Agriculture Bill (Tenth sitting)

Robert Goodwill Excerpts

Committee stage & Committee Debate: 10th sitting: House of Commons
Tuesday 3rd March 2020 Public Bill Committees

[Ruth Jones]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship this afternoon, Sir David. I am pleased to speak to these important amendments.

Over recent weeks, as we have worked our way through the Bill, my hon. Friend the Member for Cambridge and I have moved and spoken to a number of amendments, and I have noted not only the importance of this legislation, but the potential that accompanies it. As we approach this stage in our consideration of the Bill, it is time that we reminded ourselves of the motives and headlines around it.

Before she was sent to the Back Benches, the former Secretary of State, the right hon. Member for Chipping Barnet (Theresa Villiers), said that the Agriculture Bill

“will transform British farming, enabling a balance between food production and the environment which will safeguard our countryside and farming communities for the future.”

I am sure Members will agree that those are aspirational and noble aims—a vision that nobody could disagree with. I just wish that the content of the Bill matched the media lines published by officials at the Department. However, I say to the Minister that we can deliver that vision together on a cross-party basis if the Government accept our ideas, our advice and our suggestions. There is no better time to start doing so than now, by accepting amendments 77, 78 and 79.

The amendments reflect a great deal of interest from many of the relevant external bodies, and we have received many thoughtful and reflective commentaries from organisations including the National Farmers Union, the Tenant Farmers Association and Greener UK. I am grateful to them all for the hard work they are doing on behalf of their members and sectors, which includes a collective welcoming of the fact that fairness is required in the supply chain; we need to ensure that there is transparency and openness, too. The Bill is particularly weak in those areas.

The Government need to rethink and revisit the supply chain provisions designed to secure a fairer price to farmers for the food they produce. Those provisions have been broadened in this iteration of the Bill, but there is still no duty to use them, and the Government have not published anything about how they intend to use the powers and who would be enforcing, using and safeguarding them. Our amendments would provide some clarification on those questions.

We note that the NFU believes there should be an obligation on a Secretary of State to introduce regulations to ensure a baseline of fair dealings between business purchasers and producers across all sectors, and that those regulations should be brought forward within 12 months of the Bill’s coming into force. They are right to call for speedy implementation of the measures that would give effect to the fairness we all want, so I support those calls from the NFU.

We have heard from a number of stakeholders about the need for a strong and meaningful overarching body, and they are right. We need the Minister to provide some clarity about who that regulator will be, how it will work, and what it will look like. It is clear to us on the Labour Benches that the Government have a vital role to play, and our amendments will help ensure that this role is carried out. We should nail down today the fact that the regulator should be the Groceries Code Adjudicator. The Bill as it stands leaves hanging the question of who the regulator should be, and the last things anyone in the real world needs at this time are uncertainty, indecision and confusion.

The elephant in the room—we spoke earlier about one elephant in the room, but this is another elephant—is our departure from the European Union. There will soon be tough and competing demands on the Government for resources, focus, scrutiny and implementation, but I hope that in the weeks ahead, this Bill will receive the strong and guaranteed focus of Ministers on the Treasury Benches.

[Mr Robert Goodwill (Scarborough and Whitby) (Con)]

Does the hon. Lady accept that there are some areas in the agricultural trade, such as the grain market, where there is no market failure? There are lots of buyers and lots of sellers in that area, and it operates very well.

[Ruth Jones]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for his intervention. Of course, he is an expert in this area and I bow to his superior knowledge, but what we are saying is that we need to clear the matter up for the whole industry, not just for certain sectors that already work well. However, I appreciate his intervention.

I hope that the amendments have shown the Government that there is widespread support for this action. They are about not partisan advantage, but clarity for the sector and an improved set of circumstances and conditions. I am proud to have tabled them.

--- Later in debate ---

[Daniel Zeichner]

Of course. Last week, we had an interesting discussion about labelling. I take Members back to that because on page 16 of the document is a theoretical discussion of the effect of labelling. The Government tell us:

“Tapping into the consumer willingness to pay begins with understanding the value-action gap”—

which I am sure is being discussed on every omnibus around the country—and that

“it is possible for someone to derive positive value from the fact that animals are being well cared for as a result of another’s purchasing decision. Those not buying animal products should be included in any assessment of public value, one person’s holding of this value does not detract from another’s.”

I find that a puzzling suggestion. I tried it out on my partner—I will not say what she said, but she was not convinced that, basically, other people buying poorly produced food somehow does not detract from the wider public good. That is a theoretical discussion the Government may want to go back to. The following page states:

“Addressing consumer understanding, and understanding how purchasing decisions are made in practice in the retail environment and online, are also key elements…It is important to note that improved transparency alone can only address information asymmetry, and does not capture the public value held by non-consumers.”

I am not sure what any of that means, and I am sure that the public have little idea of what it means. I think it shows that labelling is not simple; there is a big discussion to be had. Is it enough to use labelling? The right hon. Member for Scarborough and Whitby and I had an exchange on that last week; there are sincerely held differences of opinion about it.

Back in the simpler, empirical world, we have seen the positive impact that labelling can have on eggs. Since 2004, when EU law began to require eggs and egg packs to be labelled to highlight production method, there has been a considerable move in the market towards free-range eggs and away from caged egg sales. I am told that around 52% of all UK eggs come from cage-free systems, which is welcome.

It is not the same in other sectors. Consumers are still very much in the dark about the production of meat and milk. It is hard to find meat or dairy products that have a labelled method of production. For meat, there is some labelling of free range and organic, but not much else. There is even less information about the farming methods of milk. Most milk is pooled together, making it difficult to distinguish between pasture-based and intensively produced milk. From personal experience perusing the supermarket shelves, it seems the world is becoming more complicated these days; there is a greater range, but we need to go further. I find it confusing. It is confusing for consumers and it does a disservice to farmers who are already producing to higher standards but do not have any means of distinguishing their products because of labelling ambiguities.

A lot of marketing and packaging borders on the misleading. Intensively produced meat and dairy products, where animals may have seen very little of the outside world, are packaged in pretty green packets featuring rolling hills and what looks like a welfare-friendly world. That does not help consumers make informed choices, and it does not help producers extract the higher value that they deserve from their products. Proper labelling would work in everyone’s interests.

The production methods highlighted would differ for different products, but mandatory labelling could be used to indicate on the packet whether the product has been produced intensively indoors or extensively outdoors, with the full range of production methods in between, so that consumers can make a decision in the shop about what they want. That is something that the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee recommended twice to the Government in 2018, and it makes a lot of sense.

At the moment, any consumer demand for less intensively produced meat and dairy is impeded by the lack of clear information at the point of sale about how the products have been produced. Informing consumers about methods of production allows them to make that choice. We could see important shifts in the market towards the production of food that is less intensive, more environmentally sustainable and based on higher animal welfare.

A good labelling system could also play an important role in further incentivising farmers to take up environmental land management schemes and deliver the public goods that we discussed last week under clause 1, particularly those who seek to promote higher animal welfare measures, by giving them the recognition they deserve for using less intensive production methods. If the consumer has no idea what farmers are doing, it stands to reason that farmers will see the benefits of making positive changes only in the direct payments they receive, rather than in any changes in consumer demand. There needs to be a way for farmers to demonstrate that they are delivering food in a way that consumers may choose to pay for.

International debate is moving quickly in this area. We heard evidence of the number of schemes that are being looked into across Europe. The Government have talked big talk about using the new opportunity post Brexit to improve our animal welfare standards and modernise our farming processes. It is important that we do not miss key opportunities to adopt mechanisms that can help support that. A relatively simple change of wording would give this clause the strength it needs to deliver the Government’s aim of achieving an impact we all support.

[Mr Goodwill]

I note that the amendment would substitute “must” for “may” in subsection (1), but all the other subsections contain the word “may” too. Has not the hon. Gentleman made an omission by not seeking to insert “must” in all the others? Surely having “must” in subsection (1) would be completely counteracted by all the “may”s in the rest of the clause.