Lord Maude of Horsham
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Public Bodies Bill [Lords]
Lord Maude of Horsham Excerpts(12 years, 10 months ago)
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The Minister for the Cabinet Office and Paymaster General (Mr Francis Maude)
I beg to move, That the Bill be now read a Second time.
It seems almost unseemly to move a Second Reading in the wake of the august tributes to the retiring Clerk of the House. It is actually quite appropriate, because many of the tributes to Sir Malcolm, which I heartily endorse, talked about his understanding of and commitment to the powers of this House. Central to those powers is the House’s power and right to hold the Executive to account. That is essentially what the Bill is about. It will enlarge the scope of the state—the public realm—which this House and Parliament can hold to account, and reduce the scope of quangos and non-departmental public bodies and the range of public state entities that are not accountable to a democratic authority. That is long overdue. The Bill will put in place a mechanism that will enable this Government and future Governments to change the landscape of those bodies without the need for separate primary legislation whenever anything is sought to be done.
The public are right to expect a system in which Ministers are accountable for what the Government do and for how taxpayers’ money is spent. For too long, there has been the proliferation of a complex network of public bodies, which has worked against that expectation by blurring the lines of accountability and disguising inefficiency and duplication in the delivery of public services. It is for that reason that last summer the Government conducted an intensive review of public bodies, which was stimulated and led by the Cabinet Office but conducted by the relevant Departments across Whitehall. It was the most comprehensive interrogation of the role of such bodies for decades.
We subjected each body to four tests. The first was existential and asked whether the body needed to exist and whether its functions needed to be carried out.
Joan Walley (Stoke-on-Trent North) (Lab)
When the review was carried out, what environmental appraisal was there of the proposals?
Mr Maude
In conducting the reviews, the Departments will have considered the environmental implications. One example that I am about to refer to would have carried no environmental implications. Obviously, the Departments would have considered the environmental implications in every case. Before any action is taken under the powers in the Bill, there will be an opportunity for further detailed scrutiny.
The first question was whether the functions had to be carried out at all. In some cases, the answer was no. We decided fairly rapidly that the Government probably did not need an independent non-departmental public body to deliberate on the purchase of wine for the Government. That is of course an important function that must be carried out properly, but there does not need to be an NDPB to do it.
Sir Alan Beith (Berwick-upon-Tweed) (LD)
One body that is widely thought to be necessary and desirable is a chief coroner to provide leadership to the coronial profession. It would be possible to create that post without creating the kind of elaborate body that the Government are rightly anxious about by designating an existing coroner to have that leadership role with just a small amount of additional support.
Mr Maude
We rather agree with what my right hon. Friend says. There is concern that a whole new apparatus and bureaucracy should not be set up, with all the associated costs, which the previous Government’s plans would have entailed. However, we understand the concern that not proceeding with the establishment of a chief coroner would look insensitive, and would perhaps be insensitive in the circumstances. I will say a word later about the detail of our plans in respect of that office.
Mr Kevan Jones (North Durham) (Lab)
What has changed from when the Minister was in opposition, when he voted for the chief coroner and his party’s Front-Benchers spoke in favour of it in Committee? The Minister spoke about cost and there is an issue about cost. Why has he not yet published what savings will be made by not having a chief coroner? If, as he recognises, certain functions have to be carried out in the Ministry of Justice, at what cost will those functions be carried out?
Mr Maude
It will cost very much less. The set-up costs for the office of the chief coroner, as planned under the Coroners and Justice Act 2009, would have been £10.9 million and there would have been running costs of £6.6 million a year. I will tell the hon. Gentleman exactly what has changed. A Government have come to office and inherited the biggest budget deficit in the developed world. We had to take urgent steps to control and eradicate the deficit. As a result of that, he will be glad to know, despite having a budget deficit roughly the same size as that of Greece, we now enjoy interest rates roughly the same as Germany’s.
Mr Jones
The Conservative central office spin is wearing a bit thin. Will the Minister break down the costs? The other place was disputing the one-off set-up cost. Included in the so-called £6 million a year is nearly £1 million for contingency, which is 20% of the supposed running costs. Would it not help to justify his arguments if a detailed breakdown was printed, which the Ministry of Justice has signally failed to do and he has not done today?
Mr Maude
I will, of course, ensure that my right hon. and learned Friend the Lord Chancellor hears what the hon. Gentleman has said. There will be plenty of opportunities, such as at Question Time once a month, for the hon. Gentleman to ask those questions of Ministers at the Ministry of Justice.
Mr Maude
Do I have every single detail about every single body contained in the proposals? No I do not. I can answer in detail on the bodies that are within the responsibility of the Cabinet Office. This is an enabling Bill, which will enable the House of Commons and the House of Lords to scrutinise the detail of the proposals in each case. There will be plenty of opportunity for that to be done in the case of the office of the chief coroner, because the Government will introduce amendments in Committee, where the issue can be explored in great detail. I am confident that all the questions that are springing up can be answered at that stage.
Mr Bob Ainsworth (Coventry North East) (Lab)
The Minister is trying to evade collective responsibility for the decisions that the Government are taking. He is also ignoring the fact that there was widespread consultation on this matter and that it was supported by the Opposition. It was found that, almost without exception, nobody disagreed with this. This is far and away the cheapest and most effective way of getting consistency into the inquest service. The cost of the inconsistency is both human and monetary. The costs that the Minister talks about need to be offset against the costs of the judicial reviews that are brought regularly against the current system. He knows that this is the most preposterous U-turn. The suggestion that the coronial service should be accountable to this House is also a disgrace. It should be independent. It can therefore only answer to one of its own. That is why the creation of the office of chief coroner is so necessary.
Mr Maude
The office of chief coroner will be brought into existence. It will not be set up in the elaborate way and with the extensive additional costs embodied in the proposals of the previous Government. The office will exist. The functions, to the extent that they are needed, will be exercised in a way that is affordable in the current circumstances. If the right hon. Gentleman, for whom I have considerable respect, is really suggesting that we should spend this amount of extra money on this matter, he needs to tell the House what he would cut to enable that to happen.
Charlie Elphicke (Dover) (Con)
Surely the concern is not just over the amazingly expensive offices that many quangos like to equip themselves with, but over the amount of pay that they receive. People at the UK Film Council get more than £150,000 a year, the British Waterways chief executive gets £230,000, and a similar amount goes to the chief executive of the Dover Harbour Board, dare I mention it? Surely we should ensure that the cost of each individual is reduced to a sensible amount.
Mr Maude
One of the benefits brought about by this Government is to make all that more transparent. We have exposed for scrutiny by the public and the House what those high salaries are, and it is right that we should do so. They may be completely justified in many cases, but they ought to be justified and scrutinised, so I make no apology for introducing that degree of transparency.
Helen Goodman (Bishop Auckland) (Lab)
While the right hon. Gentleman is talking about salaries, perhaps he will address the abolition of the Agricultural Wages Board, which protects the incomes of the poorest people in the countryside. Its abolition will mean that those workers lose more than £150 a week in sick pay straight away. How can he defend that?
Mr Maude
I justify it on the basis that the Government of the hon. Lady’s party introduced a minimum wage, which was voted through by the House. The Agricultural Wages Board was introduced at a time when there was no national minimum wage. It now exists, and we take the view that an independent body with the AWB’s powers no longer needs to exist.
Andrew George (St Ives) (LD)
The point about the Agricultural Wages Board is not just that it pins down a minimum wage for agricultural workers but that there are six scales of pay and other protections for those workers, who have a very weak voice in the labour market. The Minister talks about transparency, but the rural voice will be lost unless transparent decisions are made in the Chamber about each of the bodies involved, including the Rural Advocate, who speaks up on behalf of the most vulnerable in rural communities.
Mr Maude
On the hon. Gentleman’s point about the Rural Advocate, it seems to me that rural areas are very well represented in this House. It seems odd that a separate body should be created to be a rural advocate, because it seems to me that it is the duty of Members of Parliament to be the advocate for their constituents. There are many very effective advocates of rural residents and constituents.
The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs proposes to consult on the AWB in the autumn. It will be part of a wider consultation package on the future of the agricultural wages committees and the agricultural dwelling house advisory committees.
Mr Sam Gyimah (East Surrey) (Con)
I fear that the Minister is being led down the path of discussing every public body covered in the Bill. Is it not the case that the public bodies identified in the Government’s review form a significant layer of state control, and one from which people can only feel distant? Bringing accountability to bear on that layer is the most important aspect of the Bill for him to focus on.
Mr Maude
My hon. Friend makes a very good point. These bodies are rarely discussed in the House, and that is part of the problem that we are seeking to deal with. Unless there is a compelling reason why a state function should be carried out by a body that is independent of any democratic accountability, the presumption should be that it is accountable. That is the test that we apply.
Rehman Chishti
I am grateful to the Minister. Between 2007 and 2008, public sector organisations spent about £4 million on hiring political consultants to lobby Government, which is totally unacceptable. What steps are being taken to ensure that it does not happen again?
Mr Maude
The guidance has been tightened up considerably. Taxpayers find it quite offensive that a body that is not democratically accountable should use taxpayers’ money, in some cases, to hire lobbyists to lobby Government to give it more taxpayers’ money. We have taken urgent steps to ensure that that does not recur.
Alun Cairns
I am very grateful. I could not agree more with my right hon. Friend about lobbyists, but does he also accept the danger that many public bodies will start to employ internal lobbyists directly rather than commissioning and contracting them? That would also be a waste of money.
Mr Maude
My hon. Friend will forgive me, but I really do need to make progress. A great many Members wish to contribute to the debate.
Our first test of a body was the existential test—does its function need to be carried out at all? If, as in most cases, the body’s functions were deemed necessary, we then sought to establish whether the functions should be carried out independently. We had three tests. If a body carries out a highly technical activity, if it is required to be politically impartial or if it needs to be able to act independently to establish or measure facts, it is right for it to remain outside direct ministerial or other democratic accountability. That is clearly the case with bodies such as the new Office for Budget Responsibility, Ofgem and many others.
Any body that does not meet any of those tests will either be brought back into a Department, where it can be held accountable to the House through a Minister, or devolved to local authorities. In both cases there will be democratic accountability. Or in some cases, a body’s functions could be carried out outside the state altogether in the private or voluntary sector. We went through an extensive process to determine the outcome of the review.
The first task was simply to establish how many quangos there were and what they did. It may sound absurd, but it was and remains incredibly difficult to get firm information on that. Many do not publish accounts, there is no central list and there are many different types of quango with different statuses. The official list of non-departmental public bodies contains 679 bodies, excluding those in Northern Ireland, but that does not include non-ministerial departments, Government-owned public corporations or trading funds. Our review covered 901 bodies, and we believe, but cannot be certain, that that is the true extent of the landscape. I stress that departmental executive agencies were not within the review’s scope. They are directly controlled by Ministers, who are accountable to Parliament for what they do.
At the end of that review, I announced our proposals to the House on 14 October last year. They were that 481 of the bodies should be substantially reformed, including 192 abolished entirely and a further 118 merged. Since that announcement we have concluded consideration of a number of other bodies, and I can tell the House that the current total is that 495 bodies will be reformed, including 200 abolished and 120 others merged into 59 successor bodies. We have moved quickly to implement that programme, and I am pleased to tell the House that 45 bodies had been abolished by the end of April this year. Overall, we expect to make administrative savings—I stress that they are administrative—of £2.6 billion from public bodies over the spending review period. That money will be better spent on protecting public sector jobs and on front-line services.
Mr Maude
If the hon. Gentleman will forgive me, I am going to make progress. I have given way a great deal, and I do not want this speech to go on too long. I am sure that is a sentiment that the House will support.
I note that the previous Government’s intention, set out in 2009, was to abolish 120 bodies, saving the conveniently round sum of £500 million. Yet in the six months following that announcement, they did not even manage to abolish half of them—a clear demonstration that, as ever, they had a better knack for the headline than for the hard work of implementing what had been promised.
Where public bodies have been retained, they will be subject to a process of rigorous triennial review, to ensure that they remain fit for purpose, that the need is there, and that the justification for them remaining independent is still valid. Far too often, bodies have been created and left well beyond the time when they are needed, partly because there has been no means to reform or disband them—any such change would have required primary legislation, time for which is, as we know, at a premium in the House.
The Government’s response to the Select Committee on Public Administration report outlined the principles of that review process, and I look forward to giving further details to the House in due course. The review process for individual bodies will be led by the responsible Minister in each case, and co-ordinated and supported by the Cabinet Office.
The House will be aware that the Bill was brought from another place, where it has received substantial scrutiny, resulting in a number of important amendments. I thank noble Lords for their constructive engagement in this process, which has helped the Government to produce an even more coherent and well-structured Bill—it was fairly coherent and well-structured to begin with. I hope that it will command the support of this House and the confidence of the public. I pay particular tribute to my noble Friend Lord Taylor of Holbeach for his skilful stewardship of the Bill in the other place.
The Bill is centred on a series of order-making powers that enable Ministers to make changes to public bodies through secondary legislation, subject to the approval of Parliament. That mechanism creates a coherent and efficient procedure for reform, while properly giving Parliament the ability to scrutinise both the principle and the detail of the proposals.
Mark Lazarowicz (Edinburgh North and Leith) (Lab/Co-op)
Will the Minister give way?
Mark Lazarowicz
Although there is no doubt nothing wrong with dealing with some of those bodies by order, can the right hon. Gentleman not understand the concerns many of us have about the fact that bodies such as the Office of Fair Trading and the Competition Commission can simply be merged by order, when there were hours, days or weeks of debate in the House, including in Committee, to set them up? Is not that a dangerous precedent for the Government to set?
Mr Maude
Powers to amend primary legislation by secondary legislation are not unprecedented. An amendment made in the other place, which the Government supported, will mean that either House can require an enhanced affirmative procedure. Such a procedure not only requires consultation before a draft order is laid, but allows a further period for reflection on, and analysis and scrutiny of, the proposal. It is reasonable to have a reasonably accelerated process for the reform of public bodies. Otherwise, we will end up in a position in which we have a wholly incoherent landscape of public bodies. I confess that even at the end of the process that we are currently proposing, that landscape will still be quite muddled, but it will at least have been cleared up to some extent.
Gavin Shuker
Further to the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh North and Leith (Mark Lazarowicz) on the OFT and Competition Commission, is that not an odd state of affairs? There are reports that one of those bodies will take responsibility for NHS contracts worth more than £70 million, yet today we are discussing the changes to them abstract from Monitor’s responsibilities.
Mr Maude
The functions will continue to exist, but there will be a rationalisation of the landscape of the bodies. A single competition authority will be created. A number of the consumer advocate functions will be given to citizens advice bureaux, which will strengthen their role and bring welcome additional funding to them—[Interruption.] I would hope that hon. Members welcomed the enhancement of the role of CABs that the Bill brings about.
The Bill provides an ability to make further changes as need arises in future. Each order-making power is limited in its application to those bodies that are listed in the relevant schedule to the Bill. Clause 1 creates a power for a Minister to abolish a body or office by order. Such an order may either abolish the body’s functions if they are no longer required, or transfer some or all of them to another eligible party, such as a Government Department, a charity or another public body.
In some cases, an order under clause 1 will be motivated by the principle of accountability—that a Minister should be directly accountable for Government actions within their sphere of influence. For that reason, we propose to abolish the Child Maintenance and Enforcement Commission and to return its functions to the direct control of the Department for Work and Pensions. In other cases, a body will simply be abolished to halt unnecessary expenditure and duplication. For example, clause 1 will also be used to introduce orders to abolish the Valuation Tribunal Service, the functions of which can now be performed by Her Majesty’s Courts and Tribunals Service, and which therefore no longer needs to be a separate entity, with its own overhead costs.
The next four clauses of the Bill create a complementary set of powers to merge groups of bodies, to modify constitutional or funding arrangements, or to modify or transfer a body’s functions. The breadth of those powers is a reflection of the breadth of the Government’s reform agenda. We aim to enhance the scope of civil society by the creation of a new waterways charity to replace British Waterways. Our agenda spreads to the modification of regulatory bodies such as Ofcom and the Equality and Human Rights Commission to ensure that they are fully focused on their vital regulatory functions.
In total, 294 bodies currently appear in the schedules to the Bill, demonstrating the importance of this measure to the reform agenda. Details of our proposals for each of those bodies are available in a document that has been placed in the House Library. I can assure the House that that document will be updated regularly throughout the passage of the Bill, and I hope it forms a valuable basis for debate in Committee.
In addition, the Bill creates specific powers for Welsh Assembly Ministers to take forward a number of changes to public bodies operating in Wales. Those will assist the Welsh Assembly Government as they seek to simplify their public bodies landscape and to deliver further savings, and I hope that those measures also enjoy the support of the House.
As I have indicated, the passage of the Bill through the Lords saw a number of modifications to the mechanisms of the Bill. The modifications tighten the purposes for which those powers can be used and ensure the appropriate balance between speed and scrutiny in the reform process. Those changes mean that the Bill that was introduced in this House strikes a carefully crafted balance. It will enable Ministers to make much-needed reforms to public bodies without recourse to specific primary legislation, an innovation that I believe will support efficient management of public bodies both now and in the future. Yet at the same time, the Bill requires Government to make the case for their proposals to stakeholders and to Parliament, guaranteeing that proper consideration is given to the exercise of important public functions.
I should tell the House that the Government intend to introduce a number of amendments in Committee. In particular, the House will be aware that following the written ministerial statement on 15 June by the Minister of State, Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, my hon. Friend the Member for Hertford and Stortford (Mr Prisk), who has responsibility for business and enterprise, the abolition of the regional development agencies will now be taken forward in primary legislation through the Bill. Abolishing the RDAs in the Bill will ensure that the Government can meet our timetable for the development of a new framework for regional growth, providing clarity and opportunity to businesses across the nation.
Similarly, we will seek to amend the Bill to modify the Broadcasting Act 1990 to revise the funding arrangements for S4C by removing the retail prices index link, while securing the channel’s independent future status and delivering significant savings.
I can also inform the House that the Government will seek to reintroduce the office of the chief coroner and the Youth Justice Board to the Bill’s schedules, overturning votes in the other place. As I said earlier, my right hon. and learned Friend the Lord Chancellor has listened to the concerns raised in relation to the important functions that those bodies are designed to carry out, and I believe that our revised proposals will gain wide support. We have agreed that the office of the chief coroner should remain on the statute book, and our amendments will propose adding it to schedule 5 to the Bill to enable some of its functions to be transferred to the Lord Chief Justice and the Lord Chancellor.
The Government will propose a number of more technical amendments to the Bill, including measures to clarify the requirements of the consultation process in clause 10, to ensure that any orders made under the Bill in relation to the funding arrangements of bodies or offices require the consent of the Treasury and to modify the list of taxes subject to variation in their provision as part of a transfer scheme made in connection with an order under the Bill.
The Government are committed to bringing about radical change in the administration of government in the UK—change that responds to the public’s demand to place the principles of transparency, accountability and value for money at the centre of what the state does. Quango reform has been long promised by parties on both sides of the House and is long overdue, but we have now taken the difficult decisions necessary to make it possible and to make it happen. By enabling a comprehensive and overdue reconfiguration of the landscape and by creating a framework to support better management of public bodies in the future, the Bill gives the Government the essential tools with which to turn this commitment into reality. I commend it to the House.
Tessa Jowell
We ought to take into account the reduction of bodies at the Department of Health, link to that the significant reduction in the number of bodies announced by the Haskins review of Natural England and consider the systematic reduction in the number of other bodies, as well as the fact that some were merged and others increased their functions. However, in March 2010, we announced plans to go further and faster and to reduce the overall number of bodies by a further 123.
Tessa Jowell
I do not necessarily accept that that was the largest reduction. However, devolution was one of the most significant policies introduced—and proudly so—by the Labour Government, and of course previously reserved powers were then devolved to the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Assembly.
A 20% reduction would have saved £500 million from next year. The Minister jibbed at that, but we viewed the process of altering, closing down and merging public bodies as one that should take place systematically over time. Those £500 million of savings would have been realised by next year.
Tessa Jowell
If the hon. Gentleman does not mind, I am going to make some progress, as there are lots of Back Benchers who want to speak in this debate.
The approach that the Government have taken in this Bill is the opposite of the clear and costed plan that was produced by the last Government. They are abolishing and merging bodies, in some cases without any idea of what their functions are. Again, I hope that a greater understanding of those functions will result from further scrutiny. Even now, more than 10 months after the review of public bodies began, we are still in the dark over what the Government have planned for a number of the bodies in this Bill. A number of consultations have begun, but the Government are not even waiting for the results. Consultation was eventually promised on the regional development agencies, but it has now been withdrawn because it would disrupt the process of disassembling RDAs that is already under way. Today the Secretary of State for Justice has announced a public consultation on all the bodies that affect his Department, but this will report after the Bill has gone through Parliament. Therefore, the Minister here today is effectively asking this House to give its permission fundamentally to change or to abolish those bodies before his colleagues have decided what will be put in their place.
While the Government cut quangos in this Bill, they are adding hundreds of bodies elsewhere. Let us take the national health service. As a result of the Government’s chaotic approach to the NHS, they have tripled the number of statutory bodies in the NHS, which now number 521. There will now be new shadow commissioning groups and authorised commissioning groups, primary care trust clusters, strategic health authority clusters, clinical networks and clinical senates, all of which will be overseen by the NHS commissioning board, which the chief executive of the NHS has described as
“the greatest quango in the sky”.
The question that we now have to ask the Minister is whether, even with the passage of this Bill, he believes that there will be fewer public bodies in 2015 than when he first entered his Department. What is his baseline number and what will be the number of quangos in 2015? I am happy to give way to him if he wishes to speak at the Dispatch Box. Okay, the House will note the absence of an answer to that question. The Government do not even know how much money they are going to save. In an article in The Sun—the Minister’s newspaper of choice for these purposes—in March, he claimed that the Government would save £30 billion in spending on quangos,
“so we can protect jobs and frontline services”.
What he failed to mention was that the majority of those savings were from cuts to the very front-line services that he had pledged to save. Almost £25 billion are from cuts to housing and universities, with almost another £2 billion from our arts, our sports and our museums. Only £2.6 billion of the claimed savings were from actual administration, and even that figure has now come under scrutiny.
In written evidence submitted to the Public Administration Committee, the Minister’s own Department admitted that only £1.6 billion of cumulative administrative savings can be found. Perhaps the Minister would like to explain to the House where the other £1 billion of administrative savings are likely to come from. [Interruption.] Again, the Minister appears not to know where the administrative savings will come from, and this is before the Government have even looked at redundancies, which are a major cost of any organisational transformation. The Local Government Chronicle has estimated that the bill for redundancies at the RDAs alone will cost the Government at least £100 million, yet the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills has not even estimated how much they will cost in this financial year. Information gathered from parliamentary answers shows that out of all the Departments affected, only two have so far made estimates of the likely costs of redundancies, neither of which is the Department headed by the Minister. The Minister should take this opportunity to admit to the House that he has no idea what the net savings will be from his reform of public bodies, and no idea of the cost of the redundancies. This deeply flawed Bill is part of a deeply flawed, ill -thought-out programme of reform that could well end up costing more money than it is projected to save.
Mr Maude
I want to make it absolutely clear, as I have done before, that these are cumulative administrative savings over the spending review period of £2.6 billion, and that they are net of restructuring costs—[Interruption.] That was made absolutely clear in March, in my response to the Select Committee. The right hon. Lady has lots of suggestions for what should not be done in the Bill; has she any suggestions for what should be done to reform the quango landscape?
Tessa Jowell
Yes, we certainly have. I should like to refer the right hon. Gentleman to the programme of reform that was clearly set out by the previous Government, on which I am sure full information is available in his Department. If not, I am happy to provide it for him. It involved £500 million-worth of savings by 2012-13.
Let me now turn to some of the specific bodies listed in the schedules to the Bill. When the Minister began this process of reform, he said that public bodies would be allowed to remain if they fulfilled one of three criteria—namely, if they performed a technical function, if they dealt with issues that required political impartiality or if they needed to act independently to establish facts. I should like to say to the Minister that those are good, rigorous tests of public bodies.
Let us apply those tests to the Agricultural Wages Board. If the Minister believes that we should preserve bodies that perform an important technical function, surely the board should be removed from the Bill, because it sets the pay of 140,000 people in England. That also covers holiday pay, sick pay and overtime. If the board is abolished, fruit pickers and farm workers will see their wages fall. Workers could lose between £150 and £265 a week in sick pay, because that would no longer be guaranteed. School-age children working at weekends or in summer jobs will also lose out. The Farmers Union of Wales has warned that
“unless there are systems in place to protect payments to agricultural workers, the industry will not attract the highly skilled technicians it needs to thrive.”
I hope that the Minister will recognise that Labour is seeking to help him by today launching our “Back the Apple” campaign, which shows our commitment to fairness in the countryside and our backing for the Agricultural Wages Board. It is a precious asset that helps to ensure the decency of fair wages and to enable people working in the countryside get a fair deal.