Agriculture Bill

Kerry McCarthy Excerpts

2nd reading & 2nd reading: House of Commons & Money resolution: House of Commons & Programme motion: House of Commons & Money resolution & Programme motion
Monday 3rd February 2020 Commons Chamber

[Luke Pollard]

The right hon. Gentleman is right that acetic acid is used in many cases instead of chlorine. Whether the infection is killed by acetic acid, chlorine, or any other process, the concern is that there is an infection there in the first place through poor animal husbandry. I invite him to look at that and at the work produced by the EFRA Committee under his colleague, the hon. Member for Tiverton and Honiton. It goes into detail to make sure that the standards of any imported food are as least as high as those we have in the UK.

[Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)]

This goes to the heart of why Labour is supporting the reasoned amendment and does not want to allow Second Reading to go through. In the last Parliament, we supported the Second Reading of the Agriculture Bill. I sat on the Bill Committee. The hon. Member for Tiverton and Honiton tabled new clause 4 and I tabled new clause 1 to the Bill. The Government were terrified that they were going to lose, because we had such cross-party consensus on this—from the NFU to environmental groups, to farmers and to greener people—so they suddenly shelved the Bill. We have not seen anything of it since December 2018. We cannot trust the Government this time and allow Second Reading to go through without trying to raise this point now.

[Luke Pollard]

I thank my hon. Friend for that very good point. Farmers will be watching this discussion tonight who are unfamiliar with parliamentary process. For them, the idea of letting the Bill pass Second Reading without making a case for this might seem appealing, but unless the Government and the Secretary of State, in particular, will accept an amendment or propose one that sets the promises in law, it is important that we make the case now. I say to all the farmers who do not want their standards undercut, who are genuinely worried about this, that they have an opportunity to ask their Member of Parliament, whichever side of the House they sit on, to make that case, because that challenge about putting this into law is important. Every day that passes when it is not proposed, including in the Bill, we have to ask why.

We do not need to look too far back to find a precedent that would help the Secretary of State. Last week, the Government whipped their MPs to vote for the NHS Funding Bill to set into law their commitment to spend more on the NHS. Why do the Government need a law to implement promises on the NHS but not a law to implement promises on animal welfare and environmental concerns? Let us look at what the Health Secretary said about that Bill:

“The crucial thing in this Bill is the certainty: the Bill provides everyone in the NHS with the certainty to work better together to make long-term decisions, get the best possible value for money”—[Official Report, 27 January 2020; Vol. 670, c. 566.]

Indeed, certainty is a good thing. The certainty that British farmers will not be undercut by cheap imported US produce grown at a lower cost with lower standards would help them as well. Why is legal certainty good for one election promise but not for another? We know the reason: one they intend to deliver, and one they do not. That fact has been pointed to by leaks from DEFRA officials that were unearthed by Unearthed. A report published in October said:

“Weakening our SPS regime to accommodate one trade partner could irreparably damage our ability to maintain UK animal, plant and public health, and reduce trust in our exports”.

That is why this matters.

I am proud of British farmers—not just the ones who are in my family, but all of them. Because the Bill fails to uphold animal welfare and environmental standards in law, Labour cannot support it. We need a legal commitment not to allow imports of food produced to lower standards or lower animal welfare standards. We need advice and support to help smaller farms transition to more nature-friendly farming methods that tackle the climate crisis, and we need the Government to set out a clear direction of travel for future agricultural regulation. Food grown to lower standards, some with abusive practices, must never be imported to undercut British farmers.

I have no doubt that Tory MPs will dutifully vote for the Bill tonight, but each and every one of them must know that my argument has merit. They might be wise to ask themselves why the NFU, the RSPCA and Greenpeace are saying the same thing as that Labour chap at the Dispatch Box. Why did the re-elected Chair of the EFRA Committee present a similar argument in the last Parliament? Could it be that collectively we are on to something? If we are—spoiler alert: we are—I encourage Members to make a beeline to the Secretary of State to encourage her to propose an amendment to the Bill as swiftly as possible to set in train the promises made at the general election, not only by the Prime Minister but, I believe, by nearly every Tory MP here.

I and my colleagues on the Opposition Benches will be voting for the reasoned amendment to deny the Bill a Second Reading because it omits the legal protections to prevent our British farmers from being undercut. I hope that the Bill can be improved—and swiftly—because in proposing a greener and better future it will also allow for that future to be undermined by imported food grown more cheaply and to lower standards. Who will eat that food? It will be the poorest in society. Who will be able to afford food grown to higher standards? The better-off. It will lead to deregulatory pressure to ensure that Britain’s farmers can compete with US industrial agriculture, which is the opposite of the spirit of the Bill and of what the Secretary of State said at the Dispatch Box, and it is the reason we need legal protection to ensure that no food is imported that has been produced to lower standards than we have today. The Secretary of State has the opportunity to do that. Every day that she lets that opportunity slip by is an indication that they intend to renege on their promise.

--- Later in debate ---

[Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Ynys Môn (Virginia Crosbie) on her maiden speech. Her Welsh pronunciation sounded absolutely fine to me, but what would I know? Perhaps my colleague here, my hon. Friend the Member for Merthyr Tydfil and Rhymney (Gerald Jones), is in a better position to judge.

I do not want to repeat everything that I said on Second Reading or in Committee last time round. I hope to be on the Committee again. I will start on a positive note by saying that an addition to the Bill will now give financial assistance to farmers to share information about agroecology. Those of us in the all-party parliamentary group on agroecology have been involved in this for a long time and we would like to see a little bit more clarity in writing from the Minister about how that will work in practice. We are rather disappointed that there is not more of a commitment to financially rewarding the transition to and practice of whole-farm agroecological systems. There is a concern that we are still looking at small tweaks to a system in which environmental stewardship will be located very much on the margins, rather than being done at farm scale. That is one of the weaknesses of the Bill.

We have talked in the past about county farms, and I know that there was a commitment to support county farms, but it is not in the Bill. I would like to hear more about that if the Minister has time when he winds up.

There is no commitment to net zero by 2040 in the Bill. The NFU supports that, and I would have thought that the Government felt able to commit to putting it in the legislation. That ties in with the whole debate that we need to have about land use, which ranges from the impact of the deforestation of the Amazon and the importation not just of meat but of livestock feed, which has a direct connection with our farming here, to the burning of peatlands—the natural carbon sinks that ought to be protected and preserved, not burned to a cinder because of grouse shooting.

It is widely acknowledged that the common agricultural policy was a failure. It was a blunt instrument that led to the inefficient and unsustainable use of farmland. Landowners and farmers were often rewarded for how much land they had, rather than what they did with it, so I very much support the public money for public goods approach, but there is concern that the future environmental land management scheme could end up failing in the same way if it does not adopt that whole-farm approach to landscape-scale delivery. We also need to build in natural climate solutions to that, and to have far more debate about rewilding, peatlands, the planting of trees, agriforestry and so on. I hope that we will do that in Committee.

The Bill is also silent on the baseline of environmental standards that all farmers should adhere to, whether they are in receipt of financial assistance or not. We discussed that in Committee before, and it is really important that we establish that baseline in law and make it clear not only that farmers will be rewarded for going above those standards but that they will be punished if they go below them. This morning’s report by the Institute for European Environmental Policy highlighted the fact that hedgehogs, birds and mammals could all be at greater risk because of the gaps in domestic regulation as a result of our leaving the EU.

[Mrs Sharon Hodgson (Washington and Sunderland West) (Lab)]

As a member of the Children’s Future Food Inquiry, which I co-chaired, my hon. Friend will be aware that we made recommendations to the Government to establish an independent children’s food watchdog to implement policies that could improve families’ access to affordable and healthy food. Does she agree that the small nod to food security in the Bill by way of a report to Parliament every five years is just not good enough in this regard? Does she also agree that the Government should look into implementing a food watchdog?

[Kerry McCarthy]

Yes, I think that that is very much the case. As I am fond of saying, the F in DEFRA stands for food, not just farming. Food is quite cheap and there are question marks about who is paying the price. We only have to look at the breaches of human rights and the modern slavery that is prevalent in our food chain, as well as the difficulties involved in trying to find people to work here. Despite food being cheap, many people still cannot afford to feed their family in a healthy, nutritious way and are forced either to go to food banks or to buy food that is barely worthy of the name. It might have calories in it, but it has very little nutritional value. I want to pay tribute to my hon. Friend for the brilliant work she has done with the Food Foundation and on school food. She has done so much to make the case that food is intrinsically connected with our health. That is such an important thing, and I hope that we can carry on talking about it.

On trade, I tried to introduce new clause 1 on Report in the previous Parliament, but the Bill mysteriously disappeared as we were gearing up for victory. It is so important to have a black-and-white commitment, because I do not believe that many Back Benchers are prepared to accept the Government’s word. Without such a commitment, we will offshore our nature and climate commitments, exacerbating the crisis we face, we will undercut UK producers, creating a race to the bottom here at home to compete on price, and we will leave consumers unprotected against low-quality imports produced to standards that would be illegal on British soil.

Whenever we question the Secretary of State, junior Ministers, the International Trade Secretary or even the Prime Minister, we must listen carefully, because they tend to say, “No lowering of UK standards,” but that is not good enough. This is about the standard of goods that we allow into this country, so it is completely irrelevant to make promises about UK standards. A leaked DEFRA briefing stated that the Department would come under “significant pressure” from the Department for International Trade to weaken our food and environmental standards to secure trade deals, particularly with the US and Australia. I happened to be in Washington at the same time as the previous International Trade Secretary, who was on television saying that he did not think there was a problem with chlorinated chicken.

Now, with the publication of the leaked US-UK trade talk papers, we can see just how determined the US is to weaken our standards. Taken with the evidence American farming lobbyists provided to the US Trade Policy Committee last year, the US wish list now includes: abandoning the precautionary principle for food and farming; accepting hormone-treated beef, chlorine-washed chicken and meat raised with high levels of antibiotics, when we know that there is a crisis in the routine use of antibiotics in farming and its impact on human health; lifting the ban on ractopamine in pork and stopping parasitic tests on pigs; allowing genetically modified foods to be sold with minimal regulation; scrapping mandatory labelling on GMOs and for E number additives and food colourings—if anyone is lost, this is what the US has said its priorities are—ditching rules that protect traditional food and regional specialities, such as pork pies and the salt from Anglesey; removing our safety-first approach to chemicals; and legalising hundreds of pesticides currently banned in the UK under EU law. The latter is a particular cause for concern if we are serious about transitioning to a sustainable food and farming system, because the US currently allows around 1,430 pesticides compared with just 486 in the EU.

That is why those of us who have been engaged in these issues for a while have always been clear that while chlorinated chicken has become totemic, it is just the tip of the iceberg. While the Secretary of State’s commitment on “Countryfile” that we would not import hormone-treated beef or chlorinated chicken was welcome, it does not cover the million and one other issues that we ought to be equally worried about. There are questions, for example, about how easy it would be to unpick the statutory instruments that underpin that position and, frankly, all SIs that contain transferred EU food safety legislation.

I look forward to serving on the Agriculture Bill Committee, Whips permitting, to bringing back my new clause 1 on Report if the Government do not make any concessions—and to winning this time.

[Several hon. Members rose—]