Agriculture Bill (Sixth sitting)

Philip Dunne Excerpts

Tuesday 30th October 2018 Public Bill Committees

[Kerry McCarthy]

The hon. Gentleman has plenty of carrots, although I do not know about sticks. For those who do not know, he is in the carrot business. I have already said that I get a bit fed up with the constant refrain that we have the highest animal welfare standards in the world, because I think it suggests a slight degree of complacency and we should constantly aim higher. The Minister is probably sick to death of the number of written questions that I table about slaughterhouses and conditions on farms, but we have seen from undercover investigations some of the conditions under which the more intensive farms operate. I am by no means tarring all farmers with the same brush, and it is good that we take animal welfare so seriously in this country. However, there are a lot of examples of when we do not, and we should not be too complacent about it.

[Mr Philip Dunne (Ludlow) (Con)]

I am grateful to the hon. Lady. I should declare that I am a livestock farmer and am in receipt of single farm payment. I understand that she may not have had much experience of visiting livestock farms, though she might have done so as a member of the Select Committee on Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. She would be welcome to come and see the livestock on my farm—both cattle and sheep—and how they are looked after. That might encourage her to consider whether she wants to continue to be a vegan.

[Kerry McCarthy]

I have visited quite a few farms. The hon. Gentleman is completely missing the point. Anyone could take me to a farm with happy cows or happy sheep, by his definition, but that does not mean that there are not places where abuse occurs—where animals are not kept in the best possible conditions or treated well. That is exactly the point I have just made. I accept that we have high animal welfare standards generally, but I am also saying that we should not be complacent. As for the vegan thing, I have been a vegan for 27 years, so the hon. Gentleman would have to do a lot more to change my mind than simply show me his cows.

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[George Eustice]

rose—

[Mr Dunne]

May I help the Minister on that point?

[George Eustice]

I think it is probably best if I answer one intervention before I take another.

We are in the middle of a huge decision to leave the European Union. An enormous amount of work is needed under the withdrawal Act to ensure that we have a functioning statute book on year one; we all recognise that, and it will necessarily take priority in the months ahead. However, I reassure the hon. Member for Stroud that all the EU regulations that bind us on this issue will still be in force in UK law when we leave the EU at the end of March. That will be unaffected by whether a Bill that recognises animal sentience has been introduced, because none of the regulations that we are bringing across are contingent on the overarching principle of animal sentience.

[Mr Dunne]

I have the distinct privilege of serving on the European Statutory Instruments Committee. The Leader of the House has reassured us that the volume of work for us in determining whether the forthcoming statutory instruments should be laid under the negative or the affirmative procedure will be very similar to that of scrutinising the routine number of statutory instruments that the House considers year on year. The forthcoming SIs should not give rise to the kind of concerns that the hon. Member for Stroud has voiced.

[George Eustice]

As a member of that Committee, my hon. Friend has to digest those points, so he probably has a clearer idea of the work that will be involved, but we recognise that it is a big exercise.

The hon. Member for Darlington raised an important point. I can reassure her that the Government are committed to publishing legislation that will recognise animal sentience. We do not believe, however, that it is right to bring that into the Bill in the way that she has by linking it only to the narrow issue of how payments are made, when we are talking about purposes that inevitably recognise animal sentience, because that is why we are incentivising farmers to adopt high standards of animal welfare.

Amendment 71, tabled by the hon. Member for Bristol East, also seeks to establish an additional rule that says broadly that financial assistance cannot be given unless it is over and above the regulatory baseline. I understand her point, and it is a legitimate question to ask, but it is wrong to try to prescribe it in that sort of amendment, for reasons that I will explain.

As a country, we have done something new in including animal welfare as a public good. I have been clear that I wanted to do that for the last couple of years. I have worked closely with the RSPCA, Compassion in World Farming, Farmwell and other organisations. We are trying something new. Just last week, I met Peter Stevenson from Compassion in World Farming.

We are considering several things in the design of a future animal welfare scheme. One of those is the possibility that we could financially reward farmers and incentivise them to join some kind of United Kingdom accreditation service-accredited higher animal welfare scheme—perhaps the RSPCA one or others that may form. We may also choose to support farmers to invest in more modern housing that is better for animal welfare. In the pig sector, there are some issues with outdated housing that does not lend itself to providing for modern welfare needs such as enriched environments and straw in barns. We may also have a third category of payment for the adoption of particular approaches to husbandry, such as lower levels of stocking density, systems that are more free range or even pasture-based systems.

Finally, we are interested in the potential for payment by results. Farmwell has done some work on that. The hon. Member for Bristol East mentioned Compassion in World Farming and its view about payments for curly tails. If pigs go to slaughter with intact curly tails that have not been damaged, that is a good indicator that they have had a higher-welfare existence. Likewise, Farmwell has developed a feather-cover index for a depopulated flock of laying hens, which is a good indicator as to how well people have approached farm husbandry. In a free-range system, there can be good and poor farm husbandry.

It is a complex area. If there is a mixture of payment for capital items to renew housing, which may have higher welfare outcomes, payment for joining accreditation schemes and, potentially, payment by results, it is not always obvious how that would be benchmarked against a regulatory baseline, which by definition does not cover everything.

If the hon. Lady is concerned about money being spent in that area in a way that simply pays farmers for what they are already doing to comply with the law, I guarantee that there will be no shortage of push-back and pressure from within the internal machinery of Government—the civil service, the Treasury, the Cabinet Office and other Departments—to ensure that money is spent only to get additionality. We will not have the problem that she perceives, which is that we would spend money on things that are already a requirement by law, but if we were to accept her amendment, we might have a different problem, which is that we would place barriers in the way of policy innovation. For that reason, I hope she will not press amendment 71.

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There are reasons why we would always import and export food, being a major export of the British economy. Knowing what will happen to the way we treat farmers and other users of the land is crucial. That is why we are probing with this amendment. No doubt we will come back in future with a slightly more thoughtfully worked-through amendment, which would allow us to bring both the environment and food production elements together. It will be very interesting to hear what the Minster has to say to allay some of our fears and show the way forward, and to hear what the hon. Member for Ludlow has to say.

[Mr Dunne]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Wilson, and to follow the hon. Member for Stroud, whose amendment bears a striking resemblance to mine. The prime difference between my amendment 88 and his amendment 52 is the order of the subsections, and I do not think that is substantive. As he just described, my amendment came from the wording in schedule 3 relating to Wales. My hon. Friend the Member for North Dorset, who inexplicably left the room just before I rose to make my contribution, asked me to assure the Committee that he supports the amendments.

One reason for tabling the amendment was to pick up on some of the comments made in the evidence sessions, in particular from the representative of the farming industry in Scotland. They welcomed as close an alignment as possible of the regimes that will stem from the Bill, and once we leave the CAP regime, to try to minimise difference among the four schemes. I am conscious that we do not have any of the regulations that will implement the schemes but, in terms of the regulatory environment and the legislation, the more commonality we have between the four nations, the better for farmers and the industry.

I must remind the Committee of my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests; I am a farmer who will be affected by the regime, in common with other farmers. The purpose of the amendment is to probe the Government’s intent in relation to agricultural support. I agreed with much of what the hon. Member for Stroud said. We are designing a scheme that replaces the legislative environment of the 1947 Act, which put in place an initial set of agricultural support. We are also replacing the CAP system that we have been operating under since the 1970s. The legislation is designed to set in place agricultural support for the future. Yet the challenge to us, as members of the Committee, is that the purposes as set out under clause 1, thus far, are not agriculture-heavy; they are agriculture-lite; or barely existent.

There is a challenge, which I think we will see when the Select Committee on Environment, Food and Rural Affairs comments on the Bill. It is keen to see specific references to agriculture, horticulture and forestry in the purposes of the Bill. That was what lay at the heart of my amendment 88, and in particular proposed new subsection 2(d) of clause 1, which refers to

“supporting the production of such part of the nation’s food and other agricultural produce as it is desirable to produce in the United Kingdom.”

When I intervened on the Secretary of State on Second Reading, I asked him what his view was about food security being an important purpose of the Bill. As a former journalist with an ability to encapsulate pithily what he means in as few words as possible, he replied with four words: “Food security is vital.” That is why I felt that it was important to probe where the Government stand on the issue, because that objective is not as apparent in the drafting that has emerged in the Bill as the Secretary of State was on Second Reading. Amendment 88 would help to make that objective explicit.

The Secretary of State went on to describe how he sees food security providing the opportunity for UK-based farmers to compete internationally by way of exports. Of course, the UK competes internationally in global food and food product markets. At the moment, we produce about 60% of the food we consume in this country, so we are importing 40%—not quite as much as we are producing. There is clearly a risk that once we move to more internationally competitive markets, we will find imports coming in to a greater degree. We are now setting up a legislative programme that will allow for unforeseeable events in the future, and future Secretaries of State may therefore find it advantageous to have a power on the face of the Bill that allows future Governments to design or redesign a scheme in the event of market conditions changing.

We will talk about exceptional market conditions later in our consideration of the Bill, and I welcome the clauses that deal with that topic. They represent a very good idea. However, when responding to the amendments, I urge the Minister to consider whether it is desirable for Secretaries of State to have that power, which may—rather than must—be used. At some point in the future, in the event that there are challenges to local production, that power may be called upon. Food security is not just about how much food we grow in this country; it is about how readily accessible food is to our populations in the event of difficulty. We have already seen from previous incidents of industrial disturbance and severe weather that, on occasion, distributing food to the population is not as easy as it is during normal times. Having the ability to grow as much food as we can in this country will be of benefit for the future.

[Mr Goodwill]

Is it not the case that the amendment is absolutely in line with the 1975 Government White Paper entitled “Food from Our Own Resources”?

[Mr Dunne]

I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for his encyclopaedic knowledge of previous agriculture Bills.

I move on to some brief remarks about amendment 89 and the consequential amendment 90, which would amend schedule 3, “Provision relating to Wales”. Those amendments seek to make it explicit that agricultural support should be payable to those who are responsible for managing the land. Under the previous system, that support has been paid to farmers. We are trying to devise a system of public goods for farmers to do things of environmental benefit that will replace income that they would otherwise derive from growing food, food produce or horticultural forestry products on the land. That aims to provide farmers with some incentive to generate environmental benefits. It is the farmers—all 83,500 of them—who currently receive direct payments through the RPA basic payment scheme who are most deserving of the support that will be made available in the future, rather than other worthy, worthwhile groups who will be able to advise them and generate benefit for the environment. But they are the people who are responsible for delivering most of that public good; that is, the people who manage the land.

That was explained by the Secretary of State in a letter that he sent to MPs when the Bill was published last month. He said:

“For too long our farmers have been held back by the stifling rules and often perverse incentives of the CAP… Our new Agriculture Bill marks a decisive shift. It will reward farmers properly at last for the work they do to enhance the environment around us. It recognises the value farmers bring as food producers.”

He was very clear that the Bill is designed to provide support to farmers in lieu of what they would otherwise do in managing the land by trying to stimulate a greater public good.

I therefore encourage the Government to respond on whether the Bill seeks future support to be able to make payments to those who deliver public benefit from stewardship of the land, or whether it should go to other bodies that do so only indirectly, and for which there may be benefits through subsequent legislation, such as the environment Bill, which might be a more appropriate place for it.

[Sandy Martin]

The House of Lords Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee report stated that if the Bill is passed in its present form,

“Parliament will not be able to debate the merits of the new agriculture regime because the Bill does not contain even an outline of the substantive law that will replace the CAP after the United Kingdom leaves the EU”.

What the House of Lords was looking for and what, I believe, farmers are looking for is a far clearer expression of the support that farmers will get and the activities for which they will get that support than is expressed in the Bill.

However, at least one thing is clear in the Bill as it stands. The Secretary of State does not envisage rewarding farmers just for being farmers. They need to be supporting the public good. I think farmers would support that, but the problem is defining exactly what the public good is and the extent to which any definition should be left entirely to the Secretary of State, rather than laid out clearly in the Bill. If the hon. Member for Ludlow supports the idea that access to healthy local food grown sustainably is a public good, I am a little mystified as to why he could not support our amendment.

We all want what is best for this country. One of the supposed benefits of Brexit was that it would enable us to decide for ourselves what would be the best agricultural support regime, rather than having to rely on the common agricultural policy. However, I am afraid that amendments 88, 89 and 90 fall down at that hurdle, because they very much advocate supporting farmers simply for being farmers. In the words of amendments 88 and 89, following the meaning across from one amendment to the second:

“The Secretary of State may also give financial assistance”

to

“those with an interest in agricultural land, where the financial assistance relates directly to that land.”

In other words, that means paying farmers for being farmers or, indeed, paying landowners for being landowners, which neatly expresses the worst aspects of the current operation of the common agricultural policy.

I have been a keen advocate of much of the support and protection that we have achieved through our membership of the European Union, and I fear that we will lose a good deal of it when we leave. However, even I would never claim that the common agricultural policy is perfect, and the UK has been at the forefront of attempting to reform it over the years. I think that that reform was intended to ensure that any financial support through the common agricultural policy aligns better with the support of the public good, but I do not believe that it was altogether successful. Payments to landowners simply for being landowners is one of the aspects of the common agricultural policy that this Bill was designed to end, so amendments 89 and 90 would be a serious step backwards.