize for anaerobic digestion, which has been damaging to the environment. But what we have will achieve nothing. We have not achieved a rotation. There is nothing to stop farmers growing the same crop in the same field year after year as long as they grow the right percentages overall on their farm. Whereas farmers who actually practise a rotation by block-cropping with another farmer—the whole farm goes into wheat in year one and the next door farm goes into oilseed rape or beans and then they swap the following year—will not be allowed to do so under the new rules. They will have to grow a bit of each on each farm, which will add considerably to their costs. As it is not creating genuine rotation, it is a pointless and bureaucratic exercise that will achieve nothing for the environment.

Secondly, there are the environmental focus areas. Again, a broad-brush arbitrary figure of 5% has been decided on at European level. There is ample evidence now from a number of research bodies, including work the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has done, that what really matters is not the area of land we manage for conservation but the way that we manage it, ensuring that it is properly managed and not neglected year after year. This plan makes no reference to that, and that is a major error in the system.

I welcome the decision to include hedgerows in the ecological focus areas. It is right that they should be included, but I am concerned about what that will mean not just for mapping, which has been mentioned, but for entitlements. The Minister might want to reflect on that. The areas of land that farmers farm—that is, the area that they claim against—might not include their hedgerows, but when those areas are taken in, as they need to be in order to be within the 5%, farmers might not have enough entitlements for the overall amount of land that they will then be considered to farm. I hope that the Minister will look into that.

Contrary to what the hon. Member for Bishop Auckland (Helen Goodman) said, I pay tribute to how the Rural Payments Agency has made dramatic strides since the days when her party were in government. When we took office, every farmer in the land was incensed by the performance of the RPA and it is now, as my hon. Friend the Member for Sherwood (Mr Spencer) rightly said, delivering the vast majority of payments on day one of the window, at the beginning of December. That is a considerable achievement by the present management and I think they should be rewarded and recognised for what they have managed to achieve.

The challenges of implementing the new system are huge. It is far more complicated and, as the Chairman of the Select Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Thirsk and Malton (Miss McIntosh) said, will cost a considerable extra amount that the Government can ill afford. It is also an absolute waste of money given the bureaucracy that I have described. For the hon. Member for Bishop Auckland to suggest that the present system should be continued and that now is not the time to change systems belies belief. The present system is, metaphorically, held together by string and sticky tape. It is completely obsolete, even for the process it currently tries to operate, and it is a tribute to the RPA that it has managed to improve performance even using such an obsolete system. To suggest that it could somehow manage the new process is ludicrous.

I also wanted to mention appeals. I hope that under the new system the Government will ensure a satisfactory appeals process. I must confess, even though I had to judge those appeals for a time, that the current system is not satisfactory. Individual responsibilities, the responsibility of the RPA and the whole background of penalties and EU disallowances are not clear. Let me use one of the most ludicrous cases I saw as an example to demonstrate what has to change. Somebody had sent all the forms in to the RPA by registered post and yet the claim was rejected on the basis that it had never arrived. When the farmer submitted the registered post docket to the RPA to show that the letter had gone, he got a letter back saying that that proved that an envelope had been received but did not say what was in it. I felt that that was ludicrous, but there was no absolute proof that the RPA had received the forms and it was impossible to allow the claim. The new appeals system must cover such situations.

I strongly support the points that have been made about digital by default. I hope that the Minister will reconsider it and ensure that farmers are entitled to continue to use paper at least until they can access broadband. I am trying to be constructive, so if he concludes that that is not possible I suggest that he finds a way of ensuring that farmers who employ land agents—as many do, of course—solely because they cannot access broadband themselves should be recompensed in some way, perhaps by a small discrete sum within pillar two.

That leads me to pillar two and the rural development programme. I take issue with the Government over how the funding has been split, because they seem to have fallen for the line that if one spends more, one gets more. That does not always work. Even though we all know that the pot is not as large as we would like it to be, I regret the Government’s decision to increase the share of the pot going to the environment, not because I do not care about the environment—I strongly care—but because it has been abundantly clear over the past 10 years or so that simply spending money on the environment does not necessarily produce results. What really matter are outcomes and far more should be directed at those. We could have ensured that a greater share of the rural development pot was used for other purposes, in particular the economy and innovation in farming, to enable farmers to face the inevitable decline in the basic payment, as it is to be called, and no doubt its eventual disappearance. Farmers need to be able to invest and face up to that day. Just £140 million out of £3.5 billion to assist farmers is not a good deal.

On the new environmental land management scheme, my hon. Friend the Minister will know what I am about to say. I recognise that there is a £2.2 billion overhang from the current system of entry-level schemes and higher level stewardship, which must clearly be allowed for, but I am concerned about the way the new scheme will operate and the potential for cherry-picking. The implication is that funding will go only into schemes where it is likely to do most good. There are vast areas of the country, including much of my constituency in the north, in the fens and further up into northern Cambridgeshire and Lincolnshire, which nobody will pretend are the most beautiful areas, or that they contain a massive abundance of wildlife, but if such areas receive no funding and are completely outside the new scheme, the situation will get worse. We might end up with biodiversity deserts, because the funding has been concentrated on the hotspots. I hope the Government will look at that carefully.

Our land is precious. The report that came out two weeks ago from Cambridge university about agricultural land use over the next few decades makes salutary reading. It demonstrates that in the worst-case scenario we could be 7 million hectares of land short in the next 30 or 40 years. Clearly, that cannot be made up. It demonstrates that all policies must address the use of our land in the most effective way to combine looking after the environment with food production, its primary purpose. There is a great deal more to be done to achieve that. These reforms are not the right way forward, but I commend the Government on the way they have tried to implement an impossible task.

[Several hon. Members]

rose—