Agriculture Bill

Lord Vaux of Harrowden Excerpts

2nd reading & 2nd reading (Hansard) & 2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 10th June 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Vaux of Harrowden (CB) [V]]

My Lords, I declare my interest in beef and sheep farming in Scotland.

This is a framework Bill, enabling the principles but not providing the detail. It still leaves farmers facing a high degree of uncertainty. I want briefly to set out what I see as the key needs of livestock farmers following Brexit. First, they need a market for their products. More than one-third of British lamb is exported to the EU. Without a free trade agreement, there is a very real risk that that market will effectively be lost. It is frankly not credible to suggest that it can be replaced by other markets on any realistic timescale. The loss of this market is an existential threat to upland sheep farmers. Will the Minister tell us how the Government propose to help livestock farmers in the event of no deal?

Secondly, farmers need fair competition. We are, rightly, subject to a wide range of environmental, welfare and other regulations. Other countries do not all face the same rules. This issue is often confused, sometimes deliberately, with food safety standards, and the Government have committed to not reducing them. However, it is not just about food safety standards. UK farmers are not frightened by fair competition, but it would be unfair to expect them to compete against imports from countries that have lower environmental, welfare and other standards, and therefore lower costs, even if our food safety standards are met, so I greatly regret that the Government rejected the amendment in the other place that would have put their manifesto commitments into law.

Thirdly, farmers need predictability. Farmers have faced uncertainty for some years now and, even with the Bill, we do not know how the various financing arrangements will work. Farming is a long-term business. If farmers are to invest, they need to be able to see how things will work into at least the medium term, and preferably longer. If the financing arrangements set out in the Bill turn out to be a series of short-term or one-off projects, rather than multi-year financing schemes, investment for the future will not be possible.

Fourthly, there is simplicity. We have heard about the shortcomings of the CAP, and I do not disagree, but it does have the merit of being relatively simple. In this Bill, we have a list of nine different purposes of financial assistance, many of which themselves have further subdivisions. It is easy to see how this could become extremely complicated, with an even heavier administrative and compliance burden on farmers than the CAP if it is not carefully planned and executed.

Finally, there is consistency. I started by declaring that I farm in Scotland. Agriculture is a devolved matter and we will have our own rules. But that introduces another concern, which a number of noble Lords have raised. When the UK was a member of the EU, our internal market was kept consistent by the umbrella framework of EU regulations. With that gone, we face the risk of different parts of the UK producing under different rules and different financing arrangements, potentially leading to unfair competition even within the UK. So it must make sense that the Government and the devolved assemblies agree a UK-wide framework to ensure that our internal market continues to work fairly.