Lord Whitty
Main Page: Lord Whitty (Labour - Life peer)
Lord Whitty (Lab)
My Lords, two minutes: three points. First, on labour costs, the fact of the matter is that British farming is going to have to accept that it will have to pay its workers more. As the noble Lord, Lord Redesdale, said, we have relied for too long on immigrant and migrant labour to undercut British workers. We need a proper skills base to address the kind of mechanisation and technological improvement referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Lilley. We need better training. Unfortunately, the underfunding and overdiversification of Lantra and our agricultural colleges have meant that new people who are skilled enough to take up posts as farm workers or managers are not coming through. I hope that the Government will recognise this problem and set up a manpower board for land skills that truly delivers a new generation of a skilled workforce working in this new era.
On trade, I disagree with the noble Lord, Lord Lilley. We are placed in a very difficult situation: just at the point where subsidies are being reduced and costs increased, we sign a deal which goes against the commitments made by the Government during the passage of the Agriculture Act. I can only quote the words—approvingly, in this case—of the president of the NFU when she said:
“We always wanted to do a deal with Australia. But we never thought that it would be a deal where we just gave the most prized food market in the world over for nothing.”
That is the problem with the deals being reached now.
Thirdly, on policy itself, there is a central problem. I agreed with the greening of agricultural policy in the Agriculture Act, but it has proved to be very slow and complex to deliver. To judge by the words of George Eustice last week, the problem is that the Government are focusing not on making agricultural and food production more sustainable but removing large chunks of land from food production for other purposes. That is the wrong emphasis. Both have to happen, but we need to find more sustainable, effective and advanced methods of producing our own British food.