Brexit: Agriculture and Farm Animal Welfare (European Union Committee Report)

Lord Greaves Excerpts

Tuesday 17th October 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Greaves (LD)]

My Lords, there were a lot of wise words there from the noble Earl. This is a really good report and I congratulate my noble friend and his committee on producing it, and I associate myself with a lot of what has been said today, particularly the excellent speeches by noble friend Lady Miller and the noble Lords, Lord Wigley and Lord Whitty.

The report is amazingly topical. That it is topical five months after it has been produced is a sign that nothing very much has happened. After the initial speech by my noble friend Lord Teverson, we heard an interesting speech from the noble Lord, Lord Jopling, with whose conclusions I agree. However, in the course of it, he attacked the repeal of the corn laws and I thought, “Only in your Lordships’ House could the repeal of the corn laws still be an issue for debate and discussion”. As the noble Lord said, it was wrong then and wrong now to remove the tariffs; I would say that it was right then and wrong now. It was right then because Britain controlled farming policy not only in this country but in all parts of the British Empire, which were the great wheat-growing lands, and it controlled much of world trade. The world has changed since then.

Many noble Lords have pointed out defects in the common agricultural policy—indeed, there are many—but the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, reminded us of the way in which the underlying purposes of the CAP have evolved over a period of time. When it was set up so many years ago, its purpose was essentially food security: to make sure that the then six members of the Common Market had security over their own basic food supplies—this was just after the war, when there was great insecurity around. In that, there is no doubt that it has been outstandingly successful. As the years have gone by, many of the other things that it has evolved and the ways in which it has supported agriculture have changed, from tariffs and intervention payments to maintain prices, through to direct payments, through to the present system of area payments—where basically farms are paid for being a farm and for being a certain size, whatever they do on that farm—together with Pillar 2, which has not used as much money as Pillar 1 by any means, but has evolved in ways which have enhanced local environments and rural development. I do not believe that without the CAP those policies would have been introduced into this country.

What do the Government want? In this week’s Farmers Guardian I came across a statement by a Defra spokesman. I will read it out because it includes all the contradictions and the lack of clarity which underlie the present position. It says:

“Outside the EU and free from the bureaucracy of the Common Agricultural Policy our farmers will be able to focus on growing, selling and exporting more fantastic produce. We are determined to get the best deal, one that allows us to continue to have tariff-free, frictionless access to the EU market and we will strike new trade deals around the world to help farmers take advantage of the growing appetite for great British food”;


in other words, every possible advantage of every possible system and every possible circumstance. The fact is that completely frictionless access to the EU market, which we have now because we are in the customs union as part of the single market, is incompatible with regulation-free operations. The European Union is simply not going to agree—whether or not the talks get that far—to frictionless access to the market unless this country accepts most of the rules and regulations that operate within the existing CAP and single market. We will have to obey the rules and will have no say in what they are. That is a fact that this Government do not seem to understand.

I just want to say something about food security and the very learned comments made by the Transport Secretary on television on Sunday that all we have to do is grow more food in this country. I do not think we need to grow more food. We might need to grow better food and different food but what we need to do is stop wasting so much food. About half the food grown in this country is not eaten. It is ploughed back because the market has failed; it is rejected by the supermarkets because it is not the right shape and colour; it is left unsold in supermarkets and thrown away; and huge amounts of it are bought and thrown away. If only people would really tackle that problem, it would transform the food market and answer a lot of the problems.

Ask farmers what they think about government policy at the moment and they will say, “They do not know what they want, they do not know what they are doing and they do not know where they are going”. A decision has to be made. The Government have to decide: do they want full, frictionless access to European markets and to remain a member of the biggest free trading area on the planet, with all the advantages of that, or are they going to throw all that away and go for the unknown?