Agriculture Bill

Lord Cameron of Dillington Excerpts

2nd reading & 2nd reading (Hansard) & 2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 10th June 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Cameron of Dillington (CB) [V]]

My Lords, I declare my farming and landowning interests.

I have a lot of good things to say about this Bill but no time to say them. The change to ELMS and the wider approach to the food chain are great—it is about more than just production on the land—but, despite the paper Health and Harmony: The Future for Food, Farming and the Environment in a Green Brexit, there seems to be little in the Bill about nutrition and health.

I will focus my remarks on my worries. First, I worry about the imminent vacuum in our support systems. ELMS is still a long way off. Farmers do not know what it will mean for them. Changes in land management take a long time to implement. A farmer would be mad to start preparing or training now for something that may or may not come in by 2027. Meanwhile, the single farm payment will be mostly gone before farmers know what the Government want them to do to survive. In all fairness, the Government cannot abandon one support system before the way forward on the next is clear.

Secondly, it must now be obvious to everyone, including the Government, that reviewing our nation’s food security only once every five years, after what we have just been through, is madness. I will say no more at this stage.

Thirdly, I would like a clear message in this Bill that we will move forward to allow gene editing in our research programmes. This is a way of speeding up the natural methods of farm breeding to ensure that we can improve the environmental and nutritional outcomes of feeding our ever-expanding human population, both at home and—more particularly, as far as I am concerned —in the developing world.

Fourthly, everyone knows that we must have a clause in this Bill that looks carefully at the importation of goods that would be illegal to produce in this country. Every department, including the DIT, is signed up to this red line, as is the Prime Minister and the vast majority of the voting public, so what objection could there be to putting something on the face of the Bill to make it more difficult for future Administrations to renege on that? In my view, it would make trade negotiations easier. If it is not a matter of discretion during discussions but is the law of the land, then everyone knows precisely where they stand and it disappears as an issue.

My final area for amendment is to introduce a clause allowing Ministers to support businesses and communities in rural areas. Why do we want such a clause in an Agriculture Bill? Because currently it is hard for a family farm to survive on food production or land management alone. We must help the farming households to find cash for jobs off the farm, to ensure the survival of the farm itself. I am not saying that the Government must spend their agricultural budget on the wider rural economy; I am just saying that Farming Ministers should have that arrow in their quiver for use in certain areas or circumstances, should it prove beneficial. To have it there can do no harm.