Agriculture Bill

Lord Swire Excerpts

Wednesday 10th October 2018 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

Order. The approach the Secretary of State is taking is most engaging, but it is not necessary for him to conduct an orchestra in proceeding with the debate, nor is it necessary to give a precise chronological guide to his intended order of taking interventions. Nevertheless, it is a notable eccentricity, which the House might enjoy. I call Sir Hugo Swire.

[Sir Hugo Swire (East Devon) (Con)]

I am most grateful to you, Mr Speaker, as I think you have just given me an earlier slot than my right hon. Friend was indicating so effortlessly, like Herbert von Karajan.

My right hon. Friend just talked about supermarkets’ desire to stock more British and locally sourced products, which if true is manifestly a good thing. Will he commit to conducting a root and branch overhaul of food labelling and the country of origin system, which is currently misleading and has often been abused? The British consumer deserves to know where food is produced and where it is packaged and not to be misled by labelling.

[Michael Gove]

My right hon. Friend makes a good point. Traceability and knowing the provenance of our food are vital. Outside the European Union, we can reform our food labelling system so that we have greater honesty about where our food comes from. He gives me an opportunity to say also that, as the Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, my hon. Friend the Member for Macclesfield (David Rutley), made clear yesterday, we are looking urgently at how we reform labelling to ensure that the safety of the consumer is guaranteed. Recent tragic events underline the need for action, and we will act.

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[Sue Hayman]

I thank my hon. Friend for her contribution. I have discussed that with the Lake District national park, which is in my constituency, and I am sure that there will be other discussions in this area.

[Sir Hugo Swire]

An important point was made about the number of forms that farmers have to fill in to access funds. Does the honourble not agree that one of the most important things is ensuring the availability of reliable broadband, given that the amount of farming now done online is way in excess of the amount of farming when Clement Attlee was the post-war Prime Minister?

[Sue Hayman]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for that important contribution. It is disappointing that the digital roll-out came before farmers could access it. I would add that mobile connectivity is as important, because when farmers submit their application online, they are sent a text message with a code that they need to put in; if they do not have a mobile signal, they cannot continue with the application. All these things need to be considered before we move forward.

We praise all our farmers for the important role that they play in environmental stewardship. The Secretary of State talked about the fact that the food and drinks industry is such a huge manufacturing sector. It is incredibly important that we get more support for our farmers than the Bill currently offers. At the moment, the Bill offers our family farmers just a payoff, which we believe risks leaving our fields to ever larger, more intensive factory farms run by global big business.

It worries me that the vision of the UK as a leading free trade nation with low tariff barriers is completely at odds with the commitment to thriving British food and farming sectors. Combining and delivering those two objectives will be a considerable challenge for this Government, who are and always have been in favour of more deregulation and who have a blind reliance on the free market to deliver social outcomes. Labour will oppose any free trade deal that threatens existing standards: we will fight any such deals tooth and nail.

In conclusion, the development of a new post-Brexit UK agriculture policy is a seminal moment for the future of our environment, our food production and our countryside. Never has it been more important to lift our line of sight and to talk proactively about what we want to see as part of a long-term strategy for food, farming and the environment. Sustainability, above all else, has to be at the forefront of a thriving farming, food and drink sector.

It is right that we shift agricultural support for land-based payments to the delivery of public and environmental benefits, but the Bill sadly falls short in a number of areas. There is no strategy to safeguard our nation’s food supply or recognition of the importance of sustainability to reduce the reliance on imports. There is no provision for controls over production methods, working conditions, animal welfare or environmental standards in countries from which our food is imported. The Bill hands wide-ranging powers to the Secretary of State but includes no legally enforceable environmental protection targets, and there is no provision for current agricultural funding to continue until 2022, as Ministers have previously promised.

This House should have had the chance to conduct proper prelegislative scrutiny of the Bill. What we are discussing here is fundamental to the future of British agriculture, and getting it right is crucial. For those reasons, I am afraid that Labour cannot support the Bill’s Second Reading, and that is why I strongly urge colleagues to vote for our reasoned amendment tonight.

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[Neil Parish]

The hon. Gentleman makes a good point. We have to ensure that applying for grants is simple enough for all farmers, not just the big landowners who can employ offices full of people to do that, and I believe that we can. With some of the ideas coming forward about how we make payments, we can also ensure that, as we transition, family farms and smaller applicants can have less taken from them in the first instance. There are ways we can make this much more palatable.

Upland farming, which the Secretary of State mentioned, is very important, especially because of lamb and beef production. It is coupled with that great environment on the hillside, and we will not be able to pay public money just to keep sheep and cattle on the hillside; we have to ensure that they are profitable. Profit is what will drive this because—this point has already been made—if you are in the black, you can go more green. That is absolutely essential.

We produce great food. We also have a very effective poultry industry, although sometimes that is not mentioned. That is why we can produce good-quality chickens for under £5. Let us look at how we deal with our food industry and our production.

[Sir Hugo Swire]

Does my hon. Friend agree that post Brexit there will be a real opportunity to buy “British first” through the procurement of British-sourced food?

[Neil Parish]

My right hon. Friend and constituency neighbour makes a really good point. We must redouble our efforts to encourage our armed forces, our schools and our health service to procure our high-quality British food. Let us ensure that we can feed our nation with our food, because that is absolutely essential.

I also think that healthy food, as a public good, can be recognised naturally across the piece. This is an agricultural Bill, but if we think about the NHS, we could save nearly £2 billion when we consider the type of healthy food that we can produce. Buying from local producers will allow us to reduce our carbon footprint and improve the environment, so we also need joined-up thinking about future-proofing the Bill. If we weaken our farming sector to the extent that we have to import more food from abroad, there will be many consequences. When we import food from other countries, we also import their water and their means of production, and some countries can little afford that. We have to ensure that we continue to produce good, high-quality food and that, if possible, we produce more of it in future.

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[Chris Davies]

I do not share the hon. Lady’s concern. My constituency lies on the border, and there are of course border farmers between Scotland and England as well as between Wales and England, and we are concerned that we might see different processes taking place on either side of the border, causing great problems for cross-border farmers. I am afraid the hon. Lady, the leader of Plaid Cymru in Westminster, does not share that concern with Welsh farmers on the Welsh side of the border.

Farmers are also conservationists. They have a dual role; there is no difference—there is no difference at all. The Secretary of State visited a farm in my constituency just before the summer recess, and met farmers there—family farmers and Young Farmers’ Club members.

The Painscastle valley is a typical farming valley in Wales. It has a river at the bottom and well fenced and hedged green fields leading up to the commons above. This was not designed by a young civil servant with an environmental degree sitting in Westminster, Cardiff or Scotland, or by a bearded, sandal-wearing lifetime environmental campaigner, or even by a fashionable environmentalist who writes a blog and has thousands of Twitter followers. That scene, that valley and that countryside were designed and managed by generations of farmers over 300 years and more. Farmers really are the best people to take the environment and farming forward, and livestock farmers should be right to the fore in this brave new world of farming. They should be looking after our payments, guiding our policies and ensuring that they are there to provide the true knowledge of agriculture.

As the chair of the all-party parliamentary group on forestry, I should like to touch briefly on the subject of forestry. It has not been touched on a great deal in the debate so far. The Bill focuses on agriculture, as has my speech so far, but it is important to consider tree planting in this country. Brecon and Radnorshire is a large constituency in which forestry and timber production support many rural livelihoods. We have the largest sawmill in Wales, based in Newbridge-on-Wye and employing nearly 200 people. It is important that we support tree planting, and I was delighted to hear the Secretary of State giving a firm commitment during our conference a week or so ago to planting 11 million trees during this Parliament. I hope that he will be able to achieve that aim, because it is vital to maintain the timber processing industry, whether for flood prevention and mitigation or purely for products for the future, to enable it to thrive and prosper.

[Sir Hugo Swire]

Does my hon. Friend agree that it is intensely regrettable that the current Mayor of London has not continued to plant as many trees in London as his predecessors did?

[Chris Davies]

I fully agree with my right hon. Friend. It is important that we plant trees in this country, wherever they might be: in the countryside, in the streets or in the middle of dual carriageways. The public want that to happen, and I hope that DEFRA will ensure that it does.

We might not all be farmers or foresters, and we might not all be cheese makers or honey producers, but whatever we do and wherever we reside, it is important that we live in a clean and healthy environment. And of course, we all need to eat. Unlike some Members who might sit on the Opposition Front Bench, we cannot all live on avocados from Mexico or mung beans from India. We need to feed ourselves on great British products, and it is important that we support our farming industry. We clearly produce the best products in the world, including livestock in the form of beef and sheep, and fruit and vegetables. Here in Britain, we have the best welfare standards in the world and our products are of the best quality. Through this Agriculture Bill, we need to support that and support our farmers.

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[Sir Hugo Swire (East Devon) (Con)]

I very much look forward to supporting the Bill later this evening. It is important and long overdue, regardless of Brexit, although, of course, Brexit will impact on trade deals and our ability to export and strike bilateral trade deals.

Farmers, like all industries, need as much certainty as they can get at the present time. I therefore think it is entirely regrettable that the Scottish National party has chosen to put politics above certainty for farmers in Scotland. Farmers in Scotland deserve better.

The challenge for my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State—and he is a friend of mine—is to strike a balance between environmental stewardship and the production of food. There will always be those on all sides who argue that he is erring on one side or the other, but what he must take away from this debate is the fact that it is not just about managing land but about the production of food. We all have these balances in our own lives and our own constituencies. In my beautiful constituency we have to balance the area of outstanding natural beauty status against farming, which is a constant challenge. There is also the issue of access to the countryside, which I will come to in a minute.

My right hon. Friend can further champion the industry by doing more than the Bill stipulates. He can talk more about, and do more to support, our land-based colleges. In my constituency I have Bicton College, which he visited in a previous incarnation as Education Secretary in May 2012 to open the earth centre. We should do more to get young people into farming and show them the industry. The number of county farms has shrunk, and it is more difficult for young farmers to get in. At the other end is the work of charitable trusts such as the Addington Fund, which looks after farmers when they have to vacate their residences at the end of their farming careers. We need to show young people that there is a future in farming. Frankly, there is a demographic problem in farming and we need to encourage more young people into it.

My right hon. Friend has a real chance to be a champion in food production. I alluded to food labelling in an intervention. For too long, we have put up with misleading food labelling and country of origin labelling. The consumer deserves better and needs to know the country of origin. We need to know what is purely British—what has been reared, produced and packaged in Britain—and what has been imported into Britain, repackaged and sold in a misleading way. He can go much further in that respect.

Another issue of great concern around the Chamber is that of livestock transportation. We can ensure that we have the toughest possible regimes for our livestock exports, which I hope will increase after Brexit.

My right hon. Friend has done a lot regarding our slaughterhouses and abattoirs. I have written to him in respect of one of my small abattoirs, which does very little business. I think we have to have a light touch to secure the best possible practice. One abattoir in my constituency has CCTV as well as someone sitting there, even though it slaughters animals only once or twice a week. The requirements are very onerous for such a small business, and I hope my right hon. Friend will look at those issues when they arise. We should not shy away from the fact that the practices of some communities—for example, halal butchery and orthodox Jewish butchery—are simply not acceptable in animal husbandry terms.

I said earlier that we have a chance to introduce a “buy British” policy, and somebody from the Opposition said that we could not do that under WTO rules. We do not know the rules yet, but we should put buying British products for our schools, hospitals and armed forces at the forefront of everything we do once we are out of the EU.

On land access, my right hon. Friend is absolutely right. We want to encourage people to make more use of the countryside as part of the anti-obesity campaign, but there is a quid pro quo. The landscape looks as it does because it is farmed. It is man-made. Stone-walling, ditch-digging and hedge-laying are all done at farmers’ expense, so farmers are due some compensation. Simply to open up land irrespective of that, without acknowledging that it is private land that people are paying to maintain, is entirely wrong. I think there is a wonderful opportunity to review the whole question of footpaths, which are way out of date, and perhaps to look at compensation for farms that are covered in footpaths. We need to look at bridleways and the use of off-road vehicles. We can do so many of these things now that we are coming out of the EU.

This country should be able to feed itself; that is the duty of the Government. I think that the Opposition amendment is unnecessary and, frankly, unintelligible. I believe that the country should be able to feed itself, and I hope that the Bill will bring that goal one step closer.