Agriculture Bill

Lord Greaves Excerpts

Committee stage & Committee: 2nd sitting (Hansard) & Committee: 2nd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Thursday 9th July 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Boycott (CB) [V]]

It is a great pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Curry, and I congratulate him on his school for kids to come to; I am sure they had a splendid time. I thoroughly endorse his amendment about education.

I add my support to Amendments 43 and 54 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle. They are mostly about localisation, which also has a great part in education and the connection between citizens and food. While most of us understand that local food is a good thing, most of us have very little sense of how local food is produced. I am in Somerset; we have lots of supermarkets around and are just as divorced as you can be in a city. It can be very difficult. There are many reasons for this, but a key one is that local authorities have insufficient cash to provide the essential infrastructure to allow local food economies to flourish.

Here I divert briefly to my own experience of once running a smallholding in Somerset. We went into pig breeding and were lucky enough to have a local abattoir that dealt with our animals in a quick, precise and compassionate way. I remember being completely shocked on my first, nerve-racking trip to the abattoir, with two of my favourite pigs rattling around in the back of the trailer. We were early and had to wait, and I was amazed that outside the door to the slaughter room were four pigs happily snoozing in a companionable heap. This was as stress-free as it could be, the food miles were minimal and I was able to sell the meat in complete confidence that the animals had had a good life and a good death.

There has been a long-term decline in the number of abattoirs in this country. According to the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Animal Welfare, there were 30,000 in 1930; that dropped to 249 in 2017, a 99% decrease. Of those, 25 are in danger of being shut. The alternative is huge abattoirs where animal welfare is low on the list and the distances need to be extensive and thus increase the stress and cost. I believe you cannot have a local food economy if you do not have a means of taking your animals to market.

I urgently recommend that the Government look at funding to restore local abattoirs within reach of most people, to ensure that we have a thriving economy. There are interesting examples globally that we could follow, such as the mobile abattoirs now introduced in France, New Zealand and Australia. We have one based in Nottinghamshire that believes its service can aid animal welfare and meat quality. It is something worth looking at.

The second thing I will talk about in support of the amendments from the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, is county farms. Recent investigations have shown that the number of county farms in England has halved over the last 40 years. Why does this matter? The county farm is a farm owned by the local authority and let out to young and first-time farmers, often at below the market rate. They are a vital first rung on the ladder for farmers in a sector that on the whole has incredibly high up-front capital costs—unless, of course, you are lucky enough to inherit. Through their provision of land and farm buildings, young people can become farmers. With the average age of farmers in this country at 60 and the price of land quite prohibitive, this is something we should really investigate and try to support.

Specifically, the acreage of county farms across England has plummeted from 420,000 in 1977 to just 215,000 now. For instance, Dorset Council just sold six of its county farms, 14% of its entire estate. When Michael Gove was Secretary of State for the Environment, he talked lavishly about equipping a new generation of farmers, but the facts all point in a different direction. You cannot be a farmer if you have nowhere to farm. If we value our farmers, local food and rural economies, community and county farms must not be allowed to slither into obscurity.

Finally, I will speak briefly about Amendment 47. I am a meat eater, but I want to eat meat that has been reared on pastures or in humane ways. Specifically, I do not want to eat chickens or any animals that have been grown in inhumane environments. The UK has come a long way in protecting and preserving standards of animal welfare, but there is one area in which we are not doing well, and that is local chicken production.

In the county of Herefordshire in particular, there is a rapid growth in the intensive chicken industry, which is generating a wave of vast industrial complexes across the landscape. The visual impact is not the only concern. Many environmental organisations are increasingly concerned by the growth and proliferation of these ILUs, particularly the impacts of ammonia, nitrogen deposition and phosphate on biodiversity and human health. These concerns include, but are not limited to, the pollution of water—streams, rivers and ponds. There has been news in the last few weeks of massive algae blooms in the River Wye, which are killing fish.

These chicken farms—which are owned not by British people but by global internationals—affect our health and environment. The companies, such as Cargill, contract with local farmers to put up the factories yet pay only farming rents and rates. These birds lead miserable lives and have miserable deaths, and this is something we should stop. Without a doubt, this leads to less good local practice and lower animal welfare standards. If we want to move towards a sustainable, holistic farming system in which local people can play their part, we have to work against these giant conglomerates.

[Lord Greaves (LD)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, and to agree with pretty much everything she has just said. I support Amendments 43 and 54 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle.

It is at times such as this that I realise that—although in the difficult circumstances it is highly commendable that we are operating this Committee in any sensible way at all—nevertheless, the sooner we can back to proper Committees, the better. Normally I would wait for the noble Baroness to move her amendments, then if I wanted to say something about them I would rise after her and comment. Given the hybrid Committee, I understand that the way in which we are now operating, with a speakers’ list, is essential, but it is nevertheless restrictive. I hope that when we come back in September, people will try to get back to normal Committees as quickly as possible, even if it means that a few people who are particularly restricted by Covid still have to come over the air, as it were. The basic Committee ought to be here. We also ought to be able to intervene and have a proper conversation. Committees in this House are traditionally and properly about conversations and discussions, not a series of speeches.

[A noble Lord]

Very good!

[Lord Greaves]

I got a bit diverted by that. I thank the noble Lord for his intervention from a sedentary position, which under our present rules is not allowed.

In order to comment on the amendments from the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, I need to mention what they say. The first seeks include the words:

“supporting the development of strategies to assist in the distribution of agri-food products which are locally produced and sold by microenterprises and community enterprises”

and

“developing a supply chain infrastructure for the purpose of assisting in the supply, processing and sale of”

such things. The second amendment consists of definitions. This is something that the Government really ought to take seriously. We live at a time of big supermarkets that are highly centralised and operate on the basis of just-in-time deliveries. If a shelf becomes empty one evening, it will be filled again by the morning; certainly where I live, a truck will have hauled the goods up the M1 and the M6 overnight.

I understand that system. I understand why it operates and why it helps to produce cheap food. For many people, it is very convenient to be able to go to the supermarket and buy food. That is not going to go away, but we ought to move away from it a bit and get a bit more balance; there was a lot of talk about balance on Tuesday in this Committee. There needs to be a lot more involvement of, for example, people in Lancashire, where I live, growing produce of the right kind for sale in Lancashire to people in Lancashire. I very much support these amendments.

There has been a lot of talk recently about parts of the country being left behind, and the way in which left-behind places, particularly small and medium-sized towns such as former mining communities and industrial areas in the north of England, have even changed their politics as a result, and that something has to be done about it. The role of those towns will be crucial to the recovery of this country following the present coronavirus crisis. The Government’s approach to that, which I do not disagree with per se, is to put a lot of money into what they call infrastructure. However, building lots of new fast railway lines and roads going through places—or, and this is a key point, past places—will not do very much at all for the places concerned. Even providing more education and training is not going to do a lot.

What is essential for those areas is the rejuvenation of towns, from small towns to medium-sized towns, and even those that pretend to be cities. I am not talking about Manchester, Leeds, Newcastle and Liverpool and the like; the big regional centres are going to do okay anyway, and by and large they are. It is the areas in between: the places on the edge, the places that used to depend upon one or two basic industries that have disappeared, and the places that are increasingly rootless and increasingly lacking a future. I believe that developing local agriculture and local farming, and local markets for that local farming, can contribute to the future of those areas. That is why I think that this idea, among others, is so important.

The other amendment that I support, in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Whitchurch, has not yet been moved. It hints at discussions that we will have later in Committee about the potential conflicts between productivity in agriculture and all the environmental and social improvements—the public goods—that we want to see on the other side. There is a conflict and we really need to discuss it, but this is probably not the time.

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Moved by

[Lord Greaves]

19: Clause 1, page 2, line 13, at end insert “, including where appropriate the reintroduction of native species of animals or plants which have become locally or nationally extinct;”

[Lord Greaves]

My Lords, in moving Amendment 19 I shall speak also to my Amendments 52 and 102. I remind the Committee of the interests I declared at Second Reading. I should have done this when I spoke on Tuesday, but I forgot. They are more relevant to our debates on Tuesday, but never mind.

Amendment 19 in this small group seeks to probe the Government on one issue, that of whether farm-based schemes could include the reintroduction of native plants and animals that have become extinct nationally or, what is more likely, locally. I hope that the Minister can reassure me on this point. I want to concentrate on an issue that is of growing interest to many people, that of rewilding. I shall explain in a minute what is meant by that.

First, I want to make clear what is not meant. A lot of misrepresentation has been made by tabloid media of a few proponents of rewilding who frankly go over the top and, in my view, do not do the cause any good. Rewilding as it is used here does not involve the reintroduction to the English countryside of animals such as bears and wolves. Unfenced reintroductions for some species may be justified—beavers may be a case in point, and who can deny the glory of peregrine falcons and red kites, as well as locally extinct species of butterflies and reptiles—but it is not what rewilding as such is about.

Rewilding is also not about the wholesale transformation of whole regions into some romanticised version of this country before its widespread cultivation by the Celts, Anglo-Saxons, Danes and their descendants. Nor is it about the creation of nature reserves as we know them conventionally, where the ecology of the flora and fauna in a local environment is carefully managed, sometimes in tiny detail. However, a success rewilding scheme could in due course become a very special but different kind of nature stronghold. Nor, finally, is it a means to just abandon large areas of land that are devoid of economic value. Indeed, it can be a means by which landowners increase their income by diversifying in areas where farming alone may no longer be viable. If I can drop into government speak for a moment, it can deliver public goods at scale both efficiently and effectively.

Amendment 52 would add rewilding to the list of activities that can be financed under Clause 1. A two-tier scheme could involve the rewilding of all or much or a largish farm, if that is what the landowner would like. I keep prompting the Minister for examples of tier 3 schemes involving things other than peat restoration and tree planting, but perhaps the rewilding of a broad upland valley could qualify for such funding. Rewilding could mean allowing coastal land or floodplains to revert to wild marshlands. It may be that while the Government are not averse to rewilding schemes as I have described in appropriate places, they would prefer to them to be funded in other ways and through other budgets. If that is the Minister’s response, can he or she set out what those other ways could be?

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[Baroness Bloomfield of Hinton Waldrist]

I can of course reassure the noble Baroness. Indeed, it is the first point of Chapter 1 that

“The Secretary of State may give financial assistance for or in connection with any one or more of the following purposes … managing land or water in a way that protects or improves the environment”.


The whole thrust of the Bill is to do just that.

I also take this opportunity to say to the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, that my noble friend the Minister is of course happy to meet him at any time.

[Lord Greaves]

That answers the first thing I was going to ask. All I want to say is that I was bowled over by the encyclopaedic knowledge of British birds of the noble Lord, Lord Cormack—the good ones, the bad ones, what they do and where. I could wax lyrical to him about the occasion in the Uig hills in south-west Lewis in bright, shining, sunlit mist, when I was the subject of interest of a wonderful golden eagle that could have known a bit more about social distancing for my state of mind. The great thing about birds is that they cannot be kept in by fences. Having seen the white-tailed eagles on the Isle of Lewis, I for one will be delighted if they penetrate to the north of England. That is nothing to do with the amendment, and what the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, said was nothing to do with rewilding as I am describing it.

I thank everybody who took part in this little discussion with great expertise and knowledge. It was an extremely useful discussion—I am thrilled by it—and on that basis I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 19 withdrawn.

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[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Faulkner of Worcester) (Lab)]

We are having problems connecting to the noble Baroness, I am afraid. We shall move on to the next speaker and come back to the noble Baroness later. I call the noble Lord, Lord Greaves.

[Lord Greaves]

My Lords, I am enthused by Amendments 68 and 77 in the names of the noble Baronesses, Lady Jones of Mouslecoomb and Lady Bennett of Manor Castle, but I think that they explain themselves. They are set out well, they stand for what they stand for and the two noble Baronesses will speak to them. I think you have heard enough from me for the time being, and I will say no more.

[Lord Lucas [V]]

My Lords, I am very grateful for the draft of the Bill, and particularly for the definition of “livestock” on page 3, which

“includes any creature kept for the production of … drink”.

I had to look that up on Google. I will not repeat most of what Google suggests. The most printable is seagull wine, but I had not realised that we had such industries in the UK.

My amendment would make the definition “in connection with” the farming of land rather than “in the farming of land”. I want to quiz the Government on why they have drawn the boundary in that way. It seems to me to exclude a number of common inhabitants of the farmyards I grew up on, such as dogs, pigeons, cats and, indeed, horses. I do not know how horses, even New Forest ponies, come in under the definition of livestock in the Bill and I cannot find a place for maggots, although maggot farming is still an active business in this country. Other than that, Amendment 68 seems on the prescriptive side, although it reminds me of my cousin, who was shipped out to Australia with a one-way ticket and found himself on Intercourse Island in Western Australia castrating sheep with his teeth.

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Taking into consideration the health and environmental effects of chemical pesticides, it is clear that there is an urgent need for a new concept in agriculture. This new concept must be based on a drastic reduction in the application of chemical pesticides. I feel that some of the new science that is being developed and investigated at centres such as the John Innes Centre, the Sainsbury centre and the James Hutton centre may well produce some of the answers whereby we could eliminate the use of chemical pesticides that may be damaging to health. No doubt in later amendments we will be able to explore some of these scientific developments. I support the amendment in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay.

[Lord Greaves]

My Lords, during the last two, three or four months, like everyone else I have had quite a lot of spare time on my hands and have been able to get out into the countryside around where I live, which is on the edge of an urban area where you can walk straight into Pennine pastures, fields with gritstone walls and, beyond there, rising up to the moorland massif of Boulsworth Hill. Two valleys run down from the hills to where we live; they are really contrasted at the moment, as I will briefly explain.

Before I do so, I am sorry that the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, is not in his place. He talked about going out of Sheffield on to the Peak District hills and delighting in what I think he called the song of the curlews, which are one of the evocative birds of the Pennine moorlands. The others are the skylarks and the lapwings, which locally are traditionally known as “tewits” after the sound they make.

During the past three or four months, I have been woken up every morning by the sound of curlews, which is wonderful, but when we first lived there 40 or 50 years ago, we were woken up by flocks of lapwings. I have not heard a lapwing from our house for a long time. Lapwings have declined most in that kind of area up on the moors, particularly in what the amendment refers to as “semi-natural grasslands”.

For us, the grasslands are pastures and fields; they have got tall, quite coarse, natural native grasses, and some better ones. We have some of what the amendment calls “dicotyledonous herbs”, although that really refers to lowland meadows rather than the sort of meadows we have, and lots of clumps of rushes, which are important for giving cover, along with the tall grasses, to ground-nesting birds such as curlews and lapwings—the tewits.

Over the years, the fields have been improved. Those nearest to us used to be buttercup meadows. They have long gone, and now a lot of the coarser semi-natural meadows have gone as well. The farmers scrape off all the vegetation which has been growing there and seed it with one or two species of much richer and, from their point of view, more productive grass, mainly for the sheep but also for mowing, haylage and so on.

The landscape has been transformed. The fields in spring, instead of being a greyish green—natural, as they were, or semi-natural—are now sparkling bright green, and no doubt some people find them attractive. The two valleys, however, are contrasted. One is the Wycoller valley, which largely belongs to Lancashire County Council—Wycoller Hall is thought to be Ferndean Manor from Jane Eyre—and the other is the Trawden valley, which has the old mill village of Trawden it and lots of farms around. The Trawden valley is bright green and the Wycoller valley is still very much as it was. How do you know where you are? If you close your eyes, in the Wycoller valley you can hear the tewits and in the Trawden valley there are none. It is as simple as that.

So it is not just lowland meadows that the amendment is talking about. I hope the new regime will stop farmers turning even more of the pastures into modern bright green pastures and driving away the tewits, which is still taking place at the margins and the moorland margins. The tier 1 or tier 2 deals that come about, whichever they are, encourage a reversion of at least some of the fields to what they used to be. If you have a farm of six or 10 fields, you do not need a lot of it to revert to the traditional pasture that it used to be to provide a flock of lapwings with a habitat; you might need one or two, and that is all. As you walk through that area, you can plot the flock of lapwings to the fields that are still traditional.

I hope that kind of thing will be part and parcel of the new regime, not to destroy farmers’ livelihoods in any way but to provide them with some finance to provide a natural, or semi-natural, environment that superb birds such as lapwings and tewits require.

[The Earl of Caithness [V]]

My Lords, before I go on to talk to the amendments, I want to reiterate the point that the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, made earlier today and make a plea to the Minister and the Whip to talk to the Chief Whip about the groupings. Can we please go back to the old way that used to happen in Committee, whereby the movers of amendments spoke first and then the other signatories spoke afterwards? All the signatories to my amendments have spoken before me, and on the next group of amendments I am a signatory to an amendment from the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, but she, as the mover, is speaking after me. It really does not help proceedings unless we get back some sort of structure like we had in the old days.

I turn to the amendments. This is a hugely important group because I believe that the only way that farming will survive in this country is if we work with nature. All these amendments are designed to help farming to do just that. There is considerable overlap between them. I shall speak to Amendments 39 and 96 in my name, which relate to nature-friendly farming. Not everything that nature-friendly farmers do is covered in the Bill. For instance, what about the creation of new habitats, ponds and wetlands? That leads to another problem, because the creation of some ponds will require planning permission. Therefore, as I said, you need dedicated farmers who are very keen to help nature to carry out such work. A farmer taking these schemes solely to get money from the taxpayer is not someone who is going to apply for planning permission for a new pond. There is no mention in the Bill of field margins and hedgerows. These are hugely important as wildlife corridors, and nature-friendly farming is a great help in that respect.

It is tragic that we have seen the decline in 600 farmland species over the last 50 year. Of course, none of us now has the problem of having to wash our windscreens having driven through the countryside, particularly at night. That is long gone. When I first started driving, one had to wash one’s windscreen after every drive because of the number of insects that got stuck on it and impeded the view. It would be nice if we could go at least half way back to the situation that we were in.

I will just make a point on what the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, said about lapwings. I know a farm in Caithness where the farmer has farmed organically since he took over the farm—gosh—it must be 30 years ago now. He has farmed in a nature-friendly way, but the number of lapwings has decreased hugely. There used to be lovely big flocks, but now there are very few. The problem is, it is not the farming system—that is not totally responsible—but the fact that we do not control the predators of lapwings and lapwing eggs and nests, such as the hooded crow. When I was a boy, the hooded crow was a very scarce bird; it is now very common. When I last lived in Caithness, about four years ago, I remember seeing five hooded crows on the lawn outside my little cottage. They just would not have been there when I was a boy. Unless we get to a stage where we can control the number of corvids and the abuse by corvids of ground-nesting birds, there will be a continual decline, whatever system of farming one operates.

I have also put my name to the agroecology and agroforestry amendments, because these are hugely important too. They are slightly different ways of farming from nature-friendly farming, but they of course work on exactly the same principle of working with nature.

I pay tribute to the work of the Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust, Nature Friendly Farming and Agricology, which have been working together for five years. The Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust, the Organic Research Centre and the Daylesford Foundation have together done a tremendous amount of work in this area and I can tell the Minister how grateful they are for the financial support that Defra has given them. It is exactly from institutions such as this and the demonstration farm at Allerton that other farmers can learn how to carry out these works and the benefit that they can contribute to their own farms. I hope that, when responding, my noble friend will say that this funding will continue.

I turn to Amendment 224, which is on soil. It requests that the soil metric index is instituted. This was of course in the 25-year environment plan, from which it is worth quoting:

“Farmers and land managers can struggle to monitor the quality of their soil, which in turn makes it difficult to improve. We will develop a soil health index (including indicators such as the level of humus and biological activity in the soil) that can be used on farms to check whether their actions are having the desired effect. At the moment, data on soil health is held piecemeal by different institutions and businesses. It is not easy to access or use. Defra will invest at least £200,000 to help create meaningful metrics that will allow us to assess soil improvements, and to develop cost-effective and innovative ways to monitor soil at farm and national level.”


Can the Minister say what is the result of that work? Is there any progress? What is the progress? Can she please update us on it?

It was encouraging to hear the Secretary of State respond to the Environmental Audit Committee in the other place recently, saying he was considering a combination of approaches to address soil problems, and a more sustainable approach to grade 1 and grade 2 agricultural land, focusing on soil health and crop rotations. What is this going to involve? Can the Minister shed some light on these very encouraging statements?

EU: Xylella Fastidiosa

Lord Greaves Excerpts

Wednesday 8th July 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Gardiner of Kimble]

My Lords, I realise that there is great interest in this House in the Environment Bill, and I am keen that progress is made in the other place. We are in a situation where there is a great deal of legislation before us. The OEP is an important body, but we have always said that we will ensure that there are alternative arrangements if, given the position we are in, the OEP is not up and running by 1 January.

[Lord Greaves (LD)]

My Lords, this makes a change from Japanese knotweed. Can the Minister tell us how, when plants are imported into this country, they are being checked? How do the Government and the country know whether or not this pathogen is being imported? Is the problem importing plants which are affected by the bacterium, or do the insects have to be accompanying them?

[Lord Gardiner of Kimble]

My Lords, we are intensifying this through APHA inspections, sampling and testing. The statutory notification scheme for olive, almond and plane trees means that imports can be traced to premises and inspections can be carried out. For other plant species, such as lavender, risk-based visits are carried out to inspect and sample plants, focusing particularly on recent imports. A lot of scientific work is going on into Xylella fastidiosa, because not all the answers are known. One thing we are most concerned about, and which the EU has not yet acted on following EFSA’s report, is it jumping further distances; we are extremely concerned about that.

Agriculture Bill

Lord Greaves Excerpts

Committee stage & Committee: 1st sitting (Hansarad) & Committee: 1st sitting (Hansarad): House of Lords
Tuesday 7th July 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Greaves (LD)]

My Lords, there has already been some discussion which hinges on the question: what is the Bill about? We start off with a very important clause which lists nine environmental aims, together with one aim concerning

“the health and welfare of livestock”,

which at least is about agriculture. Is this an environmental provision or an agricultural one? Those of us who are very keen on the environmental aspects of the Bill must nevertheless recognise that it is fundamentally about the future of farming in this country, not about the wider issue of the environment. It is unfortunate, as has been hinted at by at least one noble Lord, that the Environment Bill has not come first and we have not legislated on the Government’s new vision for the environment of Britain and then been able to fit farming into it. This is a problem that runs through the Bill, as the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, raised at Second Reading.

However, we have the Bill as it is. I was pleased to add my name to the amendment of the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh of Pickering, on drainage schemes and so on, which are crucial. There is an important thing here which links to the proposals for the three tiers of the environmental management scheme. I think everybody is beginning to understand the importance of managing water on a catchment area basis; otherwise, if you do something upstream which affects something downstream, they are not co-ordinated.

The Government talk about peatlands and tree planting as tier 3 schemes, and it is easy to understand how they might work because of their nature. A catchment area scheme, by its very nature, will involve a very large number of landholdings and land managers. It can succeed only if a large proportion of them take part; otherwise, people may be persuaded to take part if they benefit but refuse if they do not. The whole catchment area must be treated as a unity. If such a scheme exists, will it be a condition on a landholding that is part of that catchment area, for all the other grants that it might want, to take part in the tier 3 scheme—the catchment area scheme? I ask the Minister that question because it is crucial.

I very much support what my noble friend Lord Bruce said about hill farming, and I added my name to his amendment. As someone who lives in the middle of the Pennines, in the north of England, I endorse everything he said. There is a tendency among some people to suggest that in such areas, land managers should be just that and that farming becomes irrelevant—in so far as farming takes place, it is there simply because the sheep are needed to manage the land in the way that people want, and hill farmers should become some special variety of civil servant operating on behalf of the Government, because that is the only way they can make a living. The hill farmers I have known over the years in the Lake District, the Pennines and Wales—and, indeed, in parts of Europe—are not the sort of people who want their lives regulated by officialdom. That is putting it fairly mildly. Will it really work like that?

It seems to me that in the hills, in the less favoured areas—in the Pennines, for example—farmers will continue to exist only if they can continue farming and can make enough of their income, their livelihood, from farming. They will not want to become land managers engaged by some bureaucratic board to manage the landscape in a particular way. There are parts where that will be the answer, but they will be a minority. By and large, if our economies, communities and landscapes in those areas are to survive, they will need to make enough money from what they produce. I see no way in which direct subsidy of the products they produce can be done away with in those areas. In the rest of England, perhaps so, but in those areas it will not happen. As we know, at the moment, people are producing milk for more than the price at which the supermarkets sell it; that is the cost to them. They are able to survive because they get the subsidy.

The only other thing I want to mention briefly is that I have two amendments, Amendments 80 and 81, which are amendments to an amendment proposed by the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, who has not yet moved her amendment, so it is a bit awkward. She is talking about big cities; I agree with everything I think she is putting forward, which is that in many urban areas, the rural fringe between the towns and the countryside is a bit of a mess. It is what some of us call the zone of tatty land. All I will say is that that applies to small and medium-sized towns, not just big cities.

[Baroness Ritchie of Downpatrick (Non-Afl) [V]]

My Lords, I support Amendments 1 and 37. I understand what the noble Earl, Lord Dundee, said about Amendment 1: he seeks simply to probe in relation to financial assistance. We need to end the uncertainty felt by farming folk as we come out of the common agricultural policy and enter a new regime of funding. Therefore, there needs to be greater certainty about funding provided to farmers. Perhaps the Minister will provide some elucidation on that.

I support Amendment 37 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh of Pickering. To me, many of the amendments in today’s groups deal specifically with how we manage our land environment and new financial assistance powers which are grounded in Clause 1. Amendment 37 gives an opportunity because it gives the Secretary of State the power to issue payments to those farmers who protect or improve and manage the landscape. It is important that farmers are allowed to manage their own land environment for food and livestock production because, after all, they work that land daily, they know about the soil texture and the production levels that the land they farm is capable of. In so doing, they are then enabled to protect the flora, fauna and wildlife, which are all part of the natural environment.

As the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh of Pickering, said, Amendment 37 is about ensuring that that financial assistance recognises and is provided for the protection, improvement or management of landscapes and biodiversity through pasture-fed grazing livestock systems. She referred in particular to upland farming, and I recall that when she was in the other place as chairman of the EFRA Select Committee, of which I was a member, she had a particular passion for the needs of upland farmers. Coming from Northern Ireland and from an area where upland farming is a central part of farming, I fully understand that.

Like the noble Lord, Lord Bruce, I believe there needs to be some co-operation between the devolved regions and Westminster, or Defra, on how this funding could be managed, how the less favoured areas classified under the old common agricultural policy, including those upland areas, could be managed and protected, and how farmers using that pasture-led grazing system can eke a subsistence and a living out of it and ensure a good farming life.

Always remember that the world’s soils represent the largest terrestrial carbon reservoir. In the UK, two-thirds of our farmland is pasture. Ruminants can effectively convert this into produce of value to us all. The capacity of pasture to build the fertility and health of the soil and the vital role of grazing animals in that process have been known for a long time. With a growing recognition of the environmental costs, and the cost of concentrate feed around five times that of grazed land, there is a shift to feeding ruminants increasingly on pasture.

Pasture-fed grazing livestock systems show a care for the animals, the environment, the land, the soils and the landscape. They bring value to the land, to the farming industry and to us as consumers. As the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh of Pickering, said, they produce good-quality food in terms of feed production. Pasture also provides a natural and unstressed environment in which ruminants can express themselves while producing nutrient-dense meat and milk that has measurable health benefits for us all and for the wider consumer market.

I believe this needs to be reflected in the Bill and am very content to support this amendment, which I have signed but is in the principal name of the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh of Pickering. I hope the Minister can provide us with some elucidation on adding that as a purpose for financial assistance and ensuring that the purpose of financial assistance in itself is much more, shall we say, mandatory than simply permissory.

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It may be difficult to define, but one topic that has not been raised thus far in our far-ranging debates is social prescribing, and the incredible value of the countryside and nature to people for mental health and physical health. We have seen that emphasised over the recent months of the coronavirus lockdown. Certainly, in Devon we have seen those who are able to do so stream into the countryside to escape the confines of home, the lockdown and the social restrictions it has imposed. More than ever before, we see now that the health and well-being benefits of the countryside are to be encouraged. The Bill should explicitly do that, rather than just encouraging our enjoyment of the same.

[Lord Greaves]

I have just been told that because I was not here at the beginning of this group, I cannot speak. I thought that it was a Committee where you could wander in and out all the time. It is not a desperately important point that I want to make, so I will discuss it afterwards with people.

[Baroness Ritchie of Downpatrick [V]]

My Lords, I support Amendment 106 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh of Pickering. There are two principal points here. The Government want this Agriculture Bill, which is a major Bill and the first in many years, to be about public money for public goods. The second point was raised by the previous speaker, the noble Earl, Lord Devon: who is to receive those funds?

I believe that money should support those actively involved in farming activity. They used to be known as active farmers but, as the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh, said, that definition has probably broadened now to the wider issue of agricultural activity. If that is the case, and the Government support it, then we can ensure high standards in environmental works on the farm and in food production. We can ensure high standards of food security and perhaps in so doing, we will be able to ensure, along with good food security, good accessibility to food for all in terms of the food chain.

On reallocated entitlements, applicant farmers must be able to demonstrate that they enjoy the decision-making power, benefits and financial risks attached to the agricultural activity on each parcel of land for which an allocation of entitlements is requested. That is right and proper; it is also ethical and moral.

Furthermore, the Minister referred during the previous group to the ongoing work and discussions between Defra and the devolved Administrations. What actual work has been done on broadening agricultural activity? Who will be eligible for such payments and what grades of activity will be eligible? Land ownership probably varies throughout the devolved Administrations compared with what pertains in England. Coming from the Northern Ireland context—there will possibly be some separate legislation for Northern Ireland—I know that we have a conacre system, which is an ancient Irish system whereby people keep land under conacre for one year. It differs from the tenant farmer situation that exists in Britain. What discussions have taken place on agricultural activity between the Minister, his ministerial colleagues in Defra and ministerial colleagues in the devolved regions?

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[Lord Randall of Uxbridge [V]]

My Lords, I have added my name to Amendments 6 and 18 and I am very happy to support the noble Lord, Lord Addington, on those. I am very keen on getting more public access, but it is not just about creating new footpaths and so forth; it is about improving what we have as well, as he said. If footpaths are very muddy, that will put people off. I have examples locally where we used to have a bridleway. That got very muddy, the hooves churned it up and it is now very good for horses, very good for cyclists and very good for walkers, so this can be done and is, I think, very important. I have taken a great interest in getting more access to the countryside. It is not just about wheelchair users, although that is very important.

I got a great deal of assistance from an organisation called Birding for All and a gentleman called Bo Beolens, whose blog goes under the title “Grumpy Old Birder”—I was rather sorry that he got there first. He pointed out to me the problems you can have. For example, he can be given a key so that he can drive his car to a car park—somewhere walkers cannot go but he can get to a hide or something—but he has to get out of his car, assemble his wheelchair, go to the gate, unlock it, get back to the car, take his wheelchair down, go to the other side of the gate, get out again and repeat the process. It takes a long time and a lot of effort, so there have to be some innovative ideas. However, as I said, it is not just that. Something he pointed out that I think might have some resonance for many Members of your Lordships’ House is that, as you get older, sometimes you want to sit down on your walk, calling for provision of some resting place. It does not have to be a fancy seat; it could be an old log appropriately placed, or something like that. So, there are lots of things that can be done.

The other thing that has not been mentioned is getting access for those people who are very nervous of going out into the countryside, or even into nature. It does not have to be into the countryside; as I said earlier, we have lots of suburban areas. They are normally referred to as BAME, but there is another expression, which is the “visible minority ethnic” population, who feel very nervous about going out into areas where they do not see many other people who look like them. If we want to encourage more people to get into and understand the countryside, including farming, this is something we have to look at.

The Minister echoed the word “balance”, which was used previously, and balance is all-important here. The noble Lord, Lord Addington, mentioned the fact that there are competing desires. As somebody who goes out to enjoy nature, I am not always entirely chuffed to find myself in an area where there are lots of cyclists hurtling around when I am trying to spot a butterfly or something else, so there has to be balance.

I also well understand that landowners and farmers are nervous because, as we have seen in recent weeks and months, where people have been going out there seems to be an increase in irresponsible littering and fly-tipping, although that is a slightly different thing. I can understand why they do not want to have open access too much. We must also not forget irresponsible dog owners. Although it is probably a minority, you need only one person or a couple people to leave things around to put people off allowing access. Even on those areas that have public access, about a month ago a very important heathland in Surrey was set on fire. almost certainly by people using portable barbecues. I think that has also happened elsewhere. I can understand why, if I were a farmer, I would want there to be a balance in letting people in. We have to persuade and educate people on how to treat wild open spaces with respect.

That said, this is an important area that we should look at. For those people getting payment for public goods, public goods could well be encouraging people to use the countryside.

[Lord Greaves]

My Lords, yes, there have been fires on Pennine moors during the hot weather and lockdown, almost certainly caused by barbecues. I am one of the people pressing the Government to ban the use of mobile barbecues on open spaces. The sooner it happens the better.

I have been musing on the fact that I cut my teeth in the House of Lords on the Countryside and Rights of Way Bill almost exactly 20 years ago. At least three of us here in this debate are survivors of the all-night sitting we had in Committee—one of 11 Committee sessions. The Opposition at that time, the Conservatives, wanted 23 if I remember rightly. It was negotiated down to 11. If Members here think that they are hard done by, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

At that time there was also a pretty strong anti-access lobby in the House of Lords that was vociferous and quite angry. It is interesting that that has almost entirely disappeared and even those who raise questions are now reasonable and polite about it, which was not always the case at that time. That is a result of the success of the legislation that the then Labour Government brought in 20 years ago, which I was very proud to have been associated with in a very minor way.

I got together a speech to make today about how important access and recreation in the countryside are, but it is not necessary any more because it is generally accepted that that is the case. The value of recreation in the countryside for mental as well as physical health is generally accepted and that argument has been won.

As my noble friend Lady Scott said, we are talking about trying to make sure that things do not get worse and that they get better. Better small-scale facilities such as signposts and stiles that you can get over without demolishing dry stone walls in the process—I have done that twice in my life, simply because the facilities had deteriorated and it was a little-used footpath—help proper use and help land managers and farmers to cope with people walking across their land. It is win-win.

I am particularly supportive of Amendment 59, which is about enhancing access infrastructure. I am very fortunate to live in Pendle, on the edge of the town, with access to wonderful Pennine countryside, up on the Yorkshire border with Lancashire. Over the years, a huge amount of work had been done there on providing this kind of access. It is now beginning to fall apart a little, partly because the county council does not have the funding for it and partly because the schemes under which the work was done are not there anymore. It is very important indeed that the replacement and maintenance of facilities is part of what we are talking about.

I want to say something about the work that is going on in the Mendips by the Trails Trust, which the Minister will know about, as part of one of the trials looking at the provision of better and improved access. Will the Minister comment on that and tell us whether that kind of thing is going on in other areas? The trust is finding a lot of new bridleways, and those will be highly valuable. Indeed, I signed my name to the amendment from the noble Baroness, Lady Hodgson, about better bridleways.

One thing that is forgotten about is cycleways. Cycleways are not just urban things—they can be rural. They can be combined with horse riding and walking on local byways; indeed, you can cycle on a bridleway, but very often the surface is not all that good for cycling. They are not part of the rights of way legislation, because, at the time when that was based, cycles did not exist—they had not been invented. This is something that should be looked at now.

I ask the Government to look specifically at the problems raised by my noble friend Lady Scott concerning the ending of cross-compliance. Rights of way authorities have found cross-compliance requiring landowners to adhere to the Highways Act 1980 valuable, basically because they could threaten them for not doing it if they were getting grants. If that is removed, will a cross-compliance-type ruling be automatic, particularly in tier 1 grants and schemes, insisting that cross-compliance on rights of way on the land continues to exist—it would not be called “cross-compliance” but it would be the same thing—as a condition for getting the grant? Even if the grant does not cover rights of way at all, will landowners still be required to adhere to cross-compliance?

Finally, I come back to rights of way improvement plans, which I mentioned at Second Reading, and which the access authorities are supposed to have in place. Very often, the enthusiasm that went into these plans has gone, because rights of way departments have shrunk under the cuts to local authority budgets. The Environmental Land Management Policy Discussion Document, published in February, says that tier 2 outcomes are

“locally targeted environmental outcomes”

with

“some form of spatial targeting and local planning”.

This seems to be ideally suited to rights of way improvement plans across an area. Is that the kind of thing that the Government will look at and consider favourably? Will they encourage rights of way improvement authorities to put forward plans and try to integrate them into the new environmental land management system?

[Lord Lucas [V]]

My Lords, the amendments in this group are crucial to the success of this Bill—or at least, the spirit behind them is. When I was young, a family t-shirt read: “Farmer Palmer says ‘Get orf moy laaand!’”. Things have changed, and I am delighted by that, but it is not just offering access that is important but labelling access: making it practically possible for the people paying for these payments to farmers to enjoy the outcome. As my noble friend Lord Randall said, it includes things such as a resting place, information, enabling enjoyment when you get there and even some provision for the dog poo fairy—a range of things to make the visit worth while, a positive experience and something that people really engage with and appreciate.

Agriculture Bill

Lord Greaves Excerpts

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

[Lord Greaves (LD) [V]]

This is a very important and huge Bill, with lots in it. I will concentrate on one tiny bit of it, Clause 1(1)(b), which provides that one of the purposes of financial assistance can be for

“supporting public access to and enjoyment of the countryside, farmland or woodland and better understanding of the environment”.

Those are two important things. As a former geography teacher I could wax lyrical about understanding the environment, but I will talk about access. I declare my interests as vice-president of the Open Spaces Society and a patron of the British Mountaineering Council. I compliment the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, on his sensible comments on this, and my noble friend Lord Addington, who I see is in his place, also made some extremely sensible and balanced comments.

The nation’s path network is a treasured asset that everyone should be able to enjoy. It is the primary way in which people access the outdoors and connect with nature. Going walking is the main physical activity that people do. It brings huge benefits to rural communities, local businesses and tourism, and it helps to improve our understanding of farming and the natural world. What happens as a result of the Bill will set the agenda for access to the countryside for years to come.

While the Bill says what may happen, it has no detail in it whatever—not even a broad framework—on how it will happen. If we assume that the ambition is to enable more people to access and enjoy the countryside, while at the same time rewarding land managers and farmers for undertaking the activities to achieve this, I think we really need more from the Government on how this will work, particularly how they will work with local access authorities to help achieve this. The local access authorities and highways authorities that look after public rights of way are responsible for producing public rights of way improvement plans—they are not flavour of the moment—and for dealing with problems when a footpath is blocked or falls into the beck and making sure that the infrastructure for things like stiles exists.

The common agricultural policy was not all bad. It included cross-compliance which, in respect of rights of way, was useful to local enforcement and access authorities—they could use it to persuade recalcitrant landowners to provide the minimum standards necessary. It is not clear how this will be replaced under the new system.

One major absence from the aims of this Bill is landscape. One of the main public by-products of goods from farming is our wonderful British landscape in all parts of the UK. People think that they are wild landscapes, but they are not; they are the result of land management and farming. This needs attention in the Bill.

Japanese Knotweed

Lord Greaves Excerpts

Thursday 12th March 2020 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Greaves]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what progress they have made towards the eradication of Japanese Knotweed.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Lord Gardiner of Kimble) (Con)]

My Lords, Japanese knotweed is a tenacious species which is currently difficult to control on a large scale. Biocontrol agents have shown the potential to reduce the invasive capacity of Japanese knotweed and provide a cost-effective and time-effective way of managing this problem. We have been trialling biocontrol methods to control Japanese knotweed and are working to establish two highly specific biocontrol agents: the Aphalara itadori psyllid and a Mycosphaerella leaf spot fungus.

[Lord Greaves (LD)]

My Lords, it is 10 years since we first talked about the jumping plant louse, the psyllid, in this House. Another six months have gone by and there is another Question on Japanese knotweed. Can the Minister give us more information about the two biological agents, particularly the psyllid, which we have been talking about for so long? Secondly, can he tell us about updated government advice on property transactions when Japanese knotweed is on the property, particularly for people seeking mortgages, following last May’s Select Committee report?

[Lord Gardiner of Kimble]

My Lords, we accepted the recommendation in the Science and Technology Committee report to commission a study of international approaches in the context of property sales, and we expect to receive the final report at the end of March. I shall make sure that the noble Lord receives it. On the psyllid, there are problems with climatic issues, so more recently we have been seeking psyllids from the north and west of Japan, where we think the climatic conditions could be more similar to our climate.

As for the work that CABI, the Centre for Agriculture and Biosciences International, is doing with the leaf spot fungus, this is a single-mating type of specialist pathogen developed into a product for direct application, but which would not persist and spread in the wild or threaten any native species. I emphasise that because the last thing we want is any unintended consequences. This is going to take some years to reach the shelves if it is successful, but it is all part of our endeavour to control this very invasive plant.

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[Lord Gardiner of Kimble]

It is my privilege to occasionally see my noble friend, and she is always extremely encouraging. As for shooting admirals, I am not sure—shooting Ministers, perhaps, but certainly not admirals.

[Lord Greaves]

My Lords, I inform the House that before she retired, Lady Sharples extracted a promise from me that I would ask this Question at least every six months.

[Lord Gardiner of Kimble]

If it is my privilege to answer this Question again, I look forward to that. With research, we are always impatient and want the results now. I can promise your Lordships that through CABI, Defra is recognising that we need to find ways of doing this. For instance, the Environment Agency is experimenting with electro weeding, and on the Severn it has reduced Japanese knotweed by 50%. We are endeavouring to make progress.

England Coast Path

Lord Greaves Excerpts

Thursday 16th January 2020 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Greaves]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government when they expect to complete the England Coast Path and access around the coast of England.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Lord Gardiner of Kimble) (Con)]

My Lords, work is well under way on all 66 stretches of the path. By June, all Natural England’s route proposals will have been published. The original target was to open the path this year. The delay has been caused by a European court case which required Natural England to reassess the impact of its proposals. I expect the whole path to be open, or to have establishment works under way, by the end of 2021.

[Lord Greaves (LD)]

My Lords, I am grateful for that Answer. The first sections of the path were under way in 2010, when the coalition Government took over. During that time various Conservative Ministers tried to stop it, but, thanks partly to Liberal Democrat pressure—

[Noble Lords]

Oh!

[Lord Greaves]

It is absolutely true—I was at the meetings. Thanks to that, the Deputy Prime Minister was able to announce in 2015 that the path would be open by 2020. Does the Minister agree that only about a third of the path has so far been opened? Is he certain that the whole path will be open by the end of 2021, and is that a firm commitment?

[Lord Gardiner of Kimble]

My Lords, just to be clear, the first stretch of the path opened in 2012. I am in dialogue with senior officials at Natural England because, obviously, we wanted it to be finished this year. The Government granted a further £25 million to advance completion from 2030 to 2020. We want to keep up the pressure. I have set out very clearly the reasons for this delay; there is about an 18-month delay because of the court case and its implications for nature conservation designations. I am as confident as I can be, subject to any planning matters, that we will complete this.

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[Lord Gardiner of Kimble]

I can confirm that it is a footpath. However, having walked some of the stretch at Great Yarmouth, I know that parts of it absolutely are designed to enable disabled people to enjoy the wonders of the coastline.

[Lord Greaves]

My Lords, will the Minister join me in hoping that it is finished in sufficient time so that people with deteriorating joints, such as myself, can still walk the whole path?