Agriculture Bill

Lord Rooker Excerpts

Report stage & Report: 3rd sitting (Hansard) & Report: 3rd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 22nd September 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Rooker (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, I briefly give my full-hearted support to the noble Earl and his proposal. Again, I draw on my own experience at both MAFF and Defra and, at one time, as the Planning Minister, when I had a predisposition to facilitate the use of what you could term redundant farm buildings for other uses, be they housing or small enterprises—sometimes start-up or incubator units. I realise that it is not easy, and I know local authorities are suspicious because there have been abuses in the past. I realise that they sometimes want to limit the footprint of redundant buildings being extended too much, but the fact is that we need a national guideline for the flexibility.

The noble Earl pointed out that there are two classes of situation here. Local authorities could be deemed to be giving planning permission to themselves— or, indeed, not giving it—where they own the county farms. It is always a problem when one has to have these separate walls in local authorities. It does not always look fair.

I give my support for all the flexibility the Minister can give, by way of encouragement to local authorities under the planning system, for more modern uses of agricultural buildings. The idea of affordable housing and issues ancillary to farming are fine; I would go much further than that, but I rest on supporting the noble Earl.

[Lord Young of Norwood Green (Lab) [V]]

I first declare an interest as a member of the EU Energy and Environment Sub-Committee, which has done a lot of work on agriculture. I congratulate the noble Earl, Lord Dundee, on an excellent amendment. We certainly need to encourage new entrants and young farmers.

Looking at some statistics about farming apprenticeships, I was interested that they talked about a 2.7% growth in the industry as a whole and something like 137,000 people leaving the industry, so there are plenty of opportunities there. Is it currently easy for new entrants and young farmers? All the evidence we see is that you have to be very determined.

This is a really worthwhile amendment. It falls in line with our new approach to farming subsidies and the 25-year plan. It is a golden opportunity to put the emphasis, as it says, on sustainability and care of the environment. New young people coming into the industry will give it a fresh look; they are much better versed in the new technology. The point the noble Earl, Lord Dundee, made about housing is also important. We need to recognise that it is not enough just to create the opportunity; we also need to enable people to live near their place of work.

The other point I would like to emphasise is that there is, as we have heard in this debate, an awful lot of best practice out there and a lot of good farming going on. Finding the opportunity for those farmers to buddy up with new entrants to act as mentors would be really good.

The noble Earl, Lord Dundee, mentioned food security and fresh produce. In addition, there would likely be less food waste. Giving guidance to local authorities also seems a sensible part of this amendment. I welcome the amendment and give it my full support. I trust we will have a positive and constructive response from the Minister.

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[The Earl of Dundee (Con) [V]]

My Lords, within this grouping, I support my noble friend Lord Trenchard’s helpful amendments. First, on United Kingdom and EU standards, he corrects a misapprehension or, maybe, he forestalls it before it has time within the Bill to solidify as a regular misunderstanding. For, as he points out, there is no difference between domestic standards and European Union ones. They are identical.

Secondly, what is also insufficiently known—and as my noble friend also usefully observes—in certain respects, the UK and EU are not compliant with World Trade Organization rules. I am in favour of Amendment 103 of the noble Lord, Lord Wigley, which urges that United Kingdom global tariff rates should take into account the well-being of the agricultural sector and that imported goods must be equivalent to, or exceed, domestic standards.

[Lord Rooker (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, I will make a brief contribution. In fact, I was going to opt out altogether because I did not want to repeat anything that anyone else had said. Certainly, I support the questions that the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, asked at the beginning of the debate and, frankly, I expect the Minister to answer all six of them. They were quite specific.

It is worth pointing out that, unlike Ministers, the Food Standards Agency is actually required to do things by law. I will read out Section 1(2) of the Food Standards Act 1999:

“The main objective of the Agency in carrying out its functions is to protect public health from risks which may arise in connection with the consumption of food (including risks caused by the way in which it is produced or supplied) and otherwise to protect the interests of consumers in relation to food.”


By law, Ministers do not have that obligation. They think they can hump it away in the Commons, but I have news for them: if they want to take on the role of Food Safety Minister, they ought to have a bit of a history lesson about salmonella, orange juice, BSE and CJD. Then they will realise why the FSA was put there in the first place. It was not a happy experience for previous Ministers without its support.

I will make one further point relating to what the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh, has said about chlorinated chicken. I do not think I have got her wrong, but I do not want to mislead. She said that she could eat it safely because the issue was about animal welfare, not the safety of the food, and she is right. However, published research from the University of Southampton has shown that chlorine washing of food does not take away all the nasty bits. They started off, I think, by washing vegetables, but they have since looked at meat—I am not sure whether this was chicken or other meat. However, the fact is that this is not a solution to the problem.

The other thing that is also worth point out is that, in the United States of America, over 400 people a year die from salmonella. In this country, no one has died—I think there was one case in the last eight years—compared to 400-plus in the United States. I am not saying that it is because they ate chlorinated chicken, but I am saying that it is pretty unsafe in respect of deaths from salmonella in the United States, which seeks to push its food onto us without necessarily labelling it. Therefore, there are some issues here that must be carefully looked at.

As for the Minister, I have not been in my office or at my desk for well over 12 months, but I have a little file up there with at least a dozen quotes from the noble Lord, Lord Gardiner, who is a reputable Minister, on food standards over the last three or four years. He has more of a claim than any other Minister to reassure the public and Parliament.

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[Lord Wallace of Tankerness (LD) [V]]

My Lords, I very much support the amendment, the purposes of which have been so well articulated by the noble Lord, Lord Curry of Kirkharle; I was pleased to add my name to it. The noble Lord clearly sets out the progress that has been made, and the need to ensure that that is sustained and not undermined.

In Committee, I subscribed to and supported a similar amendment in the noble Lord’s name. On that occasion, I quoted from a letter which the president of the National Farmers Union of Scotland, Mr Andrew McCornick, had sent to MPs during the passage of this Bill in another place. It was admittedly before the Government announced their Trade and Agriculture Commission; nevertheless, I believe that the sentiments expressed are still relevant and worth repeating.

Mr McCornick wrote

“it is vital that future trade deals do not curtail our ability to grow our reputation as a nation of provenance and quality by undercutting domestic production with imported produce, with which we cannot compete on price and production method.”

This amendment is drafted in similar terms to the one tabled in Committee, but there is a crucial difference. We have heeded the concerns expressed during the debate in Committee about the short life of the Trade and Agriculture Commission which was proposed then. So this amendment proposes a continuing existence for the commission, after producing its important primary report, to make recommendations to the Secretary of State to promote, maintain and safeguard current standards of food production through international trade policy, including standards relating to food safety, the environment and animal welfare. This continuing role may be achieved by the Secretary of State prescribing further functions for the Trade and Agriculture Commission after its initial report is published, and in any event, because the TAC will have a continuing responsibility to report on any trade agreement negotiated by the Government, to consider its impact on the trade of agri-food products and to assess its impact on the ability of the Secretary of State to promote, maintain and safeguard standards of agri-food production, including in relation to food safety, the environment and animal welfare.

The amendment would give the commission an explicit additional duty to advise Parliament on all trade deals and how they would impact on food and farming standards. That is one of the reasons the National Farmers’ Union of Scotland has indicated that it would encourage support for the amendment.

I shall conclude by giving two compelling reasons why this amendment should commend itself to Parliament, and an equally good reason why it should appeal to the Government. While providing for the Trade and Agriculture Commission to make recommendations, the amendment gives a key role to Parliament to consider recommendations as well as to determine Motions on the Government’s response to them—so Parliament would have a direct role.

Secondly, the provisions in relation to the new trade treaties supplement the rather limited role given to Parliament under the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act 2010 in relation to the ratification of treaties. Both bring back more control to Parliament. As for the Government, the amendment would help them to secure their pledge set out on page 57 of their 2019 manifesto:

“In all of our trade negotiations, we will not compromise on our high environmental protection, animal welfare and food standards.”


It seems to me that this is a win-win situation all round.

[Lord Rooker (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, I am pleased to follow the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace, and particularly the noble Lord, Lord Curry, in supporting this amendment. Indeed, it is the only amendment tabled on Report which has my name attached to it. I shall be brief.

The point encapsulated in the last two speeches is very important. The National Farmers’ Union of England and Wales, the National Farmers’ Union of Scotland and the Ulster Farmers’ Union, which I worked very closely with when I was the farming Minister in Northern Ireland, all support this amendment. It is also supported by the CLA. That is incredibly widespread support that should enable the Minister to grab it with both hands. It cannot be anything but good for the Government to have the kind of support from the farming community that an amendment such as this carries.

Before I make my other comments, I want to respond to the noble Viscount, Lord Trenchard, who was kindly paying attention, or partly paying attention, to what I said in the previous debate. What I said was that in the United States of America, over 400 people a year die of salmonella. You can get the figures from the Centers for Disease Control. I did not say that they all died from eating chicken. What I also said was that nobody has died from this in the UK in the past 10 years. There may have been one case, but there was a dispute about it.

So it is not a question of looking at populations. The number of deaths in America is huge. Per head of population, food poisoning cases in the United States are 10 times higher than in Great Britain—although I did not go into that. People in America die from salmonella, but here it is not a cause of death. That is the difference, and the point I was making.

This amendment is very important for providing the checks and balances for what is a somewhat haphazard Government. I am not criticising the Minister or his team in this respect, or indeed the Bill team, but it is a haphazard Government, and this would provide checks and balances. The Government cannot rely on the existing structure. For example, I do not think that the Food Standards Agency is resourced or has the overall competence to get involved in the details of trade deals, as the proposed commission would. Of course, bodies such as the FSA and Food Standards Scotland would advise the commission, but the commission would have the main role.

It is also quite important that Amendment 101 not just involves but respects the primacy of Parliament, which Amendment 97 clearly does not. As I read that amendment, it seeks to give a veto over trade deals, and that cannot be right. I shall not recite the contents of Amendment 101, as that would be quite wrong. However, proposed new subsection (4)(d) in Amendment 101 is quite useful. In fact, I think that the Minister himself would probably quite like a list of the existing powers of the Minister, as it would be useful to know. Basically, we would like to know which powers they have got that they are not using. The powers are spread throughout a massive amount of legislation and it would be useful to have a list of them so that we could check which ones they are not using. Proposed new paragraph (f), which ties in with paragraph (c), would make the monitoring of imported foods—something that will not be easy—practical and workable.

We also have to remember that the EU does that for us now. The EU, on behalf of the member states, sends inspectors all over the world to check that farms and food factories are safe and of sufficient quality to supply the EU. We will have to repeat all that ourselves, and therefore it is very important that we have a system for monitoring the situation.

On the efficiency of UK agriculture—I am speaking from memory here—I think that the UK is so efficient in producing milk from dairy cattle that, if the rest of the world replicated our systems, there would be less than half the number of dairy cattle in the world. In other words, we are very efficient, and if we could spread that technology around the world, we would have fewer dairy cattle, less methane, less pollution and much more efficient production.

In short, on the idea of a standing rather than a temporary commission, a standing commission would consist of consumers, traders and producers, and it would instil far more confidence than the six-month commission that the Government have set up. The Minister and his team would be very wise to embrace Amendment 101.

[The Lord Bishop of St Albans [V]]

My Lords, I too will speak on Amendment 101, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Curry of Kirkharle, to which I have added my name. The previous three speakers have more than adequately spelled out why it makes a great deal of sense, so I can limit my comments.

The Government, through the joint letter from the Environment Secretary and the Secretary of State for International Trade, have assured us that standards will not be compromised as part of trade negotiations. Furthermore, I am reassured by the breadth of experience among the agri-food trade advisory group. However, welcome though these developments are, fundamentally they lack the legally binding requirement that properly guarantees that Parliament will have recourse to ensuring that our standards are not diluted.

We all recognise the value of our agricultural standards in promoting the well-being of consumers, producers and the environment. As part of the Government’s ambition to conclude new trade deals, compromises will be required, but it is imperative that they do not encroach on our standards, which must remain a red line. The amendment seeks to turn verbal and written guarantees into a comprehensive legal mechanism that combines independent expertise with parliamentary scrutiny to ensure that the necessary measures are taken to protect our agricultural sector, the environment and, above all, consumers.