Exiting the European Union (Agriculture)

Luke Pollard Excerpts

Monday 23rd November 2020 Commons Chamber

[Luke Pollard (Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport) (Lab/Co-op)]

As we are discussing agriculture, let me place on the record my traditional declaration of interest: my little sister is a farmer in Cornwall.

As these SIs appear to be technical and uncontroversial, we will not oppose them, but I have a number of questions that I hope the Minister is able to help with. I gave her advance notice of some of the most difficult ones, so I hope she has some good answers. British farmers and British farming matter, which is why Labour has consistently been so vocal on issues relating to agriculture and food standards, and I will continue that today.

These new regulations deal with technical matters relating to how food is sold, distributed and marketed, so forgive me for jumping into the detail right away. May I ask the Minister about the periods for bringing the systems contained in the regulations online? It is important that we have operable systems so that the whole framework of regulation works and people know what information is required and when it is required.

As the Minister will know, her Department told the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee that it has retained a two-year transition period for fruit and vegetables

“in order to allow policy teams to deliver the necessary IT system changes and recruit additional HMI inspectors”,

but for poultry meat the period is 12 months,

“as we do not currently enforce poultrymeat marketing standards, so will need sufficient time to operationalise the regime before being in a position to conduct the associated checks.”

When these SIs were debated in the House of Lords, the Minister in the Lords, Lord Gardiner, apologised, saying that the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs

“did not provide sufficient context on checks relating to poultry meat marketing standards and this may have caused concern, but it has since been clarified”.—[Official Report, House of Lords, 18 November 2020; Vol. 807, c. GC706.]

I will be grateful if the Minister mentions that clarification briefly when she gets to her feet to conclude the debate. Will she also set out the reason for the two-year delay in the implementation of those systems, and the difference between the fruit and veg and the poultry systems? I suspect that the IT system will not be ready for 1 January 2021, but I will be grateful if she confirms that.

We have been told that the Government have been engaging with businesses on a sector by sector basis. I am grateful for that, but may I ask what conversations the Department has had with businesses affected by these particular regulations and how they feel about them?

Lord Gardiner also told Members in the other place that the Government are working closely with the Animal and Plant Health Agency

“to ensure that we have the right calibre of inspectors.”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 18 November 2020; Vol. 807, c. GC712.]

I thought that was a curious turn of phrase, so I will be grateful if the Minister sets out whether we have the right numbers of inspectors and, perhaps as hinted at by the Minister in the other place, whether they have all received the right level of training in order to be operational as well as present.

The Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee also drew our attention to the fact that the UK does not currently enforce poultry meat marketing standards. Does that mean that if poultry meat and other products were imported from a third country, they could still be described as free range or organic and that would not be checked? Is that what enforcement of those standards means? I would be grateful if the Minister reassured us that that will not be the case. She knows my concern—I do not want to see any back doors for chlorine-washed chicken being marketed as anything else—so will she set out clearly that that is not one of those back doors? Could unregulated poultry meat be mixed with other products and given a misleading description? I do not believe that that is the case here, but will the Minister set that out? Also, the explanatory memorandum refers to the organic certifiers group having been consulted. I would be grateful if she set out whether it is now content with the regulations.

The Minister was correct that a great deal of the amendments in the draft regulations seek to change the designation of “United Kingdom” to “Great Britain”. Will she reassure us that all conversations with counterparts in Northern Ireland have been successful in respect of that, and that no issues are outstanding? Looking at the debate in the other place when that point was made, Lord Goldsmith had previously stated that there are now 72 planned border posts for inspections. As we are dealing with the inspection of agricultural products, which can cross the border between the Republic and Northern Ireland a number of times in the lifespan of a food product being made, will the Minister address some of the issues that Lord Gardiner may have omitted in his response to questions in the other place about whether the planned locations of those border posts have all been identified and published, and whether staff have been fully trained and will be operational by the end of the transition period, in particular in relation to the inspection of agricultural products, which the regulations deal with?

The Minister made mention in her remarks of the need to have fully operable regulations by the end of the Brexit transition period. The Opposition would like to see them in place, but we are here today because the original regulations were not properly transposed and a series of mistakes were made. That is why we are revisiting the regulations. I am of course grateful for the Minister laying statutory instruments to correct the mistakes and omissions of the previous SIs, but passing bad laws wastes the time of everybody here and is particularly frustrating when brilliant Bills such as the Animal Welfare (Sentencing) Bill struggle to find parliamentary time. We are using a large period on Monday evening that could have been used to pass that important legislation.

When we look at the enormous volumes of secondary legislation and new regulations that will come from DEFRA in the next couple of weeks to deal with our exit from the transition period, it is important to ensure against any more pollution of our statute books with bad regulation that will subsequently need to be changed. It should concern us all that bad laws have been passed, and I will be grateful if the Minister sets out what lessons have been learned from the first time the SI was considered to ensure that we are not in a similar place again. Having had to present the SI twice, I know she probably shares my frustration.

The Minister knows that that is not the first time that this has happened. Indeed, regular watchers of Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs SIs will recall the debate on the Common Fisheries Policy and Animals (Amendment etc.) (EU Exit) Regulations 2019, from 21 October last year, when the same problem was brought before this House. I stress the importance of ensuring that we get such regulations right the first time around. However, I am grateful to the Government business managers for bringing this draft SI before the House, so that the thousands of people who are clearly watching this debate will know what is going on, rather than hiding it away in a dusty Committee Room, for which the viewing figures on parliamentlive.tv might not be as profound as I am sure they are for this evening’s debate.

In all seriousness, there is a route to ensure that such regulations are gotten correct the first time around. I would be grateful if the Minister set out whether any lessons have been learned in relation to that, because a bewildering scale of new secondary legislation is about to come on to the statute books for farmers and for industry. It is important that farmers and the farming community have confidence that when the House passes regulations, they have been passed after detailed scrutiny and are correct.

Mr Deputy Speaker, you will know, because you have probably sat through me saying this a few times before, that I am concerned that the Government still use the phraseology in its impact assessments of “no impact” and “no significant impact” as similar terms. The Minister knows that, because she and I have sat in many statutory instrument Committees where I have bemoaned such usage. “No impact” and “no significant impact” are two very different things. The lack of an impact assessment for these statutory instruments concerns me, when there is potentially such a difference between “no impact” and “no significant impact”, and especially given that we are looking at these regulations for the second time and are having to correct errors from the first time. I know that the Minister will say that this is a House matter, but I would be grateful if she could confirm that she will be taking up that point with the Leader of the House to ensure that it is addressed for future statutory instruments.

Labour stands with our farmers, and we want our food and farming standards kept high after we leave the Brexit transition period. We want to keep high-quality food on our children’s plates, and to ensure that there is a level playing field for British farmers to stop them being undercut by food produced to lower standards from abroad.

We were pleased to see concessions from the Minister in relation to the campaign led by Labour and the National Farmers Union to put the Trade and Agriculture Commission on a statutory basis to allow more scrutiny of trade deals. There is still a long way to go, but many of those trade deals will be enacted by secondary legislation, and it is important that they are properly looked at. The market for agricultural products should matter to every one of us because a market tilted against the interests of consumers harms families, one tilted in favour of supermarkets harms consumer pockets, and one tilted in favour of importers over domestic production risks signing the death warrant for British farmers.

Labour will not oppose these regulations. However, I would be grateful if the Minister can set out how we can ensure that we get regulations right the first time round. Particularly for regulations dealing with Northern Ireland, we must ensure that the Northern Ireland Executive are comfortable with the proposals that the Minister has set out.