Agriculture Bill (Third sitting)

Nigel Huddleston Excerpts

Thursday 25th October 2018 Public Bill Committees

[The Chair]

For the benefit of our witnesses, I should explain that the Minister is not being discourteous. He has had to leave to present a Bill on the Floor of the House, but I am sure he will be back before the end of this session.

[Nigel Huddleston (Mid Worcestershire) (Con)]

Q Mr Ward, I represent the Vale of Evesham, so many of the producers in my constituency are members of your association. We, of course, produce the best asparagus and tomatoes in the world—sorry, Sir Roger, I am going off topic there, but the legislation is hugely important for many of my constituents.

You have mentioned that overall you welcome the Bill, but you have both said that the devil is in the detail. What specific improvements would you like to see in terms of the relationships between Government and the producer organisations? Secondly, you talked about the supply chain and the imbalance between primary producers and the large distribution processes. What specifically would you like to see change? Improved data, information flow and transparency have been talked about, but how would that improve things?

Jack Ward: In terms of the producer organisation, going forward, first we want a single scheme if we can possibly achieve it so that we have a common scheme in all the devolved areas, so that we have not got a different scheme in Scotland from the one that we have in the UK. Within the producer organisations, if you take soft fruit, there is a massive amount of production in Scotland and a lot of them are members of English-based POs. That is really important.

We want the principle of match funding to continue. That has been a really valuable part of it—the idea that the farmer or grower puts in £1 and the taxpayer puts in £1. That binds the two together in a common aim, which is really important. We want a fairly thorough review of the scheme. We need to get into the nuts and bolts of it and cut out the superfluous bits. From conversations with the Rural Payments Agency, it knows as well as we do where all the wrinkles are, so there is a meeting of minds there. We want more flexibility around the way the money can be invested. Sometimes, it is too restrictive and gets in the way of making sensible things, rather than having to spread it across several different areas.

The other thing is to make it more UK-centric. At the moment, it is set up for a southern European production-marketing model. As I have said, we deal with nine customers, and they operate in a very different way from the rest of the EU. We are constantly in a position where we are looking over our shoulder and second guessing how the EU might interpret what we are doing in the UK. We are worried. The RPA is worried. We need to deal with that.

In terms of supply chain fairness, there needs to be a better meeting of minds between retailers and producers. I will give you a simple example. At the moment, we are right in the middle of the English apple season, but we are overwhelmed with southern hemisphere fruit that has been over-bought and is dominating the market—and probably will until Christmas. We have mountains of fruit that needs to move, and yet there is all that southern hemisphere fruit. Eventually, that cascades into difficult conversations between suppliers and retailers. Often, it is about more clarity between the two sides, so we understand what is going on and how we can make the system work better.

Helen Browning: If I can come in on that, I welcome the focus on the relationship between the farmer and the first buyer of produce. We often pin all the woes of the world on to the retailers, but most farmers and producers deal with a processor, not a retailer. Historically, there is a blame game that goes on in that relationship. The processor will blame the retailer, the retailer will blame the processor, and it will all start to shift up and down the chain. In my experience, the processors, many of which are very large businesses, have often not been keen on farmer co-operation, unless it is their own supply chain. If we are going to encourage more farmers to get their act together, market well, grow and plan, we need that relationship to work better and that collaboration to be welcomed by the processors and not crushed, as has often happened in the past.

[Kerry McCarthy]

Q (Bristol East) (Lab): It is good to see the British Growers Association here, because yesterday, in the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee, which is also taking evidence on the Bill, we had representatives from the dairy sector, the red meat sector and the ornamental horticulture sector, which was slightly odd, because the answer to whether they should be covered by the Groceries Code Adjudicator was mostly, “No, we don’t care about that”—well, of course they do not, because they are not grocers. There was an obvious gap with you not there.

I have tabled an amendment on public health, which I hope that you will welcome. It talks about measures to increase the availability, affordability, diversity, quality and marketing of fruit and vegetables. It also talks about pesticide use and antimicrobial resistance—the overuse of antibiotics. Some environmental organisations have said that they do not support the public health goal. I wonder whether we could do more, other than putting it in as a public good, particularly around procurement. In France, for example, there is a rule that 50% of public procurement should be locally sourced or organic produce. Could we do more on that front in the Bill?

Jack Ward: There is a fairly urgent need to promote the consumption of fresh fruit and vegetables—that is a given. It would be incredibly helpful to have something in the Bill that enabled us to do that, although I am not quite sure where responsibility ends for DEFRA and begins for the Department of Health and Social Care. Within the industry, there is certainly a lot of interest in how to extend the message about health and vegetable consumption.