Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Bill

Lord Cameron of Dillington Excerpts

Wednesday 16th January 2013 Grand Committee

[Lord Cameron of Dillington]

My Lords, first, I apologise for missing the first part of this debate. I am afraid that I was unaware that this debate was taking place until very recently.

I thought that we had put this whole issue to bed with the Public Bodies Bill. We went through all the arguments, we discussed it, we voted on it, and I thought that the Agricultural Wages Board had been abolished. Anyway, let us go through the arguments again.

There is no doubt, as many noble Lords have said, that the Agricultural Wages Board is and has been a very useful guide to farmers. I totally accept that. In some ways it is a bit of a cop-out for farmers because they can look it up on a piece of paper and know what they are going to pay their workers. It has been a useful guide not because of the actual rate set—because in fact the majority of farm workers are paid above the Agricultural Wages Board rate—but because of the percentage increases that have been given. This function can be easily replaced by other means, and the NFU has already committed to replace it.

It is no surprise to me that the majority of farm workers are paid above the Agricultural Wages Board rate. As the noble Lord, Lord Plumb, said, with machinery costs—actually his figures are slightly out of date because you can get tractors nowadays that cost £400,000 to £500,000 and combines that cost nearly £750,000—would you seriously pay someone the minimum wage to drive such equipment? I very much doubt it.

As the noble Earl, Lord Cathcart, said, rural competition is huge. Agricultural employment represents around 4% of the rural employment statistics. The competition from other industries is big, and you will not get people to come to work as farm workers. As the noble Lord, Lord Monks, said, the prospects for replacing the current workforce are not particularly good. They will not be particularly good if farmers do not pay proper wages, which I personally believe most farmers do, certainly on my farm and my neighbours’ farms.

The noble Lord, Lord Deben, said that farming is a very co-operative industry, and I absolutely agree. You live and work—and even play—as a team on a farm. Quite often, you are in a remote area. You cannot treat them as a distant workforce. You have to live next door to these people, meet them in the pub and so on, and it is a very co-operative industry. Frankly, I do not believe that farmers will immediately make use of the absence of the Agricultural Wages Board to behave completely differently towards their teams from how they do at the moment.

The noble Lord, Lord Hunt, said that the supermarket interests will get the better of us and we will have to put wages down. If you sell commodities to the supermarkets, they put you through a whole series of tests, such as Nature’s Choice for Tesco, and one of the main chapters is how you treat your workforce. I do not agree that the supermarkets will impose such tight margins that agricultural wages will naturally have to come down. I cannot see that as the logical conclusion to the abolition of the Agricultural Wages Board.

The board has been a useful guide, but the NFU has committed to produce comparative indicators to help us, such as the cost of living changes, the labour market, comparative industries, farm business conditions and so on.

On farm business conditions, it is not as tough a life as it used to be. Tractors have heating, stereophonic sound and CD players, and you have to produce all these things to attract your farm workers nowadays. It is a completely different life from the image that I seem to be getting from certain noble Lords.

All the agricultural bodies—the CLA, the NFU and the TFA—have been consulted and agree that, frankly, a statutory board for a single remaining industry is completely unnecessary in today’s world, and I very much agree with that opinion.