Agriculture Bill

Lord Cormack Excerpts

Consideration of Commons amendments & Ping Pong (Hansard) & Ping Pong (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 20th October 2020 Lords Chamber

My final point is that no international trade agreement in itself changes UK domestic legislation. For that to happen requires these two Houses to make those decisions separately. So, directly, we cannot be put in a position where imports come into this country of a standard that is not acceptable under our domestic legislation. In that respect, I think that we should look at this as being about trade, pull stumps now and consider it further in discussion on the Trade Bill.

[Lord Cormack (Con)]

My Lords, how very excellent it is to get back to something like the old House of Lords, where you do not have to put your name down for—and decide you are going to have an opinion on—a debate days in advance. I came in this afternoon to listen, but I have been moved to get up on my hind feet and say a few things because we are debating a crucial issue. I do this for two or three reasons.

First, like my noble friend Lord Lansley, I owe the House an apology. I took a fairly active part, as some noble Lords may remember, in Committee on the Agriculture Bill. I was here for most sessions and spoke a number of times—not quite as often as my noble friend Lady McIntosh but nevertheless a few times. Sadly, in September I was rather messed up by a couple of cataract operations and had to be in and out of hospital, so I did not play much part—two small speeches—on Report. However, I believe the issue we are debating today is of central and crucial importance.

My noble friend Lord Lansley made a very good point about the admirable amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Grantchester, that has been dismissed by the Commons. We will have a Report stage on the Trade Bill, which I have not yet taken part in, which would perhaps be the right moment to reintroduce that amendment. I am one of those who believe that the House of Lords has not only a right but a duty to ask the House of Commons to think again, but if it thinks again emphatically, one has to be very careful indeed before indulging in another round of ping-pong. I am very conscious that I said something different last night on a very different Bill, on which we will be wholly justified in engaging in some very serious ping-pong. I am glad to see my noble friend Lord Lansley nodding a degree of assent.

The amendment placed before us by the noble Lord, Lord Curry, is in a different category. My noble friend Lord Lansley is of course right about Reasons Committees and there is nothing strange or novel about the reason given being that it fell outside the financial parameters. Fair enough. However, the noble Lord, Lord Curry, has taken note of that and presented a very different amendment in emphasis and degree; I really think the Commons should have an opportunity to reflect on it, because a number of MPs expressed dissatisfaction—some expressed downright annoyance—that they were not able to debate it. They should be given that chance by your Lordships’ House.

I was very taken last Thursday by a letter in the Times from one of the most admirable presidents the NFU has ever had, Minette Batters. She said she had had a cordial meeting with the Prime Minister the previous day and hoped he now recognised certain things—we do not know yet whether or not he does. There is a woman who is giving outstanding leadership, who was responsible for this petition, signed by a million people expressing their concern about food standards.

We know there is a danger—my noble friend Earl Caithness put it humorously tonight—of the “theme park farm” developing. What farming is about, and I made this point myself several times in Committee, is producing food for our people—food of a high standard and quality, produced in a way that recognises the livestock and does not seek to fill them with artificial hormones or to do other things. We are not exactly right, and I have referred before in your Lordships’ House to those terrible scenes on the Wye earlier this year, when the effluent from intensive chicken farming destroyed, for a time at least, one of the most beautiful rivers not only in England but in the whole United Kingdom. We have to recognise that.

Minette Batters wrote in her letter to the Times that we just do not want the situation whereby things that would be illegal if produced in the United Kingdom were sold here and undercut our own farmers’ produce. It was a powerful letter, but that is the fundamental, underlying concern of farmers in this country. I say that having represented a farming constituency for 40 years and living now in my native county of Lincolnshire, which is perhaps the greatest farming county of all.

[Noble Lords]

Oh!

[Lord Cormack (Con)]

I knew that would arouse a few barbs, but it is a very serious and important farming county where, this year, they are battling in the wake of the worst harvest in half a century. We have a duty to these people, and a duty to encourage them to produce food and not regard themselves as theme parks. If that is true of the United Kingdom as a whole, it is particularly true of Northern Ireland. My noble friend Lord Empey knows so much more about Northern Ireland than I will ever know, but I was chairman of the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee in the other place for five years and I travelled there a lot. I got to know and love that part of the United Kingdom very much, and all I can say is that everything that my noble friend said tonight about farming in Northern Ireland is, if anything, an understatement; we have to take that into account.

So I will support the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Curry, so that the Commons has a chance to think again. However, in order not to make my noble friend the Minister, for whom I have a very real regard, be too cross with me, I close by saying that I strongly support what my noble friend Lord Empey said about my noble friend Lord Gardiner. Would it not be a very good thing to have a Secretary of State, another Cabinet Minister, in this House? Would it not be particularly appropriate if the portfolio that that Minister held was for agriculture? I would like him to be, in the old way, the Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Food.

[The Deputy Speaker (Lord Russell of Liverpool) (CB)]

Does any other Member in the Chamber wish to speak? If not, I call the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott.