British Agriculture

Lord Kerr of Kinlochard Excerpts

Thursday 26th February 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Willoughby de Broke (UKIP)]

My Lords, I am grateful to have the opportunity to have this short debate about farming because farming is facing something of a perfect storm at the moment. It is a storm made up of low prices, overregulation and unwarranted regulation, in many cases, from Brussels, and the imposition of a new payment scheme—the basic payment scheme—to replace the single payment scheme, but more of that a little later.

Some noble Lords may be familiar with Noel Coward’s song “There are Bad Times Just Around the Corner”, which states:

“From Colwyn Bay to Kettering they’re sobbing themselves to sleep,

The shrieks and wails in the Yorkshire Dales have even depressed the sheep;

In rather vulgar lettering a very disgruntled group have posted bills in the Cotswold hills

To prove we’re in the soup”.

I declare my interest as a member of that disgruntled group of farmers. I farm in Warwickshire and I am disgruntled because during my time in the Lords I have served on the committee chaired by the noble Earl, Lord Selborne, who is in his place, and have spoken in many debates, including debates in 1991, 1994, 1996, 1999, 2000, 2004 and 2008. I think that in nearly all those debates there were calls for reform of the common agricultural policy. I think that both Front Benches in this House have always agreed with the idea of reforming the common agricultural policy. However, what has happened after all those fine words? Where are we now? Has anything changed? Has the common agricultural policy become less bureaucratic, less centralised and less corrupt? No, it has not. Has it made farmers any more prosperous? No, it has not. Actually, things have got worse, as I will explain.

Let us look at where we are now. Dairy farming is on its knees and in many cases producers are being paid less than the cost of production. In some cases, milk is absurdly being sold at less than the price of water. I checked this out for myself in my local branch of the Co-op supermarket in Shipston-on-Stour last week and found that one litre of milk was priced at 85p, while a litre bottle of San Pellegrino water cost £1.35. Perhaps noble Lords should put San Pellegrino water on their cornflakes as it is obviously better than milk.

The beef and sheep sectors are suffering under overregulation, passports and identification schemes, many of which are unnecessary and certainly very burdensome and time-consuming for stock farmers. Arable farmers are regularly stripped of their ability to grow profitable, healthy and viable crops at a time when they are being enjoined to feed an ever increasing population, but the rules from Brussels make it more and more difficult to do that. I take the example of winter wheat. One of the big enemies of winter wheat is the black-grass weed. Over the last couple of years, the most effective black-grass herbicides have been gradually withdrawn against the advice of our own very independent and expert Advisory Committee on Pesticides and that of the previous government Chief Scientific Adviser, Sir John Beddington. However, their advice does not really count. What counts is what goes on in Brussels. The ayatollahs in Brussels decide what we are going to do and we have almost no say there any more. The rules are decided by the agricultural bosses in Brussels in the Commission and are subject to qualified majority voting in the Council of Ministers, where we are regularly outvoted. Perhaps the Minister can explain why Britain’s much trumpeted strong voice in Europe—about which we hear all the time from the Liberal Benches and the—

[Lord Kerr of Kinlochard (CB)]

I am most grateful to the noble Lord, who is famous for his continental courtesy. When people ask, “What did the Normans do for us?”, you have to say that, after the initial fracas at Hastings, they brought a great degree of courtesy to our debates, as we will see when the noble Lord, Lord De Mauley, who is legendary for his courtesy, replies to this debate.

Does the party of the noble Lord, Lord Willoughby de Broke, wish us to withdraw from the European Union and, if so, would we not still be subject to these terrible regulations which he has described, with only one difference—that we would no longer have any vote in what they were?

[Lord Willoughby de Broke]

Certainly, my party—UKIP—would definitely withdraw from the common agricultural policy. I am time limited in this debate and I do not want to go on for too long but we would have the money to pay farmers and our vote now is—

[Lord Kerr of Kinlochard]

My Lords—

[Lord Willoughby de Broke]

I am very sorry but I do not want to take any more interventions. If the noble Lord wanted to speak in the debate, he should have put his name down. Farmers can survive in this country without the CAP.

As the Minister will remember, the humiliating position of having no say in what goes on in agriculture in this country was underlined last summer when the Commission, spurred on by demonstrators dressed up as bumble-bees, suspended the use of neonicotinoid seed dressings for oilseed rape and other brassicas. Yet again, our Advisory Committee on Pesticides was against this, as to their credit were the Government and the Minister. Yet again, we are being forced to enforce a policy with which we do not agree.

The rule of unintended consequences will now kick in. Large acreages of oilseed rape have been damaged. The percentages are arguable, but these acreages have certainly suffered. According to Home Grown Cereals Authority estimates, about 40,000 acres of oilseed rape last autumn had to be destroyed, abandoned or re-drilled. The consequence of that is that as oilseed rape is a major food for bees and pollinators, there will be less food for them: there will be less oilseed rape. Now that neonics are banned, farmers will use airborne sprays. They have to be put on at flowering time. This initiative by the Commission will definitely damage bees more than was the case when we had neonicotinoid seed dressings—but welcome to the EU, and have a nice day.

Next on the EU shooting-itself-in-the-foot department were genetically modified organisms. Last year the scientific adviser to the European Commission, Professor Anne Glover, was effectively sacked by the new President of the Commission, Herr Juncker. He simply abolished the post. While she was not an active supporter of GMOs, her big mistake—her misdeed—was to say that she understood that the technology is safe and used all over the world. She made the serious error of actually saying this, when she told an organisation called EurActiv:

“I would be confident in saying that there is no more risk in eating GMO food than eating conventionally farmed food”.

For this extreme view she was vilified and pilloried by the usual suspects: Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and the Soil Association. Her job was abolished.

The result of this negative, damaging and anti-scientific approach to risk-based regulation, which is what we should have in this country, is that British farmers are disadvantaged by not being able to use technologies that their rivals all over the world are using to their and to consumers’ benefits.

It gets a bit worse. Brussels has come up with a shiny new and exciting replacement for the single payment scheme. It is called the basic payment scheme, or BPS. It is even more complex and irrational than the scheme that it replaces; it sounds hard to do, but Brussels has done it. There is a whole lot of bumf in six papers that I have had that covers 160 double-side pages of print and weighs in at 1 pound and 7 ounces. It defines what a farmer is and tells us what we can do on our own land.

The critical point here is that as farmers we can no longer decide what we grow. We are now handed down a demand and requirement by the Commission that in order to get the subsidies from the BPS we must grow three separate crops. The peasantry can no longer decide what it wants to grow. Presumably we are too stupid to decide what grows best on our own land, too ignorant to grow food that the market requires, and not fit to know what sort of rotational scheme we should have. We have to be told what to do by the European Commission.

This is complete madness. Do the Government really think it right to remain in this wasteful, corrupt, mismanaged, bureaucratic and utterly hopeless organisation, when the common agricultural policy has been condemned on both sides of this House for many years with, as far as I can see, absolutely no result? We would surely be better off bringing agricultural policy back to this country. This would be better for consumers and farmers, and much better for our self-respect.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Kerr of Kinlochard]

My Lords, I intervene briefly in the gap—

[Baroness Garden of Frognal (LD)]

My Lords, I apologise but the noble Lord, Lord Stoddart, was going to speak in the gap first.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Kerr of Kinlochard]

I thank the noble Lord. I intervene because the noble Lord, Lord Willoughby de Broke, was unwilling to accept my interventions during his speech.

When the Minister sums up in answer to this debate, will he confirm that the noble Lord, Lord Willoughby de Broke, is entitled to grow whatever he likes on his rolling acres, provided that he chooses not to apply for a subsidy? It is when he fills in the forms that he becomes subject to the regulation on issues such as the three-crop rotation. If you believe in reducing the cost of the CAP, as I certainly do and as the noble Lord, Lord Willoughby de Broke, has argued down the years, a good initial contribution would be for him to decide that he is happy to farm his land unsubsidised. It is if he applies for a subsidy from the EU that he has to play by the rules of the game.

Will the Minister also confirm that, if the UK left the EU, farm products or food from Britain would be subject to the 10% common external tariff on entering the EU that we had left, and that the regulations on food standards and quality would still have to be honoured if we were going to sell into the single market that we had left? In other words, we would still get the regulation but would have absolutely no say in the writing of the rules.

Finally, I think I am right in saying that the proportion of our GNP represented by agriculture is now a lot lower than it was in 1972, but that the cost of agricultural subsidy to this country is a lot higher. Will the Minister confirm that? He might want to consider whether that is one of the reasons why the CLA and the NFU do not agree with UKIP.