Agriculture Bill

Lord Naseby Excerpts

Committee stage & Committee: 7th sitting (Hansard) & Committee: 7th sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 28th July 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Naseby (Con) [V]]

My Lords, I pay tribute to my noble friend on the Front Bench and his team. My goodness he has shown patience beyond belief and reminds me of the problems I had when I was Deputy Speaker in the other place. I am essentially a practical man. I hope my noble friend will listen carefully to the speeches made by my noble friends Lord Trenchard and Lord Lilley, who raised some very relevant issues that we as a Government have to face.

I will only really address Amendment 270. I pay tribute to my noble friend Lady McIntosh for tabling it before she knew whether there would be a Trade and Agriculture Commission. As has been pointed out, the commission and her proposals are not identical, but they are not dissimilar. I welcome what the Government have done so far.

Should the commission’s recommendations always be binding? I think not. I have listened to all sorts of advisory boards over many years across two Houses. I thank them, but they never were all binding. They certainly ought to be listened to very carefully, but they must be challenged on occasion.

Should the commission be a permanent body? I think it should, but every time we have a permanent body it is absolutely vital that we review its performance. I have noticed that the traditional review period is about five years. A bit of a drift has been going on to move beyond five years. Five years is about the right length.

I am not a farmer, but the quandary for me is that people say that farmers are being undercut by substandard producers. That raises the question: what happens if the producers are not substandard?

I always take an interest in what I suppose in the farming world are minority areas. I have long been involved with trees. I declare an interest in that I have a very modest 40 acres of woodland, approved by the Forestry Commission on a 10-year plan. We currently have problems with ash importation and with oak, partly from importation and partly from indigenous problems. There is a continuing need in that area, which I think is covered by the Bill, to ensure that we support research and development, and control of imports to ensure that they are of a proper quality for our saplings.

Where is the incentive for our farmers to improve their products so as to reduce the trade deficit? That seems a vital area. I have not noticed a lot of discussion about that in the many hours we have listened to these debates.

I take an interest in two other areas. There is a huge opportunity in horticulture. It is a small industry in the UK compared with what it was 40 or 50 years ago, but we must have joined-up government. We have a situation where one of the key restrictions on development in horticulture is the cost of power. If you have glass, you need cheap energy. We are producing good, environmentally friendly energy and more green energy as a percentage of supply than we have ever done. Lo and behold, along comes Ofgem with a proposal to reduce the profit percentage of energy suppliers—to halve it, in fact. Where will the investment come from in green energy and in the pricing of the product to help the horticulture industry? Someone must have a close look at Ofgem and ask it to stop meddling.

Finally, as I have mentioned before, viticulture is a tiny embryonic industry, but I hope it warrants at least somebody in the relevant department keeping a watch on it. It is growing fast and is well disciplined, but is competing across the world against the continent, the US, New Zealand, Australia and South Africa, to mention a few places. It is a good industry, which employs people and uses land that was not particularly well used in the past. It is a very exciting opportunity.

[The Earl of Devon (CB) [V]]

I remind noble Lords of my Devon farming interests and note my American links. I join other noble Lords in thanking both Ministers and the many House and departmental staff for their efforts. I congratulate Minette Batters of the NFU and many others for their tireless work on these issues. Jamie Oliver has been a leading voice for high standards in our national diet; I thank him and his audience as well. But I remain unconvinced that protection of our national food standards is necessarily the right course. I invite the Committee to consider the unashamed promotion of our national food standards as an alternative.

It is now day seven of this Committee stage, and I am embarrassed to note that, in this wide-ranging agricultural debate, the Devon cream tea has yet to be mentioned. It is my ancestral duty to correct that and to remind your Lordships that it was my Saxon predecessor Ordwulf, alderman of Devon, who first recorded serving scones, cream and jam to the builders of Tavistock Abbey in 997 AD. As an aside, could the Minister confirm whether the Duchy of Cornwall is answerable to Parliament? If it is, Devon would be most grateful if the Minister could confirm whether the Duke of Cornwall has any more ancient records of serving the cream tea. If he does not, it might settle an important local debate, once and for all.

Why is this particular piece of peninsula politics relevant? When I left California with my family, seven years ago, we served cream tea to our friends using Devon clotted cream, which was abundantly stocked in the local Santa Monica deli. When we left London for Devon some two years later, we tried the same, but could not find Devon cream in London; it was all from Cornwall. I came to realise then that the brand value of Devon cream is stronger in America than in England.

Along similar lines, we recently saw Her Majesty’s grandson Peter Phillips gamely promoting Jersey milk to the Chinese, whose appetite for meat and dairy is set to rise exponentially over the coming decades. Consider also our traditional French nickname, les rosbifs, and recall the celebration of English beef by William Hogarth and Henry Fielding, who famously wrote:

“When mighty Roast Beef was the Englishman’s food,

It ennobled our veins and enriched our blood.

Our soldiers were brave and our courtiers were good

Oh! the Roast Beef of old England”.

We can combine this ancient heritage and global brand recognition with modern environmental science. Studies increasingly identify grass-fed meat and dairy, typical of our western counties, as offering a lower carbon footprint and higher environmental benefit than alternative confinement systems, which house livestock indoors, feeding them intensive arable crops, hormones and antibiotics. Nations around the world are beginning to set net-zero targets, following the UK’s bold lead. I note that Joe Biden recently targeted net zero for the United States by 2050, which will include carbon-neutral food and farming.

Rather than protecting our farmers from high-carbon low-welfare imports, as these amendments seek to, might we not consider placing all our efforts on promoting our low-carbon high-welfare exports and re-establishing British farming as a world leader? It is for this reason that I am concerned that the trade, food and farming standards commission could be a regressive step. I do not believe that the commission that has been agreed by the Government and launched today has nearly the mandate it needs to achieve what the industry and consumers want. The commission will report in six months with a series of recommendations, but it will have no real impact on the Government’s negotiating strategy and no binding say. It is transparently a way of kicking the agricultural standards issue into that very same long green grass on which we West Country farmers pride ourselves.

Finally, I note that the Government are conducting dual negotiations with both the EU and the US, whose experienced trade delegations have long been driven directly by their farming interests. In contrast, our trade negotiators are mere debutantes due to be ravaged by their weathered counterparts, without a farming chaperone to protect them. We are all aware of the strength of the agricultural lobby in the US. This fall, the midwestern farming states are due to reprise their enormously influential role in US national politics. Similarly, none can forget the scenes of French farmers shutting down Paris with manure, in defence of their interests. Farmers have a radical sway over politics across Europe. Here, conversely, farming interests are conservative and convivial, as is graphically illustrated by the genteel hereditary voices—included mine—that have been so vocal in this debate.

I worry that this Government are not fearful enough of our farmers. They may need to become so, if our rural interests are to be fully realised in the ongoing trade negotiations.