Agriculture Bill

Lord Teverson Excerpts

Committee stage & Committee: 1st sitting (Hansarad) & Committee: 1st sitting (Hansarad): House of Lords
Tuesday 7th July 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP) [V]]

My Lords, I have attached my name to Amendment 1 and shall speak also to a number of other amendments in the group. I thank the noble Earl for tabling Amendment 1: it was something I was thinking about. Indeed, I spoke to the Table Office, because much of the discussion around the Bill has focused on the fact that it provides powers but not duties. I suggested to the Table Office that we could go through the whole Bill and change every “may” to “must”, and those in the Table Office persuaded me that that might not be the best way forward. I thank them for their patience and all their expert assistance. I think the noble Earl has managed to focus on the key part of the Bill, where “may” should be changed to “must”. I know he tabled it as a probing amendment, but we should think about this as a serious way forward: a duty to look after the key principles of carbon storage, ecosystems, the state of our natural world and healthy food. These should be a duty of the Minister.

Amendments 8, 22, 25, 31 and 50, in the name of my noble friend Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, are all about air pollution, which is a huge gaping hole in the Bill. It looks at water, at soil and at our ecosystems on the ground, but does not talk about the air; yet it is all part of an interrelated system and we know that air pollution and farming issues are closely interrelated.

I have also attached my name to Amendment 67 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, which says:

“Financial assistance may only be given for Environmental Land Management Schemes Tier 2 and Tier 3 if those individual schemes are in line with the local Nature Recovery Strategy”.


This addresses a crucial point: we need joined-up, systematic thinking about the nature of our countryside. At the moment, we have a number of silos. We have the Environment Bill, the Agriculture Bill and the now delayed food strategy, and we need to make sure that these are all joined up and working together, not at cross-purposes to each other. We need a whole-landscape approach, something the Wildlife Trust has been doing a lot of excellent work on, although we have to notice that what we see in the Environment Bill will lay new duties on councils, which, as we discussed in Oral Questions, already have enormous burdens on them.

Finally, Amendment 234 in my name, would add a clause headed “Agricultural extension”. It has notable similarities with an amendment in another group—Amendment 122, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Grantchester. Both of us are getting at the point that farmers need reliable, independent, secure, certain expert advice. In preparing for today I looked at the debates in your Lordships’ House back in 1996 and 1997 when the Agricultural Development and Advisory Service was privatised. There were some very telling words from the late Lord Mackie of Benshie, who talked about how, since the Agricultural Development and Advisory Service had started charging for its services, less use was being made of them. Some people —perhaps those who needed them most—could not afford them.

The state of our countryside and our agricultural land is a matter of national interest. It is something that we cannot leave to market forces. We have seen, in terms of agricultural extension and advice, a huge reduction, huge privatisation and a move towards many farmers being forced to take advice from the suppliers of agricultural chemicals and agricultural seeds, and even from their buyers, the supermarkets. Farmers need independent, expert advice. We need people to be able to develop careers in providing that advice. If we have an expert on growing potatoes in the south-west who spends decades focusing just on that, that is very hard to do in the private sector. If potatoes have a few bad years, no one can afford to pay that person and they do not have the chance to develop their skills in the way that they would in an advisory service.

We have to look at the whole system here. Part of a proper agricultural system has to be a government-run advice service. That is something that has existed historically for a very long time. It can a be traced back three millennia: in ancient China we know that there was a government Minister advising farmers on how to improve agricultural systems. This is a matter of national interest; it needs national involvement and a proper advice service.

[Lord Teverson (LD)]

My Lords, I shall speak to my Amendment 67 and I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, for her support for it. My main interest here is in connection with the broader environmental policies of the Government as they bring these forward in legislation. As I said at Second Reading, I very much welcome the ELMS initiative; it is a major step forward in the use of state aid for the farming industry and how it is to be targeted.

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[Lord Gardiner of Kimble]

I am most grateful to the noble Lord. I did not have an opportunity to flesh out the tests and trials. The tests and trials on the ELM are designed to work with ranges of farmers in different topographies and tenures in all parts of the country. There are schemes that will be suitable. In this case, there are clearly tests and trials with hill farmers in the uplands so that we can ensure that those schemes are in place. Some are under way already and farmers are receiving financial assistance for participating in them.

When we roll out the entire ELM in 2024, we want to follow the success in the recording and improving of those tests and trials so that we can ensure that, in the case of the noble Lord’s concern about hill farmers, these schemes will automatically work for them. Hill farmers are key to ensuring that the environmental enhancements we all want are available. I am confident that, working with those hill farmers, we will get the sorts of schemes that will be of benefit and that the farmers will actively wish to be engaged in.

[Lord Teverson]

I thank the Minister for his extensive reply. I was particularly pleased that he mentioned the shared prosperity fund. I realise that it is not a Defra issue, but it is an important structural issue and there has been very little information about when this fund, which is a Conservative Party manifesto pledge, will actually start. While I would like to ask him that question, I am sure he does not know the answer to it as it is not a Defra issue. However, will he really press his colleagues in Government to get this fund going? The EU structural funding is going to end very soon. There will be an end there, and it is very important that the rural parts of that funding start. Will he press his colleagues to get announcements here so that people can prepare and not have this gap?

[Lord Gardiner of Kimble]

I am most grateful to the noble Lord. Clearly, rural-proofing means that anything we do across Whitehall should be considered in terms of the impact on rural communities, and UK shared prosperity means rural communities. I am also grateful because I can assure him that the whole of Defra takes this approach and, as Minister for Rural Affairs, I get my teeth into this regularly because clearly we need to work with MHCLG so that this goes across all communities and will benefit rural communities, which, after all, have so much to offer the country.