Modern Farming and the Environment
Robert Goodwill Excerpts(5 years, 8 months ago)
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The Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (Mr Robert Goodwill)
Thank you very much, Mr Evans. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Gordon (Colin Clark) for calling this important debate, and I recognise his work on the red meat levy on behalf of Scottish farmers. He began his speech by talking about “friends of the earth”, and I confess that, as is recorded in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests, I too am a friend of the earth. I had the pleasure of serving with my hon. Friend on the Agriculture Bill Committee, and he consistently championed the needs of Scottish farmers and the link between farming, food production and the environment.
I, too, would like to take this opportunity to pay tribute to my predecessor, my hon. Friend the Member for Camborne and Redruth (George Eustice). Not only did he serve the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs so expertly for five years, but his vision has ensured that we are now taking up all the opportunities provided to us by leaving the inflexible common agricultural policy and the frustrating common fisheries policy. His will be a hard act to follow. It now falls to me to take the helm and guide the Bills underpinning our ambitious future policies through to Royal Assent.
My hon. Friend the Member for Gordon talked about how we should get more new entrants into the industry. It is important that we get new young blood in, bringing with it innovation and energy. Sadly, I know from my own constituency that many farmers’ sons and daughters are not taking over family holdings, so we need to consider new ways of getting new entrants in. It was interesting to see on this week’s “Countryfile” new models of tenancies being tried out to get young people into the industry. The Agriculture Bill will certainly look for opportunities to bring new blood and diversity to the industry.
A number of Members referred to the concerns about the multi-annual settlements. Farming needs a sustainable financial model, and I am happy to agree with those who support the idea of a multi-annual settlement for the industry. It is a manifesto commitment that guarantees the same cash total until 2022—indeed, our farmers have more certainty than farmers in the EU. I welcome the efforts that have already been made by DEFRA, which is working closely with the Treasury on arrangements for future funding. We are committed to offering multi-annual contracts to farmers under the environmental land management scheme for the delivery of public goods.
My hon. Friend the Member for Gordon also mentioned gene editing. As somebody who studied for a degree in agriculture a whole generation ago, when gene editing and some of the more advanced methods of breeding crops were not known, I put on record that the Government disagree with the European Court of Justice’s ruling on gene editing. We argued that gene-edited organisms should not be subject to GM regulations if the changes to their DNA could have occurred naturally or through traditional breeding methods. That remains our view, but the Court has decided otherwise, and its judgment is binding on the UK. We will be considering our future approach to regulation in the context of negotiations about the UK’s future relationship with the EU.
We recognise the potential for advanced breeding techniques such as gene editing to make farming more productive and sustainable. We want to support innovation in that area, and ensure that any regulation is science-based and proportionate. We want the UK to be a leading player in developing the possible applications of new technologies, such as gene editing, building on the excellence of our science research base and our plant breeding sector. Ultimately, we want our farmers to have the best access to the tools available, so that they can remain competitive and boost productivity. The available evidence about the impact of current GM crops is variable, but it indicates that such crops have delivered both economic and environmental benefits. For example, a meta-analysis published in 2014 concluded that, on average, the adoption of GM crops has increased yields by 22%, increased profits by 68% and reduced pesticide use by 32%.
Deidre Brock
Is the Minister therefore confirming that he supports the introduction of GM crops in England? Can he clarify his personal views on GM crops?
Mr Goodwill
At the current time, as a member state of the European Union, we must comply with its legislation. However, whatever decisions we make in the future must be based on the best available scientific evidence.
[Sir Gary Streeter in the Chair]
My hon. Friend the Member for Gordon raised the question of whether food is a public good. Food is a commercial good, and the prime purpose of British agriculture is to produce good food, fibre and fuel. Recognising that those products are integral to UK agriculture should be front and centre in all our policies. He also mentioned the displacement of CO2. I have previously been involved with that topic as a Member of the European Parliament, when energy-intensive industries such as the metallurgical industry were being exported to countries with environmental standards that were not as good as ours.
I agreed with the hon. Member for Bristol East (Kerry McCarthy) more than I had thought I would when she got to her feet. Having served on the Environmental Audit Committee with her, I know that her views are to be taken seriously. Organic farming has a part to play. Under our new agricultural regime, we may look at how we can encourage farmers to innovate, and organic farming is one of those innovations. However, organic production should be demand-led, because we do not want to create surpluses of organic food that cause a collapse in the market and make the farms that produce such food un-economic.
The hon. Lady also talked about wildflower margins. As part of a mid-tier scheme on my farm, we are planting those margins, which are certainly a public good. The Government are in the process of designing an environmental land management system to ensure that farmers are rewarded for the environmental benefits they deliver, such as creating habitats for wildlife. Decisions about how public goods such as biodiversity, clean air and water are delivered will be in the hands of farmers and land managers, who may choose, for example, to lower their pesticide use through integrated pesticide management. We will pay for the public benefits that they deliver.
A number of Members, including the hon. Member for Bristol East, talked about improving soil. The question of how we increase the organic matter in soil is important. Indeed, my hon. Friend the Member for Gordon talked about minimum tillage, and the chemicals needed to ensure that we can engage in minimum tillage contribute to the amount of carbon we can store in our soils. Mixed farming, including livestock production, is particularly important, as manures are a vital source of plant nutrients and improve the structure and heart of our soils. That means keeping livestock, and ruminants in particular, as they are the only way in which we can utilise some of our upland soil and areas that are not suitable for intensive cereal or crop production as upland pastures.
My hon. Friend the Member for Taunton Deane (Rebecca Pow) is a champion of farmers and the rural environment, and she is right that soil is a public good. Some 300 million tonnes of carbon are stored in our upland peat areas. My hon. Friend the Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Neil Parish) chairs the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee, to which I have given evidence before, but I look forward to appearing before him again. My hon. Friend the Member for Ayr, Carrick and Cumnock (Bill Grant) represents a great farming area. When I was studying agriculture at university, we went on a field trip to Ayrshire, and I am very jealous of its mild climate, brought to it by the gulf stream. It is clear that food production and the delivery of environmental objectives are not mutually exclusive; there is a synergism between those two goals, and we need to deliver them in parallel.
My hon. Friend the Member for Banff and Buchan (David Duguid) asked whether the pursuit of trade deals around the world will jeopardise our high standards, as did the Labour Front-Bench representative, the hon. Member for Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport (Luke Pollard). I am clear that we will not lower our standards. Indeed, our very high standards and high-quality produce give those countries with which we engage in trade deals a lot to worry about. We will have a great opportunity to market that produce around the world, as is already the case for good products such as Scotch whisky.
Neil Parish
I am delighted to hear the new Minister’s comments. Does he support the amendments to the Agriculture Bill that would maintain high standards for imported food, so that we do not import lower standard food through future trade deals?
Mr Goodwill
I hear what my hon. Friend says, and I will be looking at those amendments line by line—who knows, there may even be Government amendments tabled that will achieve many of those objectives. I was a member of that Bill Committee, so hon. Members can look at what I said at the time. I will aim to be consistent with what I said.
The hon. Member for Edinburgh North and Leith (Deidre Brock) talked about the intra-UK allocation of domestic support. On 16 October 2018, the Government announced a review of intra-UK allocation of domestic farm support funding that will run until the end of this Parliament, which will be in 2022—I hope. The review aims to ensure that all parts of the UK are treated fairly, and that individual circumstances are taken into account. Lord Bew will chair the review, supported by a panel drawn from England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. The review will look into intra-UK farm support allocations between 2020 and the end of this Parliament, in line with our manifesto commitment.
I thank the hon. Member for Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport for welcoming me, and I welcome him in return. He actually talked a lot of sense—indeed, the points he made were an oasis of sanity within Labour policy. I am confident that we can work together constructively to deliver a successful Brexit. If he really wants to help me with this, the first thing he can do is join me in the Lobby tonight, to ensure that we deliver a successful Brexit. The hon. Gentleman also mentioned forestry, and I look forward to working with Sir William Worsley, who has been appointed as the Government’s forestry champion. He is one of my near neighbours in North Yorkshire, so I have visited him there and know that he has an amazing tale to tell.
I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Gordon for securing the debate, and all those present for their contributions. The UK is a global leader in environmental management and scientific breakthroughs, including earth observations, sensors, big data, artificial intelligence and robotics. The agriculture sector can be transformed when we apply those strengths alongside our excellent reputation for producing food. The Government are committed to delivering a modern, tech-savvy and sustainable farming sector in England, with the protection of the environment at its core. The Agriculture Bill is paving the way for that shift, and I look forward to sharing further information and engaging with colleagues about our future policies in due course.
Draft Plant Protection Products (Miscellaneous amendments) (EU Exit) Regulations 2019
Draft Pesticides (Maximum Residue Levels) (Amendment Etc.) Regulations 2019
Robert Goodwill Excerpts(5 years, 9 months ago)
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Mr Robert Goodwill (Scarborough and Whitby) (Con)
I will make one point very briefly. May I ask the Minister, when he sums up, to give an assurance that we will truly have an independent plant protection products regime in the United Kingdom, and that it will not be the case that if, for example, the European Union bans a product, perhaps because of a political campaign rather than because of scientific evidence, or because of misapplication of the precautionary principle, that we will be forced to follow suit? Would that apply to withdrawal periods for pesticides? He talked about maximum residue levels, which are determined in practice by the withdrawal period. It may be that we have different climatic conditions in the UK whereby we could apply different withdrawal periods to achieve the same safe residue level.
Agriculture Bill (Fourteenth sitting)
Robert Goodwill ExcerptsTuesday 20th November 2018
(6 years ago)
Public Bill CommitteesRead Full debate Agriculture Bill 2017-19 View all Agriculture Bill 2017-19 Debates Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: Public Bill Committee Amendments as at 20 November 2018 - (20 Nov 2018)
Dr David Drew (Stroud) (Lab/Co-op)
Welcome back to the Chair, Sir Roger. I hope that this will be the final session of our deliberations, but anything is possible with this Government. We have already lost one Committee sitting, so let me plough on with new clauses 19 and 27.
The whole point of new clause 19 is that farmers and landowners are being asked to make a dramatic shift in how they perform their duties. I hope that all farmers are to some extent environmentalists—that is why they are on the land and why they care for it—but unless they are among the small minority in stewardship, they have principally been paid for being what they are: farmers or landowners. We are now going to pay them to do environmental things.
Mr Robert Goodwill (Scarborough and Whitby) (Con)
Does the hon. Gentleman recognise the many environmental schemes that are in place? Farmers are already doing quite a lot of this stuff.
Dr Drew
I agree that there have been schemes such as Blue Flag, but the point is that that was not what farmers were principally paid for. Under the Bill, they will principally be paid to look after the environment in whatever way is deemed fit, and they will need an enormous amount of advice. New clause 19 would implement a mechanism for that.
The Committee has already discussed the areas in which farmers might need support. We have certainly discussed the idea of people advising on land management contracts, whether they come in from local government or whether farmers and landowners bring them in and pay for their advice. The difficulty is that this is all rather fluid and open-ended, so the new clause would give it some substance.
As the Minister says, the advice will be given on a one-to-one basis, but who is going to give it? At the moment there are not many people who can give such advice, and they are very expensive. One might have thought that land agents would be interested, but at a recent event I spoke to land agents who made it very clear that rural is not really where the money or—dare I say it?—the interest is, because they have moved much more into the urban sphere. That will no doubt cause some difficulties.
The new clause covers a range of areas in which there is a need for advice. We do not want to talk in an alarmist way, but this is really important. We are asking people to completely change their business organisation over a very short period. How they operate and, in a sense, their whole reason for being on the land will have to change. I am not implying that it will change completely for everyone, but for some people the change will be dramatic.
Dr Drew
I do not know enough about Scotland, so I will take the hon. Gentleman’s judgment on that. One of the arguments about the Bill and the changes it implies, is that rents will possibly fall. I do not necessarily agree with that, but it has been put to me by more than one person. That is due to the removal of the area payment, which has pushed up rents because people have more value in the land that they possess. We will have to see; it might become apparent only some years down the line.
At the moment, I am clear that we should go back to the Agriculture Act 1970, which put an obligation on local authorities that had land to protect that land and make it available for those who wished to farm or do other things appropriate to the land that would be within the environmental catch-all we are pushing for in the Bill.
Mr Goodwill
Will the hon. Gentleman give an indication of the size of unit he believes would be viable? Currently, some of the very small smallholdings are not viable businesses.
Dr Drew
That is a problem. Traditionally, the Gloucestershire smallholdings were about 100 acres. I accept that would be very difficult because a great many of them were dairy farms, although we also had some horticulture. That is probably too small. To counterweight that, the Landworkers Alliance argue that they can make a living out of much smaller pieces of land, farmed in a slightly different way, through agroecology and so on, and maybe they would not do that full time. No one is implying that being a farmer has to be a full-time occupation. It is something that people want to do as part of their portfolio of operating.
We need to protect these bits of land initially. I would love to grow them and see local authorities encourage them. That is important, not just for opportunities for people on the land. It is about strategic ownership and the fact that we should always think ahead. If the state is not prepared to put in some effort, where is the direction coming from?
The good thing about county farms estates, as most of them are known, is that they provided education and opportunities for people to look at the front end of farming and see ways in which to do things differently, by collaboration among the tenants and so on. We will come later to tenancy reform but this is all bound up in it. A third of our farmers are tenant farmers and many of them are on land not just owned by local authorities but by charities. In my area there is the Henry Smith charity, which owns considerable areas of land and has been very good. The Church is an important landowner in the way it encourages agriculture.
Dr Drew
I beg to move, That the clause be read a Second time.
This is an important juncture in our consideration of the Bill, and it is probably going to be the most popular part, as we are giving the opportunity to those who wish to be consulted to get rid of the Rural Payments Agency.
It does not have to be that way. We could have a revitalised and reinvigorated payments agency, but a new agency this will have to be, because it will be doing fundamentally different things, and sadly the legacy that the RPA leaves is not necessarily a satisfactory one. That is nothing to do with this Government; previous Governments are responsible too. In my previous incarnation, we spent a lot of time on the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee trying to sort out how the hell we got into such a mess over the area payments scheme involving Accenture and the computer system that was brought in. It was an unmitigated disaster, because it cost millions more and never did what it was supposed to do. We had to drag the chief executive, Johnston McNeill, back from Belfast, where he had managed to hide for a period of time, to get some clarity on why the agency got itself into such a mess. That is history. My dear late lamented friend David Taylor did an enormous amount of work on the computer system, and we were indebted to him for that work on the Select Committee. I just make the point that we are asking the new agency to do fundamentally different work.
Mr Goodwill
When it comes to who was to blame, the right hon. Member for Derby South (Margaret Beckett) might have had something to do with it, given that she chose such a complex way of enacting it under the previous Labour Government.
Dr Drew
I do not disagree that we were foolhardy. There should always be a de minimis and a de maximus in terms of how the payment system operated. As always, when the delightful EU Ministers came together they looked around the room for who was going to pilot this scheme, and somebody maybe put their hand up at the wrong time and said, “We’ll have a go at it.” It was not even a UK-driven scheme; it was England-driven. The other territorial Administrations went at their own pace, adding to the complexity and confusion.
I am merely making the point that we are asking for a consultation on the most appropriate agency to take forward this brand new scheme. It does not have to be rushed; it could be done over a period of time. It does not have to be just with farmers; it can be with the green groups, obviously, but also landowners, to get some clarity on what all those different parties expect from a payments agency. The Minister says that the way public moneys will be paid out will be more straightforward. We will only be able to tell that in due course.
Mr Goodwill
Does the hon. Gentleman intend it to be an offence for individuals to purchase the product while on holiday or does he merely mean the commercial importation of this product?
Dr Drew
Again, there are going to be commercial obligations, because the fact is that we are looking for a ban. As far as I know, both parties have talked about this quite openly. Certainly representatives of the parties have talked about it. We looked at it as regards the withdrawal agreement. From memory, and we will come on to live exports later, it is one of the things that certain people prayed in aid of the advantage of leaving the EU—that is, that we could bring about some of these animal welfare changes. It was a crucial argument. It was not quite as big an argument as the £350 million a week for the NHS, but it was nevertheless an argument.
Dr Drew
My wife would say I was never romantic, although I do not want to disillusion the Minister too much. This is not about going back. There would have to be a new body, but it would perhaps take account of sectoral organisations—that was what was probably wrong with the old Agricultural Wages Board. The NFU always saw it as a one-size-fits-all.
A modern Agricultural Wages Board must take account of the different sectors and regions. Its whole point is that it underpins wages and conditions. We feel very strongly about that. We talked to Unite, the main representative body that came out of the old National Union of Agricultural and Allied Workers. Historically, Unite has always been linked to the Labour party, although it has not always agreed with it. Although we look back in this sense, we also recognise the modern world.
Mr Goodwill
On the more highly paid work in appointment grades one and two, would that not in some way create a cartel for the farmers? They would not be able to outbid each other for the more skilled staff because they would say they were paying the going rate. That would not mean that the more skilled people could do better.
Dr Drew
I hear what the right hon. Gentleman says. There is always a danger with some form of proportionality—how different groups would be paid. Those groups would not necessarily be encompassed by the Agricultural Wages Board anyway, because it is looking at a minimum structure. That is something that a modern, forward-looking wage board will have to take account of.
We have no magic answer: the NFU asks us what form things would take and hopefully we can have sensible and serious discussion with it. We are making the point that the industry is completely short of labour—yet again this year, sadly, the fruit and veg was ploughed back into the ground. There is something wrong when what has been produced cannot be brought to market because there is no one to pick it. From talking to my dairy farmers, I know that there is always a problem in getting milkers. That transcends any dairy-producing region; it is a real issue. All we continue to argue for is one way in which that can be recognised.
I will press this amendment to a vote; we hope the Government will gradually recognise that they must put a structure in place that transcends the normal minimum wage standards or the living wage. This industry is different, and that must be recognised.
Question put, That the clause be read a Second time.
Dr Drew
We really are getting away from the issue. I am making the point that the United Kingdom has a clear policy on allowing live exports. So long as that stays the case, it has nothing to do with what we are talking about here. We are talking about trade between the United Kingdom and other parts—principally Europe, of course, although livestock could be exported to various different parts of the world. We choose not to, because it would be very cruel and also probably economically illiterate to do so.
We are moving the new clause to allow the debate to take place for those who believe that the ban is going to happen as a matter of course when and if we leave the European Union, when we have the opportunity to do it under WTO rules. There is some debate about whether it is going to be that easy, but we will have to face up to that in due course.
The reality is that unless we have some legislation to enable us to implement the ban, we will never do it anyway. This is our opportunity to have a debate and to see whether this legislation can stand the test of time. Without the new clause or something like it, the ban will never happen. We can have as many Adjournment debates as we could possibly want: it will never take place until and unless we are able to put it into legislation.
Mr Goodwill
The fact is that this will not happen if we do not get the agreement voted through in the meaningful vote in Parliament. Will the hon. Gentleman make it clear that anyone who votes against the agreement is voting against our opportunity to ban live exports—and foie gras, for that matter?
Dr Drew
I hear what the Minister says. The problem with this is the issue of how many bits of legislation will come around that can be includable in terms of this ban, or can be amended to allow this to carry through. I know this is complicated, and it is sad when newborn male calves are shot. Genetic modification might provide ways of dealing with the number of male calves at source. We would want to see improvements in many aspects of the dairy industry. This new clause is not a magical answer but live exports is a very political issue, and the general public felt—rightly or wrongly—that on our exit from the European Union, the UK would have much greater discretion on what it wanted to do with regard to live exports.
Mr Goodwill
I hear exactly what the hon. Gentleman is saying, but what he is saying in the amendment does not stack up with the second of the six Labour tests for the agreement, which asks:
“Does it deliver the ‘exact same benefits’ as we currently have as members of the Single Market and Customs Union?”
The hon. Gentleman is saying one thing here, but unfortunately the policy of the Labour party is to stay in the customs union and the single market, which would mean that we could not ban live exports.
George Eustice
I hope I will be able to persuade the shadow Minister that he does not need to press the new clause to a Division. We rehearsed in an earlier discussion on clause 1 the fact that the Government are actively looking at holistic schemes to support and incentivise what could be called integrated pest management. We are considering whether we can reduce our reliance on synthetic chemistry by using more natural predators and different agronomic approaches and being willing for the first time to incentivise farmers financially to do that.
One of the things we are looking at is an incentivised integrated pest management scheme to advance this policy agenda. We also set out in our 25-year environment plan the idea of moving forward and embracing integrated pest management more than we have done previously. The new clause deals with publishing reports and measuring impacts—I have said previously that DEFRA needs no encouragement to produce reports through statutory requirements; we love reports. As I explained, I regularly have to read and sign off reports and I sometimes question whether anyone else is reading them. For some reason, many reports seems to congregate around June, so during that month my box is weighed down with annual reports of one sort or another.
I will share with the hon. Gentleman some of the reports that we have received. I have a lot of reading here that he can take away as a memento of this Committee. The UK Expert Committee on Pesticides—the ECP—which gives us advice on emergency authorisations and on some of the tricky chemical issues. It is a standing advisory committee to the Chemicals Regulation Directorate. I have with me its annual report for 2017, all 22 pages of it. The Expert Committee on Pesticide Residues in Food produces a separate annual report, on top of the one by the Expert Committee on Pesticides, so we have two expert committees in the pesticides space, one on residues and one on broader environmental impacts, both of which produce a report. The report on pesticide residues lists all the findings and surveillance on residues on a wide range of imported products and products produced domestically. It runs to 48 pages and is an annual report.
If that is not enough for the hon. Gentleman, the pesticide usage survey report, is produced by the National Statistics Office and focuses on all sorts of different icrops. I have with me the 2016 report for arable crops, all 92 pages of it, with lots of tables demonstrating exactly what is produced. That key survey already monitors the use of pesticide-active substances on each crop.
Mr Goodwill
In addition to that, does my hon. Friend the Minister recognise that farm assurance schemes carry out detailed scrutiny of the records kept by farmers on the pesticides that they use within the rules?
George Eustice
My right hon. Friend is correct: schemes such as the red tractor assurance scheme have additional checks and enforcement to ensure that there is nothing out of order, and on top of that they generally require MOTs, for instance, for sprayer equipment.
The pesticide usage survey covers the frequency of application, which picks up the measures in subsection (1)(c) of the new clause, and the area treated, which covers subsection (2)(d), as well as the weight of active substance. It also includes figures on some of the alternatives to chemicals, such as the use of viruses that can target insect pests. In addition, the National Poisons Information Service collects and considers reports of possible harm to people, which covers subsection (2)(b). Results are not published, but they are reported to DEFRA and other interested Departments, as well as to the UK Expert Committee on Pesticides.
Finally, the Wildlife Incident Investigation Scheme looks at reported incidents of possible harm to wildlife, which I think is what subsection (2)(a) of the new clause is trying to get at. Results of the Wildlife Incident Investigation Scheme are published on the Health and Safety Executive website, and the Environment Agency also monitors levels of pesticides in water.
I understand that there are very good intentions behind the new clause, but I hope that I can reassure the hon. Member for Stroud that we have a plethora of reports that cover pesticide use and pesticide issues in great detail. I hope he will withdraw his new clause at this stage, take some time to read the reports, which I would be happy to leave with him, and consider whether he still feels the measure is necessary on Report.
Agriculture Bill (Thirteenth sitting)
Robert Goodwill Excerpts(6 years ago)
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Dr Drew
I am minded to support the hon. Lady on this, although we have tabled our own new clause 23. This is at the core of the Bill. Although we are talking about agriculture, we cannot exclude trade from that. We—I mean the great “we”, because no organisation that has commented on the Bill is not of a similar mind—need to know what guarantees there are that the animal welfare, environmental and food-quality standards that British agriculture prides itself on will not be undermined by a race to the bottom, and that we will not take on some mad trade deals to try to dig the UK out of its current dilemma of what it does if it shuts the door on the EU. This is very important.
We have reached a turning point in our debate on the Bill. We hope the Government will get the message, from not just the Opposition but the organisations that have commented on the Bill, many of which will have spoken to the Minister. They want security and the knowledge that there will be no attempt to undermine the standards that have been put in place over generations for British agriculture and the environment. Greener UK, which has been largely supportive of the Government’s approach, sees this as one of the major dividing lines. It wants new clause 23 or new clause 12 in the name of the hon. Member for Edinburgh North and Leith.
We can argue about the definitions—we think that our new clause is slightly more foolproof, but we will listen to the hon. Lady and my hon. Friend the Member for Bristol East, who will hopefully get the opportunity to speak to new clause 14. This issue is absolutely crucial to the way the Bill will be received in not just this country but the wider world. We have to send the wider world the message that this Bill rules out importing cheaper, poor-quality food.
I know there is a degree of disunity in the Government. The Secretary of State for International Trade has been going to all sorts of places, but I challenge him to name one place outside the EU—where he has not been—whose food standards are equal to the UK’s and the EU’s. The reality is that there are not any. Other countries are able to produce cheaper food because they undermine labour standards, sadly mistreat the animals and use all sorts of other methods.
Mr Robert Goodwill (Scarborough and Whitby) (Con)
The hon. Gentleman is making some very valid points, but is it not the case that currently, in the EU, we are unable to ban the import of foie gras or veal produced under systems that are illegal in this country? We could improve animal welfare standards by disentangling ourselves from the single market with Europe.
Simon Hoare (North Dorset) (Con)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Wilson. I rise to speak very much in the spirit with which the hon. Member for Bristol East finished her remarks. She is absolutely right to have identified the cross-party interest in and concern about these issues.
Since the British people made the decision to leave the European Union, I have always said during my meetings with the National Farmers Union and farmers in my constituency that, as important as this Bill will be, the most pressing issue is probably the one raised by the hon. Member for Bristol East in relation to the new clauses. The Bill does important work: it is trying to sculpt and scope a framework of support, and triggers for that support, for UK agriculture. We all want that to be a success, we all understand the importance of the sector to our national economy, and we all want to see it flourish. We therefore understand the importance of the Bill.
We also understand entirely, from remarks made by my hon. Friend the Minister, that in many respects this is a skeleton Bill, or a Christmas tree Bill, upon which certain things will hang and from which future policies and initiatives will flow. I think that we have to be incredibly careful. I hope that we will be able to enter into trade agreements, because they will be good for UK plc, but we should not throw the baby out with the bathwater in their pursuit. We should not see a lowering of our standards in certain areas, particularly within the food sector. I have always had a concern that, for some in British politics, the pursuit of the “Brexit dividend”—to give it a handy moniker—could most readily manifest itself in the price of foodstuffs.
On several occasions I have heard my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset, as the hon. Lady for Bristol East referenced, talk about the lowering of food prices in the shopping basket, and likewise with shoes and clothing, although I appreciate that they are not part of the Bill. He may very well be right. I always point out that we are spending the lowest percentage of our household income on food than at any time in our history, so it is hard to see how food could become very much cheaper in real terms.
However, my concern is about the next step of the scenario. My concern has always resided on this point: if individual trade deals came back to this House to be voted upon in an affirmative way, whether through a statutory instrument or on the Floor of the House, this issue could be part of the checklist to establish whether one would be minded to support it. However, it looks as if trade agreements will not be subject to a vote in the House, so we would be wise to include in the Bill this precautionary principle—this little check—to provide comfort to consumers, who need as much information as possible. I do not believe in the sort of free market in which any old rubbish is put on the supermarket shelves and then people are allowed to make an informed decision. We have to have some standards so that people can have general confidence in the product they are purchasing, irrespective of the price that happens to have been set. There needs to be some underpinning and some general benchmark of standards.
On the “Brexit dividend”, I have always put it to my colleagues in this way: were trade agreements to be entered into that saw, as part of some spirit of reciprocity, new markets opened to what we might call the sexier sides of our economy—finance, IT, insurance, pharmaceutical and the like—the quid pro quo trade-off will be access to our large and growing consumer market, hungry for food, if the Committee will forgive the pun. We would find ourselves swamped with cheap imports, raised to all sorts of standards. Some may be higher than ours, which would be great. Some may be the same, which would be perfect. I think that we would all be keen to resist anything that was lower, for example in relation to chemical applications or animal welfare issues—I see those as equally important.
However, I have often made the point that those cheap imports would remain cheap only while a robust domestic production market formed a competitive market and challenge. I made that point on Second Reading, as did other colleagues. My fear, my hunch and my prediction would be that, as a result of a swamping of overly cheap imports—priced cheaply because the standards are lower and therefore the costs of production are less—that would see a rapid choking off of our domestic production market, either to the point of being barely recognisable, or to be non-existent.
Either of those scenarios could result in a situation whereby those who had distorted our food pricing market would then ride the crest of a non-competitive wave because domestic production would have diminished to a point at which it really only deals with the niche, farmers’ market type of market, but not large-scale domestic production. Having had two or three years of cheap prices, we would suddenly find prices going in an upward trajectory on a very fast escalator. It would be faster plus, because not only would they want to recoup the money for products sold cheaply then, but they would also want desperately to claw back the under-pricing that they had triggered as importers to our country—or exporters, depending which end of the telescope we care to look through—and regain that lost revenue, because they had deliberately distorted the market in order to choke off domestic competition.
I entirely take the point made by the hon. Member for Bristol East that the bona fides on this issue of my hon. Friend the Minister and my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State are beyond challenge. They have been absolutely and abundantly clear. If I could preserve my right hon. and hon. Friends in some sort of political aspic and presume that they would always be in office—I am not sure whether they would find that an attractive proposition—we could all take a step back and breathe a little more easily. We all know that legislation cannot bind our heirs and successors because it is subject to amendment by future Parliaments, but we should at least be setting some definitive benchmarks now. On something as important as this, it is in the Bill—although not necessarily in the wording of these new clauses—that we need to put down those important markers. Would it not be the most frustrating waste of the Committee’s time to have spent it talking about the importance of a sector and seeking to build a cross-party coalition in its support and furtherance, only to find all our work and good efforts coming to nought as a result of an overly laissez-faire approach to trading issues?
Before my hon. Friend the Member for Milton Keynes South has some sort of apoplectic fit, I assure him that, at this stage—because I am very conscious that our hon. Friend the Minister will need to go back and talk to colleagues—if the amendments are pushed to a vote, I will not support them, because further discussion is needed. I give my hon. Friend the Whip that assurance today, but I am afraid that I cannot give the same cast-iron guarantee on Report unless we see some movement on this.
I do not believe that I am alone. I noticed the sharp inhalation of breath by the hon. Member for Bristol West, in a theatrical, pantomime gesture. I hope that my hon. Friends on the Front Bench know that I have never rebelled—I have never voted against Her Majesty’s Government—and I hope that I do not have to. However, I think that the hon. Member for Bristol East was absolutely right that there is a broad coalition of interest in this on the Floor of the House. Whether Members come from a public health aspect or a fiercely pro-agricultural aspect, or whether they are concerned about better shaping and sculpting the post-Brexit environment, I am not sure.
Mr Goodwill
My hon. Friend makes some very valid points. Does he agree that adequate labelling is also part of this? For example, a lot of processed chicken comes in from Thailand and Brazil, but consumers are often not aware because it comes as part of a product. Does he agree that part of the solution to this problem is better labelling, so that people know what they are buying?
Simon Hoare
My right hon. Friend is absolutely right. At the appropriate time there needs to be a significant and radical overhaul of the red tractor. There needs to be much clearer labelling and information. However, information itself can be a bit of a blunt instrument. People need to know how to interpret and understand the information put in front of them. I can read a manual on how to wire a plug 17 times but I will still not understand how to do it. However, the information is there. I do not actually know how to rewire a plug. That is why candle consumption in the Hoare household is very high.
Jenny Chapman
I do know how to wire a plug; that is the first thing I want to say. I add my voice to this because we need to hammer home to the Minister the level and extent of the concern across the parties on this issue. I do not know whether my hon. Friend the Member for Bristol East wishes to press the clause to a vote today or whether there might be opportunities to express the view of parliamentarians in future stages of the Bill, but the Government need to take the hint provided by the excellent speech by the hon. Member for North Dorset, which put the point across incredibly well. It might be a good idea for the Government to come back with their own proposition at a later stage, perhaps in the other place, and propose something that we can all support.
This matter is of such great concern and importance because it is all happening in the context of the withdrawal agreement that we had sight of last week, which is unclear about the future of these kinds of standards, either in the backstop arrangement or in the political declaration about the future relationship. There is a huge row going on about that outside this Committee, so we do not need to go into it all here, but suffice it to say that the agreement is incredibly vague and non-specific about how the UK’s future standards and regulations on these issues would look. That is something that we are unhappy about anyway, but it is particularly important when we look at the issues that we are considering. The hon. Member for North Dorset put it well when he said that the impact may not be felt straightaway but that the erosion of the industry could be seen over time. We have spent so much time in Committee discussing how to protect, enhance, sustain and grow that industry so it will continue to be the best in the world, and it would be a tragedy to see it diminish because we did not have the foresight to put these safeguards in place.
In a way, I am reminded of what has happened to the high street. In not that long a time, we have seen the withdrawal of the vibrancy of our high streets, and it will be very difficult to get that back. Exactly the same thing could happen to our agricultural industries. As a generation of politicians, we would never be forgiven for that.
Obviously, we import food from the US now, but we do it carefully within a set of rules and we are mindful of the standards of what we import, so everybody knows that they can buy food that has been imported from the US with confidence and that it complies with the standards that we expect in this country. That needs to be the case in the future too. I think there would be widespread public support for that to happen in the Bill, and if it does not, I am not sure where in law that provision would be placed, particularly if we were to leave without a deal. I am pretty confident that we are not going to do that, actually, because I do not think the Government would take us down that catastrophic path, but we are here to deal with things that might happen as well as things that we expect to happen.
Mr Goodwill
Surely if the hon. Lady is keen for us to leave with a deal, her party should vote for the deal before us.
George Eustice
There is a very good reason for having the thorough process outlined by the Department for International Trade that I am describing to the hon. Gentleman.
Mr Goodwill
There has been much talk about trade deals in terms of what others might send us, but does the Minister not agree that trade is a two-way process? If, as he suggested, the Americans are becoming much more discerning in the quality of the products they buy, there are great opportunities to export products such as Wensleydale cheese or British beef to these new markets.
George Eustice
That is a very important point. We are working at the moment to try to get access for British beef to the United States because it is a premium product and their beef tends to be lower grade. There is also a good market for British dairy products, particularly our famous cheeses, in the United States where they largely have a standard cheddar that is not particularly good. There is a market for those. There are offensive opportunities in some of these trade deals, which we should always bear in mind.
Agriculture Bill (Tenth sitting)
Robert Goodwill ExcerptsTuesday 13th November 2018
(6 years ago)
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Jenny Chapman (Darlington) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to be back in Committee this afternoon. I look forward to hearing the hon. Member for North Dorset’s account of his lunch; he is not here—he is probably finishing his cheese and biscuits.
When you adjourned the Committee this morning at 25 minutes past 11, Sir Roger, I was about to speak to amendment 122. To give colleagues their bearings, we are on page 12 of the Bill and dealing with clause 17. The amendment would insert just a few words about exceptional market conditions. What we are asking for is difficult to explain without reading out a whole subsection of the clause, so please bear with me. Clause 17(2) states:
“In this Part ‘exceptional market conditions’ exist where—
there is a severe disturbance in agricultural markets or a serious threat of a severe disturbance in agricultural markets, and
the disturbance or threatened disturbance has, or is likely to have, a significant adverse effect on agricultural producers in England in terms of the prices achievable for one or more agricultural products.”
All we want to do is to include, in addition to the reference to an impact on the prices achievable, a reference to the costs incurred in the production of such products, because the issue is obviously not just the prices that can be obtained for them, but how much the costs of producing them may be affected.
Mr Robert Goodwill (Scarborough and Whitby) (Con)
When the hon. Lady talks about events that may have a severe impact on British agriculture, could she by any chance be referring to the points made by the shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer yesterday, when he talked about the collective ownership of land? Surely that is a policy that, when enacted by Stalin, killed millions of people in the Soviet Union.
Jenny Chapman
I think that if that were the policy, it would indeed count as an exceptional market condition, and I expect that the Government might want to intervene in some way.
Let me move on. As drafted, the power to act applies only if there is an impact on prices, but obviously there could be a situation in the sector that resulted in excessive additional costs for farmers but did not necessarily have an impact on the price of the product. Examples would be the costs of taking emergency action, such as cleansing and disinfecting, or input costs such as those for fodder. If the clause included our wording, that would enable the Secretary of State to act, or would just make it clearer that he could act when there was an effect on not only the prices achievable but the costs incurred.
Widening the scope, subtly but importantly, beyond just the impact on agricultural product prices would make the measure more flexible and reflective of the nature of exceptional conditions. In an enabling Bill, it is better to have powers with the full scope to deal with the unexpected. For now, that concludes my remarks on this group of amendments.
Kerry McCarthy
I agree entirely with my hon. Friend. The EU introduced a law in 2004 that required eggs and egg packs to be labelled as to farming methods. That was the result of consumer demand. It did not ban anything, but it gave consumers the information they needed to shop in the way that they wanted to shop. It led to a substantial shift away from cage eggs and 50% of UK egg production is now free range, but in other respects information on method of production is not available. Unless food is organic, it is quite difficult for higher welfare farmers to get the information across, so that shoppers will be prepared to pay a premium. There are some voluntary and assurance schemes, but it is all a bit of a muddle.
Mr Goodwill
Of course we are all keen to ensure that animal welfare standards are maintained and indeed improved. On eggs, the public easily understand the difference between a caged bird and a bird that has had access to the outside, but it is much more difficult for milk production. Can the hon. Lady explain how, for example, cows that are housed in winter for good welfare reasons would be characterised in her way of describing type of production?
Kerry McCarthy
I have spoken to dairy farmers and organisations such as the Pasture-Fed Livestock Association about the number of days animals would have to be outside grazing to meet the criteria. Nobody is suggesting that they would have to be outdoors year round, round the clock, no matter the weather. That is something that could be addressed in the guidance. The problem with milk is that, at the moment, most milk is pooled together, so it is impossible in most cases to distinguish the source of the milk when it comes to be marketed, so consumers are in the dark—unless it is organic of course.
Mr Goodwill
I understand the point the hon. Lady is trying to make, but would this provision not just hand the market on a plate to the New Zealanders, who can keep their cows outside for very long periods, and in that way freeze out British farmers who, because of the weather we have in winter, have to house their livestock for the best of reasons?
Kerry McCarthy
That depends on the criteria set. I have heard 120 days mentioned as a possible benchmark.
The problem is not just that the information is not being made available; one of the main reasons I tabled the amendment is that there is quite a lot of misleading marketing that gives consumers the impression that goods are higher welfare when they are not. A pork product from a factory-farmed pig may carry a label that says something like “farm fresh” or “all natural”. Packaging can carry images of green fields or woodlands. I was praising Tesco this morning for its work on food waste and modern slavery, but there was an issue, either earlier this year or last year, where Tesco meat and fresh produce had been labelled with the names of British-sounding farms, such as Boswell Farms beef steaks and Woodside Farms sausages, and it transpired that not only did those farms not exist, but in some cases the produce had been imported. That is certainly misleading the public, and I might use stronger language to describe that behaviour.
Kerry McCarthy
If people want to choose to buy organic, they can do so. They can do that at the moment. There is not going to be any judgment as to whether organic is better; it is a personal choice. I thought the Conservatives were all in favour of personal choice.
On the non-meat varieties of bacon and sausages, we do not object to the taste of things; we object to the fact that animals are killed to make them. If they are made from plant-based sources, all well and good and we can all have a nice bacon sandwich without worrying about the little pigs and other creatures. I hope that explains to the hon. Gentleman why we might want to have a veggie-burger occasionally, if he struggles with the concept.
Mr Goodwill
On that point, does the hon. Lady think we should follow the lead of France, which, following an initiative by French MP Jean-Baptiste Moreau, has banned misleading words such as “sausage” and “steak” unless they are attached to produce actually containing meat?
Kerry McCarthy
No, I do not. I am aware of that move, but I do not think that people are remotely misled. Nobody is going to buy a vegetarian sausage thinking that it has pork in it. It is the same with soya milk and almond milk—everyone knows perfectly well that they have nothing to do with dairy cows. We are underestimating the intelligence of the British consumer if we think that they are going to be misled by things like that.
Deidre Brock
I still consider the lack of focus on food production a fundamental flaw of the Bill. It is a serious omission at a time when food security has become a major concern. Farmers already have a very clear interest in protecting the environment, and the sensible approach to supporting those endeavours would surely be along the lines of the work that the Soil Association is already doing in Scotland with the support of the Scottish Government: education and exampling to encourage more productive but environmentally friendly farming. I urge hon. Members to look at Future Farming Scotland, Farming with Nature and the Rural Innovation Support Service—three excellent programmes from the Soil Association to improve farming in Scotland that are far more effective than asking farmers to fill in more forms to show environmental progress.
It would be easier for larger enterprises to do that form-filling and comply with the rules for gaining that cash than it would be for small farms, and potentially easier for grouse moors and stalking estates to access funding than for small family-run farms producing foods for local markets. That offsets any possible benefits of so-called public goods. As food miles grow, the environmental benefits surely diminish, and, similarly, as the air miles and road miles of shooting enthusiasts grow, any environmental benefit from proper management of shooting estates and grouse moors vanishes, and perhaps even turns negative.
Mr Goodwill
I represent a very large moorland area on the north Yorkshire moors. Does the hon. Lady not agree that the management by keepers and shooting estates maintains the delicate environment for the benefit not only of the sheep and grouse that graze, but of the people who enjoy those areas?
The Chair
That is a very fair point, and I have been struggling with that as well, trying to decide how far we allow the debate to go down that road. I ask colleagues to exercise a degree of restraint, because there will be an opportunity to discuss the extent of the Bill later, on clause 34.
Mr Goodwill
During the comments by hon. Member for Edinburgh North and Leith at the start of this short debate, the point was quite rightly made that nobody here is representing Northern Ireland, so I rise to speak as a member of the Select Committee on Northern Ireland Affairs. She asked if there were cases of protected geographical status in Northern Ireland, which indeed there are: Lough Neagh eels, Irish whisky, Comber early potatoes and Armagh Bramley apples. Indeed, there is also an all-Ireland protected status—there is no reason why that should not continue after we have left the European Union—for salmon.
My point is that, although we have no Government active in Northern Ireland, the Department of Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs—DAERA, Northern Ireland’s equivalent of DEFRA—is engaged in a consultation on these issues. It is grappling with the challenges that need to be faced, whereas the Scottish Government seem to be pretending that this will not happen and are not engaging with it at the level they should be.
Martin Whitfield
Aware of your earlier comments, Sir Roger, I shall be relatively brief. I rise merely by way of seeking an indication, or an answer to my question, from the Minister, or indeed the hon. Member for Edinburgh North and Leith, who moved the amendment, if they find chance to do so. I reiterate what NFU Scotland asked for, which is that the Governments on both sides of the border should sit down, discuss this and sort it out. That is what should happen. It is not a case for politicking. As my hon. Friend the Member for Darlington said, stuck in the middle is a very important industry in Scotland, England, Wales and Northern Ireland. The agricultural industry is desperate for certainty and understanding, and needs it sooner rather than later.
On the amendments, will the Minister confirm the evidence that he gave to the Scottish Affairs Committee? Some elements clearly affect the devolved settlement. With the greatest respect, more attention should have been paid to the consequences of that earlier.
I am concerned about the question of recognised producer organisations that cross the borders of the four nations. Yes, the amendment takes account of that, but there is the question of what happens if there is an argument about certification. If one side says yes and the other says no, who will take precedence?
The other point I want to make is about Government amendment 10. What sort of legal entity does the Minister envisage? Is it, or might it be, a collection of simple individuals? In that case, the Government might it challenging to find a legal entity to pass down those rights.
George Eustice
The only way that a processor could do that would be if they literally became a farmer. Setting up a sham subsidiary company that buys from the farmer and sells to a middle man would still be caught by these provisions, because the vehicle company would still be required to abide by the terms that are set out through these regulations. We thought about this hard and our conclusion was that if the challenge is the fact that farmers are too often price takers, are too fragmented and do not have sufficient clout in the supply chain, let us have a very targeted, focused approach to ensuring that we address that unfairness.
The problem with broadening the provision to anyone in the supply chain, so it could be a haulage company transporting lettuces or someone who has bought something and sold it on, is that it is broadened to many more relationships. Then it becomes difficult to justify all the requirements and purposes set out, because they are very much designed for farm businesses.
Mr Goodwill
We have heard about the case where milk crosses the Irish border on a number of occasions—it was almost like trying to hit a moving target. That is why these amendments are not really practical.
George Eustice
My hon. Friend makes a good point. We should remain focused on the challenge we are trying to address: why do farmers not get a fair price for the food they produce? Why do they end up too often being price takers and why do they need public support and subsidies in order to break even? The answer is often in the way the supply chain works to their disadvantage. Let us tackle the causes of that disadvantage and have an Agriculture Bill that is specifically targeted at agriculture.
Agriculture Bill (Ninth sitting)
Robert Goodwill Excerpts(6 years ago)
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Jenny Chapman
It is good to be back after our week’s rest last week. Clause 11 concerns support for rural development and I am afraid, looking back at our previous deliberations, I must rerun some of the arguments we applied to previous clauses. The issue that runs through the Bill is what the Secretary of State may want to do with the powers, and the inadequate definition of that. In the present case, the Minister wants the powers to be subject to the negative resolution procedure, which we went over in some detail the week before last.
Clause 11 states that the Secretary of State “may by regulations modify”
“retained direct EU legislation relating to support for rural development”
and
“subordinate legislation relating to that legislation.”
That is quite a broad power. Subsection (3) sets out some of the measures that the Secretary of State would be able to modify. It begins:
“In this section ‘retained direct EU legislation relating to support for rural development’ includes in particular—”
but it is not clear to me, and I should like the Minister’s view, whether the list of measures that follows is intended to be exhaustive, or whether the Secretary of State would be able to add to it. If he could add to it, and could use the powers in other ways, too, would the use of the negative procedure be appropriate in all circumstances, and not just the instances specified in the list? I should like the Minister to enable the Committee to understand the aim of the clause properly.
Amendment 79 relates to the Secretary of State’s power, under the clause, to simplify or improve the measures. The amendment would make the quite modest but important change of replacing the words “simplifying and improving” with
“making a change or changes which the Secretary of State believes to be necessary to”.
Mr Robert Goodwill (Scarborough and Whitby) (Con)
Would the hon. Lady rather give powers to the Secretary of State to complicate legislation or make it worse? It seems she is opening a door for that to happen.
Jenny Chapman
No—clearly, that is not the intention. If the Minister needs to table something to make that clear, we will gladly discuss that.
Mr Goodwill
I was in the European Parliament for some time, and it strikes me that the way EU regulations are drafted makes the assumption that every farmer is a crook who is trying to dodge the system; in the UK, we have a long tradition of great honesty from the agricultural community in the way they work through these schemes.
Kerry McCarthy
That is true. Some supermarkets have been a lot better than others. Tesco has taken quite significant steps in auditing the waste in its supply chain; others have only paid lip service. One of the problems with the way that the Courtauld commitment works is that everyone is bundled in together and they report in aggregate, so we do not know who is making progress and who is not. We are also committed to meeting sustainable development goal 12.3, and I believe we should make that a binding statutory target, which must be done in legislation.
Mr Goodwill
Obviously, crop yields vary according to the season and often farmers need to grow plenty to ensure that they can supply their contracts. Would the hon. Lady define stock feed potatoes or carrots used to feed livestock as waste, or would that be exempted from her definition?
Kerry McCarthy
Let us be clear: this is a discussion we have had in part about whether, if certain produce is ploughed back into the field, it should count as waste. This is not about pointing the finger at farmers and blaming them for what happens on their farms; it is about trying to ensure that the data is there, so that we can see what processes are needed to reduce avoidable waste. In the food waste hierarchy, the aim is to ensure that any food produced that is fit for human consumption is consumed by humans, and then, working our way down the hierarchy, by livestock, and then used in processes such as anaerobic digestion. At the bottom of the hierarchy is landfill—an absolute no-no, I would say.
Although there is a legal obligation for that food waste hierarchy to be enforced, we know that it is not and there are no consequences if people do not follow it. One of the reasons it is not enforced is that we do not have the data on where food waste is occurring. I say clearly that this is not about blaming farmers for anything; it is about trying to reward farmers for doing the right thing. We need the information to be available.
Mr Goodwill
May I press the hon. Lady further? On our farm, we used to grow swedes, which by and large were for livestock, but we would harvest and net up one in 10 or one in 20 for human consumption. It would be hard for any farmer to collect data on her description of food that is fit for human consumption but then finds its way into the animal food chain.
Kerry McCarthy
I am trying to get at where the policies of the supermarkets and the buyers lead to food waste on farms. We are talking about when food is produced and supermarkets reject the produce—sometimes on spurious cosmetic grounds, but usually because of poor predictions of when they will need it. Perhaps it is a bad summer and the supermarkets are not selling as many salads or other summertime foods as they otherwise would. That is what we are trying to get to the bottom of.
This is not about farmers choosing to do certain things with their produce; it is about trying to get to the bottom of the unfair relationship. We have the Groceries Code Adjudicator, but although there are measures in the Bill to strengthen that role, they still do not go anywhere near far enough. The Groceries Code Adjudicator has said that she does not believe she needs any more powers, whereas I know that farmers and a significant number of people throughout the supply chain are crying out for that relationship to be made fairer and be more firmly enforced.
Jenny Chapman
I shall speak principally to amendment 97 and what it seeks to do. To an extent it is probing, but we are incredibly concerned about this. As my hon. Friend the Member for Stroud just pointed out, clause 17 talks about “exceptional market conditions”. We are trying to understand more precisely what the Government want us to understand by that. As paragraph (b) of amendment 97 states—this may be imminent—we would consider it an exceptional market condition
“if, on the day after exit day, the United Kingdom has not entered, or secured an agreement to enter, into a customs union with the EU.”
We are concerned about that. Exit day is at the end of March next year, about 150 days from now. That would be a significant threat to the livelihoods of farmers and others in the food and drink industry up and down the country.
We want to understand whether the Government agree that that is a significant threat and what, if anything, they intend to do to support producers through it, should it come about. The Minister may be able to say, “Actually the circumstances that would emerge in that case are covered by elements of the clause in the Bill,” but it would be good to hear him say that, so that we can at least be assured to that extent as we continue to follow the Government’s progress through these negotiations—I hesitate to use the word “progress”.
I am particularly concerned, when we are talking about a customs union, that we have no Members from Northern Ireland on this Committee, so that voice is missing. I understand that the Assembly is suspended at the moment, and I wish the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland well in her endeavours to re-establish the Assembly. It is a great pity that there is currently no access to the Assembly, particularly for the citizens of Northern Ireland, and the voices of that part of our country are limited as a consequence. That is a real problem, particularly when we consider farmers in Ulster. There are farmers along the border whose farms cross the border. It is a border of 300-odd miles, intersected by far too many roads to be able to have any meaningful customs checks.
We have all heard many times in the Brexit debates the concerns about border infrastructure and what it would mean for security and identity in Northern Ireland. That insecurity and concern is felt particularly by strong Unionist farmers I have met in Northern Ireland who tell me very clearly—as I am sure that they will have told the Minister, if he has been there, which I expect he has—that they want to be in a customs union. They have a very plain way of telling you this. I was shocked to hear how one Ulster farmer, a strong Unionist all his life, talked about it. He said that he would rather have a united Ireland than a border on the island of Ireland. That stuck with me, and we all need to keep it in mind, because it shows the strength of feeling in Northern Ireland.
I regret that we have no member of the Committee who can speak with first-hand knowledge of Northern Ireland, and that we have to rely on people like me. Although I have visited many times in recent years to talk about Brexit and its implications, it is a real missed opportunity that we do not have someone on the Committee. I am sure that the opportunity will be taken to hear those voices in later stages of the Bill.
There is growing concern that the Government’s understanding of the way that food gets in and out of our country is lacking. The Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union recently remarked that he did not realise how dependent we were on the Dover-Calais crossing, which was shocking to many people, including me. It was extraordinary to hear that at this late stage in the negotiations. If that lack of appreciation finds its way into the agreement, it could have catastrophic consequences for food producers in this country.
Mr Goodwill
The hon. Lady is absolutely right to identify some of the concerns, but is that not why, when we get a deal, which I am confident we will, we should all vote for it, rather than have more uncertainty?
Jenny Chapman
Nice try, but whatever the deal is, let us see it and judge it according to its merits. One of the tests that we will apply is the effect that it will have on manufacturers, food producers, communities and the devolved Administrations, and whether it respects the nations of our country and keeps our Union together. Those are the things that we will be thinking about, and we think that having a customs union is essential. We could have referred to a single market deal or any number of things, but we have chosen to be specific in the amendment. We want to understand what the Government expect to happen should we leave without a deal and without being part of a customs union with our nearest neighbours at the end of March next year. We are deeply worried about that.
Agriculture Bill (Seventh sitting)
Robert Goodwill Excerpts(6 years ago)
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Mr Robert Goodwill (Scarborough and Whitby) (Con)
My hon. Friend the Minister has mentioned the issue of ear tags, but we also potentially have the problem of sprayers that may have missed their annual MOT. When the sprayer ultimately comes for its test, it may well have been compliant all the time, but according to this amendment that farmer could be ineligible for payments. Perhaps the guy who was going to do the test was ill that day and the farmer ran out of time.
George Eustice
I disagree; I have thought it through. If the hon. Lady and a future Labour Government want to do precisely what they set out in amendment 84, the right place to do it would be under an affirmative resolution under sections 2 or 3.
Mr Goodwill
Perhaps I should clarify something for the benefit of the Opposition. I am not talking about the Ministry of Transport MOT, where people take their car to the garage; I am talking about the annual testing that sprayers must undertake as part of cross-compliance and as part of the schemes that farmers engage in. Indeed, slug pellet applicators need to be tested every five years, so it is quite possible that a farmer would forget when that five years was up.
George Eustice
My hon. Friend makes a good point. There is a complex issue around sprayer MOTs, as he knows, because there is a voluntary industry scheme underpinned by Red Tractor. The vast majority of farmers are required to do that as a condition of their Red Tractor membership.
I have come across examples. For instance, we have a cross-compliance rule that there needs to be a 2-metre buffer strip around fields. I have come across examples where in one small corner of the field the person doing the rotavating or operating the plough drifted slightly in, so that the width went to 1.80 metres instead of 2 metres. A farmer in that particular case received a fine of £10,000. That is clearly disproportionate to the scale of the offence and it is the kind of nonsense that we now have an opportunity to sweep away.
George Eustice
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that intervention. I intend to address those issues in more detail when we get to part 2, because clause 11, in particular, gives us the power to modify the existing EU schemes. As I pointed out earlier, the difficulty that both the RPA and Natural England have with these schemes is the dysfunctional nature of the enforcement regime designed by the EU that sits behind them. We have an opportunity to clean that up once we leave the EU.
Mr Goodwill
My hon. Friend mentioned national organisations such as the RSPB. Does he see a role for local wildlife trusts? There are 47 up and down the country, including the Yorkshire Wildlife Trust, which currently not only manages 100 wildlife reserves but works closely with farmers to help them manage their land, and would, I think, like to work more closely with more farmers.
George Eustice
Absolutely. I am a huge supporter of the work of the wildlife trusts; we have one in Cornwall that does some good work. They often have local knowledge and very good working relationships with farmers because they are less of a campaigning organisation and more on the ground. There could well be a role for them. The purpose of clause 2(5) is to make provision for us to be able to engage some of those third sector organisations, and even independent agronomists farmers trust, so that we can design tailored local schemes.
Although the amendment is not pertinent here, I will briefly touch on clause 2(4) because it is a linked issue. It gives us the power to give financial assistance to an organisation that would administer a scheme directly. To be clear about the type of thing we have in mind, because it is a similar provision, the national parks have said that they would quite like to run a scheme for their members and administer the financing of that by delegating it down. There are some good examples, such as the Dartmoor hill project, where we have that kind of landscape-scale working around organisations such as national parks.
Local enterprise partnerships have expressed an interest in being involved in the administration of productivity grants. We want to have the option to subcontract some of that work, where it is appropriate, to bodies such as local enterprise partnerships or national parks. Again, that could assist in ensuring that these schemes run smoothly.
Sandy Martin
We welcome a method of incentivising farmers to do the right thing—I would argue that that is the thrust of the Bill—but it is entirely proper to include conditions for the receipt of any financial support. Otherwise, how can that incentive be effective?
Amendment 85 on waste food fits very well with our amendment 50 on greenhouse gas emissions, which was rejected on Tuesday. Methane is 23 times more potent a greenhouse gas than CO2 and is the biggest contributor to climate change after CO2. By ensuring that we deal with the issue of food waste, the amendment would help to ensure that we meet our climate change goals. There is no sense in targets that do not include methane.
Every part of the food production, consumption and waste stream needs to be part of any effective solution. If we do not include production in our food waste reduction strategy, it will not be effective. A strategy that includes targets and regulations to ensure that the incentives—the carrots—go to the right people at the right time is one that the hon. Member for Gordon will appreciate.
The reduction of food waste will help people to think more carefully about the food that they eat and therefore to move towards foods of higher quality and nutritional value. Indeed, in the Which? survey, 71% of people said that they preferred higher-quality food to price reductions. Reducing food waste will help food production in this country because it will produce greater profitability for better-quality foods in the long run. The totality of the funds available for buying food will go towards the production of food that people actually consume, rather than food that is wasted along the way.
Mr Goodwill
The shadow Minister rather let the cat out of the bag when he said that this issue was somewhat tangential to the Bill. We all subscribe to the idea of reducing food waste and ensuring that the scarce resource and the high-quality food that we have in this country is consumed, rather than being thrown in the bin and contributing to methane production on landfill sites or to the expense of incineration.
I suggest that farmers are probably the people most angry that the food they produce ends up in the bin and not in somebody’s stomach, but the decision whether food is wasted is out of their hands; it is in the hands of the consumers, the supermarkets and the catering industry. How much food in fridges is thrown away because it goes past its sell-by date? How many pensioners in the supermarket will be tempted by a “buy one, get one free” offer, only to find that it gives them more than they can manage to eat?
We probably need to look at the catering and food service industry more closely, but it is not within the scope of the Bill. For example, I was in a hotel in Belfast last week where a marvellous breakfast buffet was laid out; I was there at the beginning of service, but the full range of food would have needed to be available until the end, so a lot of it would have had to be thrown away. Indeed, on Friday I was at a meeting of farmers in my constituency. Some of them had had a pub meal before I arrived, and even they could not eat the large amounts of chips that were put on their plates, so no doubt the leftovers went into the waste stream. Historically, a lot of waste used to go into the animal food chain, but because of mad cow disease, that is now much more controlled. Pig swill is not something that can be used in that way because of disease problems.
While I understand the feelings and the motivation behind the amendment, it should not be in this part of the Bill. Perhaps supermarkets could do more than they have so far with respect to what they call “ugly vegetables”. How often has a strangely shaped carrot been thrown away rather than put on the shelves because it is not of the right specifications? Indeed, we could go to the EU and talk about straight bananas and cucumbers, which was something that was often covered in the media during the referendum campaigns.
We also need to consider what waste actually is. A lot of the so-called agricultural waste—stock feed potatoes or stock feed carrots—can actually be used as a viable feed, so reducing waste per se is not always the way to go. I hope that the Opposition will understand that, while everybody agrees with what they want to achieve, this amendment is not the way to do it.
A part of the Bill that does not need amending relates to grants that could be made available to farmers for improving their storage. Farmers get very annoyed about the deterioration of crops in storage—particularly potatoes—over winter. The very best storage conditions mean that more of a crop can be marketed the following year. The Bill already includes provisions for capital grants for farmers to improve that situation. I hope that the hon. Member for Stroud understands that, although we can get behind what he says, this is not the right place to do it.
Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)
I am chair of the all-party group on food waste. I will speak to the amendment briefly because I hope to table amendments to the provisions on data and transparency in the supply chain. That is probably the most important angle for tackling food waste because, as other hon. Members have said, in most cases farmers are not really responsible for the amount of wasted food. There is far too much focus on household food waste, and many people in the food supply chain have a vested interest in making it all about whether people throw out their salads or know what to do with their leftovers. In some ways, that lets people in the food supply chain off the hook.
A reason why farmers are forced to waste so much food to the extent that occurs on farms is that it is rejected by supermarkets. Although the Groceries Code Adjudicator has gone some way to addressing that, supermarkets now use spurious cosmetic reasons to reject fruit and veg. Vegetables might be accepted on one day and rejected on another. That is simply to do with the logistics of supermarket sales and the quantities that they need. We need to tighten up the Groceries Code Adjudicator, but we will come to that later in the Bill.
I put two questions about the amendment to the Minister. If food waste were a country, it would have the third-largest carbon emissions in the world, after China and the US. Clearly, from that point of view, food waste is a significant issue. There are measures in the Bill to support farmers who reduce their carbon footprint, and I wonder how the Minister sees food waste fitting in to that?
Measuring food waste on farms can be quite difficult, particularly when a lot of it is ploughed back into the land—would that be classed as wasted? Is using food waste for anaerobic digestion considered a waste or a good use? Farmers using food waste is a good thing—I have been to farms in Somerset where they use waste from local cider mills and bread factories for anaerobic digestion; that is absolutely fine—but how do we address the increasing amount of land being used to grow crops for anaerobic digestion? Fields should be used to grow crops for people to eat, but there is a prevalence of maize being grown for AD. I am not sure where that fits into the Bill, but I want to see farmers rewarded for doing the right thing with food waste, given what I said about it not being their fault. How can we do that while we also incentivise them to grow crops for AD?
Agriculture Bill (Eighth sitting)
Robert Goodwill Excerpts(6 years ago)
Public Bill CommitteesRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
The Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (George Eustice)
I turn my attention now to Opposition new clause 10. I recognise that there is a very big issue behind the new clause—funding. We completely understand that. We need to ensure that we have the funding in place to support the purposes we outline in clause 1 in particular. We are absolutely clear about the importance of that. That is why we made a manifesto commitment, which we will honour, to keep the cash totals we spend on agriculture policy the same for the duration of this Parliament—we hope until 2022.
There is also provision in the Bill for a long, seven-year transition. Although we have given no concrete undertaking about the exact quantum of funding after 2022, it is implicit in the Bill and in the nature of the transition that there will be ongoing funding thereafter. We also made a manifesto commitment to introduce new schemes to replace the current common agricultural policy, and that is what the Bill is all about. On 16 October, the Government announced that they will review the intra-UK allocation for domestic support, which will go some way to giving consideration to how we allocate funds within the UK and set the ground rules for allocations after 2022.
At the moment, we spend around £3 billion a year on the CAP. In the scheme of things, compared with the spending of many other Departments, that is a relatively modest sum, particularly if we refocus those resources to delivering public goods—improving the quality of our soils and water, enhancing the beauty of our landscapes, and supporting key Government objectives, such as promoting biodiversity and wildlife on farmland and reducing our climate change emissions to mitigate the impact of climate change.
However, new clause 10 is less about the size of the budget—no doubt we will discuss that later—than about annual reporting on the budget. There are two reasons why it is unnecessary. The first is technical. The new clause would create a legal requirement to list the total funding for each of the purposes outlined in clause 1. As I made clear on Tuesday, the difficulty with that is that many of the interventions we seek will cross multiple purposes. We may have schemes that enhance animal welfare but also the environment, or that enhance the environment but also mitigate the impacts of climate change. It would be difficult to separate those things out and report on the basis of individual purposes.
Strangely enough, it would be far easier to report even more granularly—to report how much money we spent on integrated pest management schemes, catchment-sensitive farming schemes or schemes to enhance farmland birds or pollinators, for instance. We would probably be able to extract that information from individual agreements and aggregate it for reporting purposes far more readily than we would be able to pigeonhole expenditure within the purposes outlined in clause 1.
The second reason—the hon. Member for Stroud may have forgotten this, but he was in the House at the time—is that the last Labour Government introduced the Government Resources and Accounts Act 2000, under which the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs already has a statutory duty to present an annual report and accounts to Parliament, detailing all our expenditure. These days that includes quite a comprehensive list, as well as reporting of the Department’s priorities and how it is delivering, for example, on its business plan.
Mr Robert Goodwill (Scarborough and Whitby) (Con)
Is it not also the case that hon. Members who might have an interest in such things may table parliamentary questions and need not wait for the publication of an annual report?
George Eustice
That is absolutely the case, as my right hon. Friend points out. We have scrutiny by the National Audit Office, the Environmental Audit Committee and the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee, for example, and I always enjoy the many parliamentary questions I receive on every piece of detail about DEFRA’s spending priorities.
A statutory requirement to do annual reporting on DEFRA is in place already. However, this is an important point, so at a later stage of the Bill—perhaps on Report—I might be willing to explain to the House in a bit more detail what information we would envisage publishing as part of our requirements under the Government Resources and Accounts Act. In a world in which we want transparency about how we spend money in this area and what it is delivering, it may well be possible for us to decide to adopt a convention on the particular format of these annual accounts. I am more than happy to return to the House on Report to say a little more about that. On that basis, I hope the hon. Gentleman will not press new clause 10.
Mr Goodwill
I echo what the hon. Gentleman said from the Opposition Front Bench. Some farmers and others involved in the management of land have been a little worried that there may be new offences for which very large penalties would be incurred through the money not being made available for support. Having said that, I understand that elsewhere in the European Union over the years, we have had some egregious criminal offences, and the system has been milked by those with criminal intent. We need to be sure that we are not talking about that here in the UK.
For example, in Spain and across a number of southern European countries, the EU ruled that any olive trees planted after 1998 were not eligible for support. The subsidy was based on the amount of olives delivered to the mills, but there was no way of testing those olives to know when trees were planted. That resulted in 40 million new olive trees being planted in 2001 alone, and the widespread criminalisation of the system. Between 1985 and 1998, only 6% of the money that had been unfairly claimed was recovered. That example shows how, when a system is out of control, it can be open to widespread fraud.
Sandy Martin (Ipswich) (Lab)
Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that where such widespread criminal activity takes place, it would be appropriate for it to be dealt with through existing criminal law or for new criminal law to be created? It would not be appropriate for it to be adjudicated by the Secretary of State in the same way that the Minister said that regulations should be done through existing law.
Mr Goodwill
That is precisely the point I was coming to. The European Union instructed OLAF, its own anti-fraud body, to look at that sort of thing. Even this year, in Slovakia, journalist Ján Kuciak was murdered along with his fiancée after he exposed widespread fraud involving the Italian mafia, Slovak business and politicians in Slovakia. That resulted in the fall of that Government, so widespread was that fraud. We have seen similar problems in Bulgaria, where, rather surprisingly, a farmer wanting to get agricultural support must first register to pay health and pension insurance, so the very smallest farmers, who we would want to help in this country, do not get help in that country.
If we have that type of fraud in this country, even though there has been no evidence and no cases of widespread manipulation and fraud in the system, there is already criminal and environmental law under which farmers could be prosecuted. The worry among many farmers—I hope the Minister will reassure us and perhaps even clarify this on Report—is that this could be an opportunity to create lots of new criminal offences and punitive financial penalties for farmers who are trying their best. The Minister mentioned the farmer who accidently ploughed an extra 20 cm on his headland margin. Indeed, when I spoke to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, I was told that if my daughter rode her pony on the field margin strip, that would be against the rules and, therefore, that we could have been penalised.
We have no similar cases of widespread fraud in the UK. This type of offence is already covered by existing anti-fraud or environmental legislation. There is some worry that trivial offences or mistakes could be penalised and that farmers could be unnecessarily criminalised. I hope that the Minister will give us some reassurance that that is not the intention of clause 3(2)(h), and that he will give further clarification to ensure that some future Government could not use the clause in a way that was not intended.
Mr Philip Dunne (Ludlow) (Con)
I will not detain the Committee for long. I endorse the comments of my right hon. Friend the Member for Scarborough and Whitby. I note that the hon. Member for Stroud does not intend to press the amendment at this stage, but it is important to reflect on the spirit of what my hon. Friend the Minister said in this morning’s debate when he outlined the Government’s intent in devising the new schemes: they are intended to be less onerous on the recipients of financial support than the schemes that they replace under the CAP.
In the same spirit, I hope my hon. Friend the Minister will be able to enlighten the Committee that this power to create offences is designed primarily not to create a mass of further offences that would allow people to be criminalised if they made inadvertent errors in the receipt of their financial assistance, but to—as I understand it—replicate existing Government powers. Anything he can do to reassure us that there will not be an extension of the kind we have described will be very helpful.
Jenny Chapman
Unfortunately not. In the case we are looking at now, it is laid down in the Bill—well, it is at the moment, but I am optimistic that the Minister will reassure me—that it will be the negative procedure. Most often, when a Minister has these powers, it is specified, alongside where that power lies in the Act, how it should be exercised. I do not know whether that is challengeable later, although I am happy to take advice on that; I am not sure that it is, and I cannot think off the top of my head of any occasions when that has happened.
Mr Goodwill
The sorts of policies we are talking about have previously been EU policies, and the decision on whether to scrutinise them has been down to the European Scrutiny Committee. However, I cannot think of a single case where the Committee has called one in for debate and it was not all done and dusted and agreed before it even got to this place.
Jenny Chapman
That is an argument we often hear. The challenge to me is, “Why are you so worried about this now? This was all done in Brussels before.” To an extent, I take that point, but the point of this exercise is that we now, for the first time in a very long time, have the opportunity to develop our own agricultural policy. If we are going to do that, let us do it right. Let us do it really well. Let us ensure that, just because Ministers cannot quite decide exactly what they want to do at this stage—I think that is what underlies a lot of the vagaries of the Bill—we do not give them too many powers or give them those powers in a way that does not enable the fullest scrutiny by Parliament.
These are important issues that are subject to amendment by Ministers, and it would be much better if today we were debating exactly what they intended to do with the powers, rather than which mechanism should apply and whether they should have the powers at all, because what people are really interested in is what will happen. What support will be available? How will it be administered? What is their right to challenge? It would be better for us to be debating that, but insufficient work of that nature seems to have been done as yet. That is a theme that we keep coming back to.
Dr Drew
I will read this interchange back very carefully to see whether it has been about what I think or whether I have misunderstood. This matters because, at the end of the day, farmers need to plan ahead, and 2021 is not that far in the future. Some farmers will lose a considerable amount of money, which they will have to replenish by moving into the new scheme, which we do not quite have yet.
Mr Goodwill
The hon. Gentleman will be aware that many farmers have already entered into multi-annual environmental schemes. They need the security that the support will be there for them to deliver the plans they already have.
Dr Drew
That is very helpful. A lot of farmers have obviously entered the countryside stewardship scheme, but a lot of farmers have chosen to come out of it because they are very unhappy with it. We have to put that right very quickly, because if farmers are to have any certainty in the payment system, they have to know that the scheme to which they are applying exists, is capable of doing what they think and rewards them appropriately, otherwise they will feel short-changed.
I see this as largely technical, but again, it is very complicated. We are moving from a scheme that pays farmers for being farmers to not paying them at all. We will pay people—they may not be farmers—to do things with the land. We therefore have to be very clear that they will not be paid anymore for being farmers; the basic payment is going. Yes, there is a taper, as the Minister says, but it rolls through quite quickly. People need to understand that they will no longer be able to do what they were used to doing and be paid for.
We will not vote against this measure, because it is a technical change. However, I ask the Minister to communicate what is involved to as many people as possible. There will be a modulation, and it was never going to be a straightforward process—when I was on the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee, we struggled to understand exactly how it worked in practice. The Minister will need a proper communication strategy, so people know that, when their money goes, on the one hand, they will have other ways in which to earn it, on the other.
Question put and agreed to.
Clause 6, as amended, accordingly ordered to stand part of the Bill.
Clause 7
Power to provide for phasing out direct payments and delinked payments
George Eustice
This debate links to a discussion we had earlier about setting a clear direction during the transition period. I understand that the purpose behind the amendment is to try to tease out a bit more what we have in mind when it comes to the de-linking of payments.
We believe that many farmers—sometimes they are in upland areas, sometimes they are on tenancies; often they are in their 70s, sometimes they are even older—who probably should face the decision to retire should have support in doing so, but it is not always easy for them. Sometimes they will have some residual debt or an overdraft and always be hoping that next year might be the good year that will put them in a better position.
If we want to have a vibrant, profitable farming industry in the future, we think it is right to support new entrants and put in place the right schemes that will help some farmers retire with dignity. We will de-link the payment from the need to farm the land and for it to be connected to the land. There is provision in a separate part of the Bill for us to bundle up several years of payments into one lump sum. Through those measures, that 70-something farmer who probably should retire, or would retire if he felt he was financially able to, may take a lump sum as a voluntary exit package to sort out some of his liabilities, pay off his creditors and take that decision to retire with dignity. In doing that, we will create an opportunity for new entrants who are coming in while, equally, helping to safeguard good retirements for those farmers for whom it is right to step back. That is one of the thoughts behind de-linking.
Also, in the final stages of the transition period it might be the right thing to de-link everyone’s payments from needing to be linked to the land. Through that, people can have complete freedom over what they do with that money, whether they invest it in new equipment, choose to retire or put it into some crisis reserve to give them a buffer. We want to free them up to do that as we prepare for the move to a new system.
Mr Goodwill
On the point the Minister raised regarding the farmer who might want to retire and take three years’ payments, one question we tried to explore during the evidence sessions was what would happen to the new entrant coming on to that farm, who perhaps for the first two years on that farm would not receive any support, which might make it difficult for him to establish that business.
George Eustice
I understand my right hon. Friend’s point, but of course we must view all this in the context of a seven-year transition period, at the end of which it is our objective and our vision that there will be no basic payment scheme as it is known today. What we would envisage happening in those scenarios is that we would free up land for new entrants to come in, who would get used to working in a different way from the start.
It would be quite possible, for instance, to prioritise the roll-out of a new scheme to those new entrants coming on to land that had been exited and was no longer eligible for the BPS payment. I would also envisage that some of those new entrants coming on to that land would also be likely to qualify for the productivity support. We have to see all this in the context of the fact that we do not want a single farm payment to be carrying on forever. We have set a clear pathway to move to a different approach over a seven-year transition period.
Dr Drew
The amendment is really a probing amendment, to consider where we are in relation to setting rules for the de-linking process. The Minister has already talked about that. I have just asked how this will work in practice. It is unclear, at least in my mind; maybe people are ahead of me on that. However, I think there is a need for further work in that regard.
What would happen if the Minister introduced a de-linked payment, but then made use of the powers to extend the transition period in accordance with clause 5(2)? The status of the farmer who has taken a de-linked payment is uncertain—we have identified that. He may be locked out of the system for longer than envisaged. This is really contingent on our previous debate. So, in taking the money—what? They then can use their opportunity on the land? The status of the person will be defined in law, but again it is a matter of how the process works in practice.
Under the CAP, there are payment windows, and—dare I say it?—this is all laid down for those who receive payments for work they have done. So things are not as clear in this new proposal. All of us who have rural constituencies know that the Rural Payments Agency is not very good at making the payments on time, for the right reasons or in the right amounts. So there are some question marks about the extant process and where we are now going to. If anything, it is going to be quite a complicated change. So it is really about whether farmers will be entitled to payments on guaranteed timescales, because again—dare I say it?—we do not have a good history.
Mr Goodwill
It strikes me as well, of course, that the farmer could take the payment but then his wife could establish a new business, in which case perhaps there would not really be a fundamental change; it was just a mechanism. I wonder if the hon. Gentleman shares my concerns and whether the Minister could comment on that situation.
Dr Drew
This did come up quite a lot on Second Reading. I think my hon. Friend the Member for Bristol East had something to say on it, or somebody else referred to succession planning. Farmers could take the money and then another member of the family could decide to carry on with the holding.
Mr Goodwill
It is particularly difficult, because as I am down here doing this job, my wife is minding the farm, although I am the one who signs the forms when I make claims, so it is often difficult to distinguish the person who is farming from the person who signs the form—[Interruption.]
Dr Drew
I am not sure whether that helped or hindered. [Laughter.] We will move on.
Amendments 107 and 108 really try to tease out how this process is going to work in practice. I do want to say some things that are effectively for the stand part debate, but they link in directly with the clause. The issue is the way in which this phasing-out of direct payments and the de-linked payments will work. This is the clause that, if you like, executes that, so we need to look at it quite carefully.
A number of important issues arise, some of which have already been identified through the EFRA Committee, where I gather the Minister had quite a difficult time in answering questions about exactly how this process was going to work. It is important that he puts on the record again how he thinks it is going to work.
We are talking about considerable sums of money. If three years’ worth of payments for a reasonably sized holding are wrapped up into one, we are talking about tens of thousands of pounds, so we have to get the accountability of the process right. The average direct payment in 2016 was £20,000, but 10% of recipients received something in the order of £6.5 billion. The bigger landholders have traditionally received quite large sums of money through the single area payment scheme, so the mechanism through which we make that change is very important. Multiplying that over seven years, which is what the transition period will be, we are talking about large sums of money. It would be useful to know that in accepting this use of public money, the Minister can justify the larger sums involved.
As I referred to, the policy statement explains how the tapering down will operate. It would be good to know that there will be some further explanation of what that means for particular holdings. Let us look at some figures from real holdings, rather than the rather abstract figure that we have at the moment. What can those lump sum payments be used for? One can understand a tenant needing to acquire property, or to have sufficient money to pay the rent. Will recipients be limited to some use or reuse of the land, or will they basically have a free choice about what they do with that money? My notes refer to Lib Dem pensions Ministers and Maseratis; I think Steve Webb will always regret having made that point.
I have quite a lot of interesting evidence from the Landworkers Alliance and from the Tenant Farmers Association. Those are the people who represent smaller farmers and new entrants. The Landworkers Alliance is keen to know what that lump sum can be used for, how much flexibility there will be in the purposes outlined in clause 1(1), and whether—dare I say it?—the payments will be linked to the productivity of the farm or farmland. Could farmers, for example, put that money into a community land trust and collectivise those payments? That is an interesting point, because there are those who do not want to farm a holding in isolation, but want to do so on a more collective basis. Is the scheme flexible enough to allow that to take place?
The Tenant Farmers Association has written to me to support the concept of de-linking, because it thinks that farmers should be able to retire. However, although the money is of significant assistance to farmers who wish to retire, the question of what subsequently happens to that money, and any bar on what they can do if they have taken the money, are of keen interest. Those farmers might want to re-invest that money in another holding, or enable another member of the family to take that money and start a new holding. These things matter, because people have to start planning their businesses now. I know that I have stretched the Chair’s patience by moving away from the amendments, but my comments are part of our stand part contribution. We are asking the Minister to spell out in a little more detail what, in practice, these de-linked payments are and are not available for, because people are going to have to plan for that.
Sandy Martin
I totally agree. Whether or not we can see what will go around the scaffolding might be annoying to us, or it might feed our fears that an awful lot of work will be done without any democratic control or oversight, but it is far more important for those involved in farming to know what will be put on that scaffolding, because they might well be making decisions without knowing.
Subsection (7) is like an offer that those farmers cannot refuse—not because they know that the consequences of refusal will be dire, but because they do not know and will therefore just go for the easy option. We do not want large numbers of smaller farmers to face going out of business or choosing to take payments under subsection (7), leaving the field clear for those with more money and resources and a better understanding of the complicated regime that the Government are thinking of introducing.
Mr Goodwill
I want to raise one point with the Minister, which I hope he will be able to cover. We have heard already that about a third of the farm land in this country is farmed through tenancies. Indeed, a tenancy is probably the only way that many new applicants can get into the industry, other than marrying into money or winning the lottery. However, there may be situations where taking these payments is attractive to the tenant, but where the landlord is unwilling for that to happen, particularly as the basic payments underwrote the rent in many cases, as we heard in evidence. Indeed, we heard that in many cases the rent was basically dictated by the basic payments.
My question for the Minister is, will the consent of the landlord be required before a tenant can take one of these multi-annual exit schemes? If not, might we then have the landlord looking at the small print of the tenancy agreement and going into the whole dilapidations situation? Many people leaving a tenancy can find clauses requiring the guttering to be painted or the gateposts to be straightened. Often, tenants find that they cannot leave because of the dilapidations. Where the landlord wants a tenant to leave, he will waive the dilapidations, so a lot of these payments might get mopped up by angry landlords demanding dilapidations at the end of tenancies.
Chris Davies
I have a query, which I am sure the Minister will be able to answer easily, relating to the decoupling of cross-border farms. There are many on the Welsh-English border, as there are on the English-Scottish border, that will own land in both England and Wales, or both England and Scotland. I can give many examples of farmers in my constituency who own land in Herefordshire or Shropshire—well, not much of Shropshire, because my hon. Friend the Member for Ludlow owns most of Shropshire.
George Eustice
I would almost say the opposite. If the market is such that a number of people choose to retire and there is no longer the inflationary pressure of a BPS payment driving up rents, rents might decline in some areas. That is not necessarily a bad thing. If rents go down, it is not great for landlords, but it creates opportunities for new entrants to come in with lower overheads and produce food for the country. There is a problem with the BPS scheme, which has inflated rents and made it difficult for entrepreneurs to get on to the land and make a sensible living.
Amendment 108, which was also tabled by the shadow Minister, puts explicit timescales on payments. I understand the frustration of many hon. Members who have had farmers coming to them in recent years and complaining that they have been unable to get the payment. We address the issue in a number of ways. First, under retained EU law, the existing timescales already set out in EU law would come across. I know that farmers will generally take the view that unless they are paid in December their BPS payment is late. In fact, the payment window opens at the beginning of December and closes in June, so there is quite a wide payment window under EU law. That will come across through retained EU law, but we have made some improvements in recent years in terms of getting money to farmers as quickly as possible. Last year more than 90% got to farmers by the end of December.
Mr Goodwill
Of course, in the past when payments have been delayed, fines have been payable to the European Commission. Under the new scheme, presumably there would be nobody to pay a fine to.
George Eustice
That is absolutely correct, but the scrutiny of Parliament will demand action. I was going to say that one of the strong features of the Bill is the fact that it gives the Government the power to act to sort out the dysfunctional EU auditing processes that create late payments.
Clause 9 gives us powers to sort out what is called the horizontal regulation. That is the regulation that sets out all the conditions on payment and the plethora of audit requirements, which often duplicate one another and are unnecessary. The primary cause of the problem we had last year in the BPS system was that under EU law we were forced to remap 2 million fields in one go, to try to get their area accurate to four decimal places. If we had not done, that we would have had a fine from the European Commission of more than £100 million, so we had to attempt the exercise. However, it inevitably caused problems on some farms. Many hon. Members will have had farmers reporting to them that fields had disappeared, or, in some cases, their neighbour’s fields had ended up on their holding. That is what happens when we try to remap 2 million fields. We would not have had to do that, had we had the powers to strike down those requirements.
Secondly, the issues we have at the moment with the countryside stewardship scheme are largely due to the fact that the EU, under horizontal regulation, introduced a new requirement that every single agreement must commence on the same date; so whereas we used to spread the burden of administration across the year, with people able to start in any month, everyone had to start in January. That meant a huge pile of application forms coming in at the same time. Our agencies had to employ lots of temps to try to process the work; and we all know what happens if there is a surge of temporary agency workers to process work. There were inevitably errors and problems. Again, we could remove those rather ludicrous requirements that the European Union imposes on us—in that case under clause 11.
I hope that I have been able to provide some further information about how we would intend to use the clause 7 powers, both to de-link and to make lump sum payments available. I hope I have also reassured hon. Members that the answer to the problem of late payments lies in clauses 9 and 11, not in an amendment to clause 7.
Mr Goodwill
As a member of the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee, I can say that this is not just a problem in agriculture. There is no devolved Government there and it is very difficult for civil servants to second-guess what might be done, because it has been a long time since decisions were made on which they could base their activities. For those in Scotland, the policy seems to be to stick their fingers in their ears, sing “la la la la” and pretend that it is not going to happen.
Dr Drew
I will not go down that line. The Chairman will be relieved to hear that I am not going to get involved in devolved politics. I think this has been a very useful debate that has been far and wide in scope. It has not really been about the amendments, but the stand part has allowed us to look at some of the possibilities of what will happen—2021 is not very far in the future. People will be doing their planning now, particularly if they have it in mind to leave their holding, and they will need security, certainty and some very good advice on whether that is the right thing to do. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment, but I am grateful for the discretion of the Chair, which has allowed us to get through this issue.
Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.
Clause 7, as amended, ordered to stand part of the Bill.
Clause 8 ordered to stand part of the Bill.
Clause 9
General provision connected with payments to farmers and other beneficiaries
Agriculture Bill (Sixth sitting)
Robert Goodwill Excerpts(6 years ago)
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Simon Hoare
I will not give way. There have to be Food Standards Agency regulations and all the rest of it, but to put the onus of responsibility for foodstuffs on the food producers who produce but do not sell themselves is either Stalinist or draconian. The shadow Minister has a great knowledge of the vagaries of left-wing thinking, and I may be entirely wrong to call him a Stalinist—he may be a Maoist, a Leninist or a Trotskyist. I am not quite sure.
Mr Robert Goodwill (Scarborough and Whitby) (Con)
I do not intend to disclose what I had for lunch. However, on the point made by the hon. Member for Darlington, I should say that Members have access to a wide-ranging diet and the money to buy healthy food. Why, then, is the body mass index of Members on the green Benches so representative of the country as a whole?
Simon Hoare
My right hon. Friend makes a valid point; I say that with some smugness, having lost three stone since the start of the year. I have another two to go, and the cake did not help.
Mr Goodwill
The hon. Lady is making some very good points. Does she agree that on animal welfare, it was the European Union that was holding us back, and when we legislated on veal crates, dry sow stalls or battery cages it was the Europeans who prevented us from blocking goods coming into the UK that were not produced to the same high standards as here? Indeed, when live sheep exports were going to be blocked it was the EU single market rules that meant we could not do that.
Jenny Chapman
The right hon. Gentleman is right—we are world leaders, and we are very proud of that. What I am trying to achieve with these amendments is that we maintain that position. I will go on to explain why later, but it is not difficult to imagine a future Government, under pressure perhaps to secure trade deals, feeling pressure to diminish our world-leading standards. None of us here today would want that to happen, but an assurance from a Minister in Committee or even at the Dispatch Box has nothing like the same weight as something written into our law. That is the issue; it is about maintaining the position that the right hon. Gentleman quite rightly highlights.
To explain this simply, rather than banging on about retained EU law, once the UK leaves the EU we will no longer be subject to EU law. As many of our laws and, importantly, the principles that underpin them are or have been previously held within EU law, the UK now can decide which EU laws it wants to adopt fully into UK legislation. EU laws on animal sentience, environmental standards and animal welfare standards are among the laws that have not been adequately taken back by the UK; I expect the Minister is thinking that, and it was indicated when we had the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018 as it went through the House of Commons. I say “adequately” because they have been transferred to some extent and I understand that, but the status of the laws now means that they are too easily amendable and do not provide the same safeguards as primary legislation does, or as they would if they were amendments that had been put into this Bill.
It would be a mistake on the part of the Government and Parliament to allow that situation to continue. We could take this opportunity now. It was hinted that the Government would do this when they could, and they could be doing it now. Why are the Government choosing not to take this opportunity at this stage?
My hon. Friend the Member for Greenwich and Woolwich (Matthew Pennycook) made a good speech on environmental standards when we debated the EU (Withdrawal) Bill in Committee of the whole House. Several of my hon. Friends in this Committee contributed to that debate, and Members on both sides were concerned about the issue—I do not know whether the Minister remembers this. We are trying to ensure that the environmental principles set out in article 191 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union are enshrined in our law. These are the precautionary principle in relation to the environment, the principle that preventive action should be taken to avert environmental damage, the principle that environmental damage should as a priority be rectified at source, and the “polluter pays” principle. We feel—I think most of us here would agree—that these need to continue to be recognised and applied after exit day.
It is not unique to EU law to have these principles enshrined in this way as they are enshrined in law in other policy areas, and there is no good reason why these should not be included in this Bill. The principles are not there to make us feel good so that we can look to them and say, “We put this into law and that shows what a great country we are,” although it does do that. They have three key roles: they are an aid to the interpretation of the law, they guide future decision-making, and they are a basis for legal challenge in court. The EU (Withdrawal) Act did not allow us to replicate the legal certainty that we currently have. At the moment, we have that legal certainty, but when we leave the EU at the end of March that legal certainty—depending on the deal that has been achieved—will no longer be in place. As my hon. Friend said when we debated the Act, we need this
“to be effective custodians of the environment and to be world leaders when it comes to environmental standards.”—[Official Report, 15 November 2017; Vol. 631, c. 495.]
It is very important that we embed the principles in the way our policy operates. I have to say that to his credit the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has recognised this, but the Government continue to argue that environmental principles are interpretive principles, and that as such they should not form part of the law itself.
I do not think that they are simply guidance. The environmental protection requirements should be integrated into the definition and implementation of our policies and activities, in particular with a view to promoting sustainable development. They are a vital aid to understanding the role and function of existing legislation, as well as being, as the Secretary of State said, an interpretive tool for decision makers and, if necessary, the courts.
There is also an important aspect to all of this around devolution. The principles provide the beginnings of a framework within which the devolved nations, as well as England, can operate. There is significant anxiety, which we may get on to in later clauses, about how exactly support for farming and agriculture might work in the future when we think about the Welsh Government, the Northern Ireland Assembly or the Scottish Government’s desire to do things—as they have done previously, to be fair—slightly differently. Why would they not want to do that? There needs to be a shared and agreed framework within which that can happen.
Another point is that the UK’s duty to comply with the environmental principles does not end when we leave the EU, because they are contained in other treaties that have nothing to do with our membership of the European Union. The way we comply with those treaties needs to be somewhere in domestic law. I will listen to what the Minister says, but there is a risk that in the future that it will not. That is why we think it is right that these principles be incorporated into this Bill. There are clear examples of other laws where this kind of approach has been taken. The Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 talks about it being
“the duty of every employer to ensure, so far as is reasonably practicable, the health, safety and welfare at work of all his employees.”
The Countryside Act 1968 confers functions on an agency for it to exercise for the
“conservation and enhancement of the natural beauty and amenity of the countryside.”
It is not unusual to have this approach.
The environmental principles set out in article 191 of the treaty form an essential component of environmental law. If the Government’s stated aim of equivalence on day one of Brexit is to be achieved, these principles need to be part of domestic law on day one and the public should be able to rely on them. The courts should be able to apply them and public bodies need to know that they have been following them. I appreciate that we are talking about transitional arrangements, but that only makes it all the more uncertain for people and shows all the more need for clarity. In the absence of any of the other promised legislation so far—we are anticipating several Bills that are yet to materialise—this has been our only opportunity to get the principles in a Bill so that they can be enshrined in UK law.
Amendments 74 and 75 would impose duties on the Secretary of State. We are going to come back to this again and again: we are not satisfied that powers are sufficient to provide us with the confidence we need to give this Bill support. What we want are duties. The principles that safeguard the environment ought to inform the way taxpayers’ money is spent. The way the public view all this in the future is going to change and the Government need to be ready for that. They have had a buffer in the EU until now, and much as members of the public might shake their heads or roll their eyes at some support for farmers, they are one step removed. That is not going to be the case in future. People are going to turn up at Members’ surgeries saying, “I am not happy with the way my taxpayers’ money is being spent” if they feel it is being distributed for things that they do not believe are appropriate. Having a legal framework underpinned by the principles we are proposing would provide some confidence and a safeguard for the public. That argument has not yet surfaced sufficiently, but we are going to see a very different tone to the way these sorts of issues are debated in the future.
Jenny Chapman
It is welcome, but I think that Members have to understand that that is not sufficient. Welcome though it is, it is not enough to reassure us, because the Secretary of State is not accountable for that. There is no way of holding a Member to a statement like that, unfortunately.
Mr Goodwill
As a former shipping Minister, I reassure the hon. Lady that I have been to Felixstowe and seen those containers coming in, including fridge boxes containing that sort of produce. There is already very detailed scrutiny of what is in those boxes. Tests are carried out particularly on pesticide residues, mycotoxins or any other health hazards that the UK might be exposed to. That is already in place for imports from third countries.
Jenny Chapman
I note that that is because we are in a customs union. That is my point: we have those high standards now, and I want to ensure that we have them in the future, and I do not see any way of doing it other than putting it on the face of a Bill—I accept that it does not need to be this Bill, but we need to know that this will happen.
Mr Goodwill
Does the hon. Lady accept that despite the fact that European treaties contain that recognition, we still see foie gras production in France and bullfighting, so it would be no protection against that sort of thing?
Jenny Chapman
I do, to an extent, but the fact is that we have had that provision up to now and we want to keep it in the future. It is the right thing to do and it provides some protection. How we implement it as part of our UK law is entirely up to us—I think that was the point of the exercise for some Conservative Members, was it not? I look forward to hearing from hon. Members about how they would seek to make the best use of the opportunity.
Jenny Chapman
Why the reluctance to have this provision in the Bill, if we are all so clear, certain and confident about it? I do not see the problem. It is important because, in a sense, it would act as an instruction to future Governments when they create legislation. It has previously been, and ought to be, the basis of law-making on animal welfare. I accept that there has been a lot of noise and confusion around the debate, and I hope that we do not get sucked into that kind of confusion as we discuss this topic.
Just as an example, one Tory MP—I hope it was not the hon. Member for North Dorset—said:
“This government, and in fact all governments, are deeply committed to continuing to protect animals as sentient beings. That law is already written into our own law.”
But it is not written into our own law—that is the point—and it would be so much better if it were. The reason we are bothering with this Committee is to make the Bill better. I do not think any Minister who has served on a Committee has ever said, “My Bill is perfect. Don’t bother discussing it; let’s all go home.” The idea is that we improve the Bill as we go forward, and I notice that the Government already have many amendments, so they are obviously open to improving the Bill. This amendment would be one way to make the Bill better.
How people feel about this topic, I suppose, depends on whether they think it is important that animal sentience should be specifically recognised, or that the law as it stands goes far enough. There might be differing views on that, but the Opposition think that animal sentience needs to be recognised in law. If the Government wanted to bring forward their own wording on this—I expect the Minister will tell me why mine is deficient any minute now—we would be interested in working with them on it, because this issue matters to so many people around the country that we need to be constructive about it. Should the Government want to do the right thing, we will work with them. I will leave it there for now, and listen to what the Minister has to say before I speak further.
Mr Goodwill
The hon. Member for Darlington has made some well-argued remarks, and I am confident that the Minister will be able to reassure her on a number of the points that she made. We are all on the same page.
I will briefly concentrate on one aspect. Who could argue with the four principles in amendment 75? My slight problem is that, having served on the European Parliament’s Committee on the Environment, Public Health and Food Safety for five years—and being partly to blame for much of this legislation, no doubt—the precautionary principle looks, on the face of it, like a good principle. In practice, sadly, it is often misused. My experience was that increasingly, it was being used as a fall-back to ban some activity or substance for which there was not any scientific evidence to justify a ban, or insufficient scientific evidence. For example, if I were to use the precautionary principle when I decide whether to cycle home on my bicycle tonight, I would almost certainly decide not to do so, because I could not prove beyond any reasonable doubt that I would not be knocked off or fall off, and end up in St Thomas’s hospital or worse. Sadly, that type of approach is used all too often.
I can give you an example from my time in the European Parliament, to do with the group of chemicals known as phthalates. They are used to soften PVC—the sort of plastic that is used in babies’ dummies, feeding bottle teats, and many medical devices. Phthalates are chemicals that have effects on human health; they are endocrine disrupters that affect how hormones in the body work. Some sought to ban the use of phthalates as a PVC softener in such products, but the problem was that the medical industry said, “If we cannot use those plastics, the devices that we will have to use will not be as good for operations”—those devices include complex catheters that are inserted during more complex operations. That was an area in which we needed to look at the risks and benefits in the round, rather than issuing a ban based on some risk that might have been unquantifiable, and certainly was not scientifically proven.
The most recent case that shows us why, when we move forward with our own legislation, we need something better than the precautionary principle—something that is much more scientifically based and that can, if necessary, be taken to judicial review and proved one way or another—is the prevention of the introduction of genetically modified crops across the European Union. Many farmers and enlightened environmentalists would have liked such crops to be introduced, to reduce our reliance on pesticides and fertilisers and to make food more nutritious and safer. That is how those crops are used around the world, but we cannot do so in the UK. The precautionary principle has been used to block such technologies, and that was a bad use of that principle.
Rather than accepting amendment 75, we need—now that we can, as we have heard, make our own legislation—something that does the same thing as the precautionary principle but in a more effective way, based on science and not, as is sadly often the case, on prejudice and misinformation.
Kerry McCarthy
I will confine my remarks mostly to amendment 71, although I will say that it is really frustrating that the animal sentience Bill disappeared into the ether after the agreement that it would be split from the sentencing Bill. We have not heard anything about it since then. It is not enough to get assurances from the Minister; we need to see that legislation if we are to be convinced that it will really happen.
My amendment is about higher animal welfare. I have seen a timeline from DEFRA that says that a definition of higher animal welfare standards will be set by 2020. I would like to know why it cannot be set sooner, because it rather complicates things if we do not know the parameters that we are dealing with. The key point of my amendment is to ensure that we are not rewarding farmers who just do what is required of them by law.
We are a little too self-congratulatory and complacent about animal welfare standards in this country. There have been numerous exposés of even some of the higher assurance schemes where the letter of the law was clearly not being followed and standards were being breached. We should always be vigilant about that, particularly as we know that future trade deals might result in a race to the bottom, with food that has been produced to lower animal welfare standards, food safety standards and environmental standards flooding into the country. There will be a temptation to cut corners. I know Ministers have said that they will not allow British standards to fall, but I cannot get them to say that they will not allow into the country, for example, US food that is produced to lower standards. Once what I would call substandard produce is allowed into the country, the pressure will clearly be on to compete by, as I say, cutting corners.
At the heart of the amendment is the fact that the Bill does not have a regulatory baseline, and we will lose cross-compliance as we leave the common agricultural policy. I am not quite sure how we will monitor whether farmers are meeting the regulatory baseline. Because we cannot do that, how will we reward them for meeting higher standards? At the moment, I think farmers get their payments withheld if they do not meet certain standards. The current wording of the Bill would make it possible for a farmer to break the law when transporting calves, for example, but still to receive payments for higher animal welfare. Are they going to be judged in the round, or just by particular things that they have cherry-picked?
I want to ensure that financial assistance under clause 1 will be given only to farmers whose welfare standards are higher than those required by law. The definition of higher animal welfare will be very important to that, and it should take into account the desirability of both preventing negative experiences and promoting opportunities to give animals a positive quality of life; those are two slightly different things. Scientists are increasingly recognising the importance for animals’ physical and mental wellbeing of their ability to engage in exploration, investigation, problem-solving and play. That is recognised by the Farm Animal Welfare Committee as well.
A second condition for receiving funding should be that the farmer is a member of a comprehensive assurance scheme.
Kerry McCarthy
My hon. Friend the Member for Bristol West is now vegan as well—in fact, three of the four Bristol MPs are vegan. She is completely vegan and a model of good health.
The second condition for receiving funding should be membership of a comprehensive assurance scheme. The RSPCA assured scheme covers all aspects of welfare and has genuinely high standards and rigorous monitoring arrangements. I am not so sure about other assurance schemes, which have been criticised. We need to clarify what the criteria would be.
I want to finish by talking about a few things that Compassion in World Farming has mentioned as additional standards and perhaps the sorts of things that farmers should get additional funding for. On pigs, it says:
“Funding should be available for farmers who achieve intact tails”—
that is, neither docked nor bitten tails. It continues:
“Getting pigs to slaughter with intact tails is recognised by the Farm Animal Welfare Council and others as a reliable outcome based indicator of good welfare.”
In Lower Saxony, I am told, farmers are paid €16.5 per undocked pig under its curled tail bonus scheme. Is that the sort of thing that we could look at rewarding farmers for here?
Mr Goodwill
A local pig farmer told us the other day that he had 235,000 pigs. I am sure he would be very interested in a scheme like that.
Kerry McCarthy
I went to a higher-welfare pig farm when I was shadow Secretary of State and was appalled to learn that while it could make money selling the pigs to local butchers, any pigs that it could not sell to local butchers or restaurants for local consumption had to be sold to the supermarket, at a loss of £80 per pig. Something is clearly very wrong with a farming system where higher-welfare farmers cannot be funded that way. I also went to a higher-welfare chicken farm that was making 2p profit per chicken, which I thought said an awful lot about the broken market model. Perhaps the pig farmer who the right hon. Gentleman met would like to be paid per intact pig tail—perhaps he could raise that with him.
One of the problems with the pig sector is that it is quite easy to move into or increase numbers, therefore the market fluctuates. If farmers get a good price, people start moving in, and before we know it, too many pigs are on the market and the price dips again—we could spend a lot of time on the economics of farming.
Funding could be available for farmers in the dairy sector who keep their cows on pasture during the grass-growing season. That is a requirement of the pasture promise scheme, which is being developed by a group of farmers. There is a wide range in the welfare quality of laying hens provided for by free-range farms. We know that ordinary free-range systems are supported by the market and are very successful—once eggs started to be marked as free range, the public responded. However, some free-range systems have much lower stocking density, a low flock size, and trees and bushes around, so there are welfare differences among different free-range providers.
At the moment, only 1.2% of UK broilers are produced to RSPCA assured standards. There is an argument for saying that we should provide support only to broiler farmers who are members of the RSPCA assured scheme, so as to encourage others to move away from the lower standard of broiler production. I am not saying that the ones outside the RSPCA assured scheme necessarily have poor animal welfare standards, but clearly there is a higher benchmark to which people could aspire, and we ought to be encouraging them to do that.
Will the Minister say how cross-compliance will work and how we will monitor basic animal welfare standards? How is he going to come up with the higher animal welfare definition, what sort of things will it include, and will he promise to bring it forward a little sooner?
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.
Mr Goodwill
The Minister talks about paying farmers for what they are doing already, and having had experience of the entry-level environmental scheme, that is precisely what it did. He might recall, however, that one of the questions I asked the farmers unions was how we should get the balance right between rewarding people who have always been doing the right thing and incentivising improvements on land that has not been looked after in the same way.
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.
Dr Drew
As I said at the outset, this is—from us, at least—a probing amendment, so we will not push it to a vote. I was intrigued by some of the Minister’s arguments; the nuance between self-sufficiency and food security was interesting. I have always thought that with more self-sufficiency came greater food security, but maybe I am naive about that. The Minister dealt with the issue of farmers’ lack of forage during the recent drought. It does not matter whether farmers are more self-sufficient or trying to work out a more secure supply—the reality is that there was no supply. It is all well and good to talk about open markets, but farmers were looking everywhere for sufficient forage for their animals for the winter. Lots of them are facing real financial difficulty; if they bought at the wrong time, they are paying through the nose because of their problems in not being able to get sufficient grass from their land.
I take the Minister’s point—it is a clever argument, but when it comes down to the practicalities, I am not sure it is one that I would buy completely. Likewise, he lauds the fact that, for some of our foodstuffs, there are greater movements towards what I would see as self-sufficiency. The market I know best is milk, because I have a former Dairy Crest factory at the bottom of my garden, which is now owned by Müller Wiseman. The milk industry is classic—we should be 100% self-sufficient, and we are not only because of the craziness of the relationship between the farmers, the processors and the retailers. The reality is that it is a very difficult market, and we cannot provide enough of our own milk because that relationship has never been good. That is a reason why, right at the beginning, we had the milk marketing boards, which functioned well for many years. They were seen as very state-led, but we produced enough of our own milk, as was reflected in the price.
Mr Goodwill
While I can understand some of the advantages of the milk marketing boards, was it not the case that during the era of intervention buying, the milk marketing boards—because of their size—were the ones making milk, butter and skimmed-milk powder interventions, while our competitors across the channel, with their co-operative structure, were developing new, innovative products that are now seen in our markets?
Dr Drew
I agree. That is why, on the back of the milk marketing boards, we created Milk Marque, which was a co-operative. Sadly, it did not stand the test of time. Talking to farmers retrospectively, many of them believed wrongly that there was a better, private solution. We have seen a monopsony grow up, which has caused the producer to face all the same problems, except that they are more subject to the whim of that marketplace, where we should be producing as much of our milk as possible. We will not get delayed on this too much, but it is a classic case of the Government’s needing to recognise that they have a role to play. They still set the parameters, even if they do not intervene in the ways in which they used to do, by controlling that marketplace completely. I hear what the Minister says. Parts of his argument are highly believable; I am more sceptical about other bits, but as we go through the Bill, no doubt we will see where the Government are going.
To go back to the start, food security is an important issue, and we need to recognise that it will keep coming back. This was a probing amendment that we will not push to a vote, but we have had an interesting discussion. I beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment.
Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.
Amendment proposed: 41, in clause 1, page 2, line 6, at end insert—
‘(2A) The Secretary of State shall also give financial assistance for, or in connection with, the purpose of establishing, maintaining and expanding agro-ecological farming systems, including organic farming .—(Kerry McCarthy.)
This amendment would ensure that new schemes support agroecological farming systems, including organic, as a way of delivering the purposes in clause 1. Agroecology is recognised by the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation as the basis for evolving food systems that are equally strong in environmental, economic, social and agronomic dimensions.
Question put, That the amendment be made.
Agriculture Bill (Fifth sitting)
Robert Goodwill Excerpts(6 years ago)
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Dr Drew
That is exactly the point I am making. We are seeking to strengthen the Bill. We come not to wreck it or to make it impracticable; we come to improve it. We believe that one way the Bill would be improved is by the inclusion of duties. As the hon. Gentleman quite rightly said, there may be a future Government who are less partial towards agriculture, and it is vital that we fetter them. That is why we have legislation.
Mr Robert Goodwill (Scarborough and Whitby) (Con)
Does the hon. Gentleman not think that his amendments would, in fact, be a lawyers charter? It would be open to any pressure group to take the Government to court for not doing something that they said they must do. It would take away the element of judgment from Ministers in any forthcoming Government of whichever colour and give it to the courts.
Dr Drew
I do not agree with the right hon. Gentleman, as much as I respect him—we have had many hours together in this place. The reality is that all we are doing—the Bill will probably last as an Act for the next 50 or 60 years—is including in the Bill a requirement that the Secretary of State must provide financial assistance. That is what legislation is about. It is not: “the Minister might want to do it and they might not want to do it.” This is about ensuring that the Minister is very clear that when they have to introduce these major changes, there are some parts that they must deliver.
Kerry McCarthy
I should begin by declaring that I am chair of the all-party parliamentary group on agroecology for sustainable food and farming and have been for some time.
In amendment 72, we call for soil health to be mentioned specifically in the list of public goods. I hope the Minister will be receptive to that—he has made noises that suggest he might be. We know that soil fertility has collapsed in this country. There have been a couple of inquiries in recent years, including a very good one by the Environmental Audit Committee, which looked into soil degradation and the impact on, for example, food productivity and flooding due to run-off.
Mr Goodwill
We currently have record wheat yields in this country. Surely that is not evidence of lower soil fertility?
Kerry McCarthy
In some places, there is fertile soil. There are measures that one can take—we heard evidence from Helen Browning, I think. I apologise that I am slightly confused about whether I heard evidence in this Bill Committee last week or as a member of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Select Committee, because the same people have been giving evidence to both.
There is a lot that we can do to increase biodiversity in fields; for instance, we can take some land out of production, which adds to soil fertility and yield. We heard evidence from Helen Browning of the Soil Association about that.
Kerry McCarthy
I think there is a consensus, at least on the Conservative Front Bench, that soil health is incredibly important and under threat. It should be specifically added to the list of public goods because it is critical to biodiversity, productivity, and mitigating and adapting to climate change—we have not mentioned that yet. The carbon sequestration function of soil is incredibly important. The hon. Member for York Outer (Julian Sturdy) said in the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee:
“I just cannot understand why it is not specifically defined in the Bill. There is so much good that is there, but it is underpinned by delivering on actually improving the soil and the huge environmental benefits that flow from that.”
As Vicki Hird from Sustain rightly said, there is also a risk that farmers are getting paid for doing things on one part of the farm or on the edge of a field, but are not protecting the soil elsewhere. That is part of the regulatory process, and bringing it into the fold would make sense to ensure that it is part of the picture. I think we are on the same page, but I would like those three words to be added to the Bill to make clear how important soil is.
I tabled amendment 41 with two other officers from the APPG, the hon. Members for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas) and for Richmond Park (Zac Goldsmith)—again, the amendment has cross-party support. It was drafted with the help of the Soil Association and Sustain, and is also supported by the Landworkers’ Alliance. Last week, the Minister suggested that he was fairly receptive to the amendment, which suggests that instead of a focus on individual public goods, allowing cherry-picking and just pursuing one or two, there should be a focus on a whole-farm approach, which is by far the best way of delivering many public goods at the same time as producing food.
The “Health and Harmony” consultation paper asked respondents to prioritise a list of public goods. I thought that was the wrong approach, because to prioritise public goods fails to recognise that intersect and that pursuing one public good will help to achieve public goods in another sense. For example, without a reduction in the use of pesticides and without maintaining soil health, water and air quality will suffer. Without output diversification, there will be no improvement to local biodiversity or crop resilience.
The worry is that a limited pot of funding could be focused on edge-of-field nature restoration within an unsustainable wider system. The system should be targeting what happens in the middle of a field, not just around the edges. Approaches to farming such as agro-ecology offer bigger picture approaches that would provide the largest amount of public goods. A whole-farm approach may also be easier to monitor, because the metrics of working out what is going on with individual public goods could be incredibly complicated.
In Committee, Helen Browning said:
“That is why I have been an organic farmer all my life: I do not want to be farming intensively in one place and trying to produce public goods in another… We will still need to do special things in special places so that we can preserve species, manage floods and so on, but the agro-ecological approach should be at the core of our farming system.”––[Official Report, Agriculture Public Bill Committee, 25 October 2018; c. 91.]
Agro-ecology is not just about organic farming. That is one method, but there are also things such as agroforestry, pasture-based livestock systems, integrated pest management, low-input mixed farming and biodynamic agriculture. Agroforestry is a prime example of an innovative approach to farming that produces benefits across several categories of public goods.
The “Ten years for agroecology” project in Europe, which was led by top scientific experts, shows that agro-ecology can address the apparent dilemma of producing adequate quantities of food while protecting biodiversity and natural resources and mitigating climate change. Although it is seen as a bit niche, France has become one of the first industrialised nations to make agro-ecology a central plank of its agriculture policy. In 2014, a law was passed to promote agro-ecological approaches actively. It set a target of implementing such approaches on 200,000 French farms by 2025.
If the French can do it, I dare say there is absolutely no reason why the British cannot. The law also added agro-ecology to the curriculum in agricultural colleges across the country. It has a triple performance: it achieves environmental objectives; it achieves economic objectives by improving yield and efficiency, especially for small and medium-sized family farms; and it has a societal impact, including health and nutritional benefits.
In evidence to the Committee, Ed Hamer of the Landworkers’ Alliance gave an example of how an amendment along such lines would work. He said:
“the integration of whole farm agriculture and agri-ecological principles would incentivise farmers to produce food on the field in addition to introducing ecological focus areas or diversity around field edges.”
He concluded that, with such an amendment,
“it is the farming system itself that delivers the public good.”––[Official Report, Agriculture Public Bill Committee, 25 October 2018; c. 116, Q160.]
The Minister was encouraging about that, saying that the Government are considering empowering agro-ecology under clause 1. Such farming methods ought to become far more mainstream. Since the Secretary of State first came up with the “public money for public goods” approach, I have said that I think he is on the right page and is doing the right thing. I just think he could go a bit further to ensure the Bill is about restoring resistant services, safeguarding our long-term food security and protecting the environment.
Mr Goodwill
I oppose amendment 72, not because I am against enhancing soil health in our country, but because I believe the amendment would act against some of our other objectives. As a farmer I manage soil, and as part of my agriculture degree I spent a year studying soil science. Although it is easy to define animal health—it is the absence of disease, or a state in which production from the animal is maximised—it is much more difficult to define soil health. As an intensive arable farmer, I know that the healthiest soil is the most productive soil. Therefore, levels of nutrients—nitrogen phosphate, potash and sulphur—should be optimised to produce optimal soil health. but we need other elements within the soil as well. The cation-exchange capacity must be optimised through the use of lime and other soil treatments so those nutrients are available. The soil also needs to have the correct flocculation status, so that nutrients and roots can travel through it and drainage is optimised.
It is easy to define what productive, healthy soil is, but for some of the objectives in the Bill we need less than optimal soil health status. For example, all farmers agree that the most optimal way to enhance soil health is to have drainage schemes in place, but we have other agri-environmental schemes to try to prevent flooding, such as flood plains and areas of reed beds. Innovative schemes are happening on the North Yorkshire moors above Pickering, where the soil health is not optimised because that land is flooded deliberately to enable the delivery of those schemes.
Similarly, the North Yorkshire moors are a valuable habitat. The land is moor land because the soil is particularly acid and the soil health is bad—bad for growing most things apart from heather. Measures that could be put in place to enhance soil health there could actually act against enhancing that particular environment. We need to look at how we help farmers to manage their farms across the board. Some of their land may well be managed in a way that optimises soil health and production, but elsewhere soil health should deliberately not be enhanced, to allow certain species and habitats to develop precisely because that soil is flooded, acidified or not optimised for production.
Jenny Chapman (Darlington) (Lab)
I observe that the amendment asks that health soil be included in a list of things to which the Secretary of State “may” give financial assistance, not “must”. The right hon. Gentleman would not need to worry so much if he accepted the amendment.
Mr Goodwill
Yes, but we have recorded that it is the policy of the hon. Lady’s party to put “must” in the Bill, which will no doubt be introduced in the Lords.
Mr Goodwill
The point I am trying to make is that it is very difficult to define enhanced soil health. Unlike animal health, where it is very easy to see whether an animal is healthy or not, there are a number of objectives, for example, looking at organic matter in the soil and the use of slurries.
Although many would wish to take measures to improve the organic matter in soils, there are downsides, particularly looking at nitrates. The Environmental Audit Committee, on which I sit, looked at nitrates in water and soils. Many of the problems with high levels of nitrates, which can lead to eutrophication in watercourses and the sea, in some cases, are due to high nutrient and nitrate levels being applied to the soil, which can be associated with organic fertilisers. My view is that this is an unnecessary amendment.
Soil health is best left to farmers. If we can create the situation where farmers manage their farms correctly, they will enhance soil health in those areas where they wish to maximise production but they might deliberately degrade soil health in order to encourage species that thrive in waterlogged, acidic and other soils. Although I can understand the motives behind the amendment, I do not believe it would achieve the intended objectives.
Martin Whitfield
First, I should point out that I have recently been elected chair of the all-party parliamentary group on the timber industries. I support the amendment tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Bristol East. The quality of soil sits at the foundation of farming and agriculture.
I listened to the right hon. Member for Scarborough and Whitby, but I think he reads too much into the amendment. At the end of the day, we are looking for an improvement in the health of the soil in the area where it is found; there is no intention to overdo the moor lands into high-growth, high-productivity areas. That may well not be a measure of soil health within an area. With great respect, I feel that the right hon. Gentleman is reading far too much into the intention behind the amendment.
On the nature of the Bill and the word “may”, it will always rest with the Secretary of State whether financial support would be given. The health of the soil was raised in the evidence session by a significant number of people, and it sits at the foundation of farming. There is a need to ensure that the soil that we pass on to those who come after us is in the best condition that the farmer feels is right for his land. Farmers are the experts, but to rely solely on the farmer, without being able to give support where necessary, would remove the need for the Bill. There is a requirement for the Bill, however, and for farmers in some areas to have support.
One thing the Minister should address is the health and quality of the soil and what the soil is doing. In my constituency of East Lothian, we are blessed with very fertile volcanic soil and the production rates are phenomenal. They are dealt with and handled with great care and expertise by the farmers. In other areas of Scotland and the UK, however, the soil quality is much lower. That needs to be addressed, and the farmers who work the land, whether for sheep or for culture, require support to do that. Soil plays a greater role than as simply the material out of which crops are grown. The carbon capture element is fundamental to the calculations that need to be made.
Amendment 72 would make a small change, but a significant one. It would place in the Bill the material that is most fundamental to agriculture: soil.
Dr Drew
I support amendments 72 and 41, but I shall speak to amendment 49. The Bill is about improving the environmental quality of our agriculture, and there is no better way of doing that than ensuring that we improve soil, water use and the development of our countryside to provide the most efficient agriculture. Those issues will take up much of our time on this Committee.
I make it clear that amendment 49 comes from the Uplands Alliance, which has some concerns about how it will fare once the Bill is passed unless some account is taken of the uplands. We all know how difficult it is to farm in the uplands; I am afraid that, whatever the Bill does, it will not make it much easier. Sheep farmers are largely farming on the margins. We will be careful to try to rule out anything that would undermine their ability to get a fair price for their sheepmeat. We are wary of any free trade deal with certain parts of the world, and we make no apology for making that argument.
The Uplands Alliance’s point is that the easiest way of dealing with environmental degradation in the uplands is rewilding, recarbonisation and allowing the land to go back to nature, but of course that does not give anyone a living. The people concerned do not have a living at the moment; they may get some money through direct environmental payments, but those are effectively a subsidy to keep them on the land.
Why does this matter? It matters not only because upland farmers deserve our support, but because this is about our kept landscape. Rewilding the whole uplands landscape may be attractive, but will it draw in the tourists? Will it give us a sustainable rural community? I suspect not. If we want these people to carry on farming, we have to allow for a balance between the environmental payments that they will be eligible for and their ability to farm at a profit, which can be done only if we invest in them.
Amendment 49 is important because it looks at the reality. I do not happen to represent any upland areas, but some hon. Members present do, so in a sense I am speaking on their behalf. They will know exactly what I am talking about.
Mr Goodwill
My constituency takes in two thirds of the North Yorkshire moors. The hon. Gentleman spoke about rewilding, which is precisely what would happen if the heather moor land was not managed properly. People would not be happy to see that, because they see the heather moor land as a fragile environment that they want to sustain as a public good.
Dr Drew
That is exactly why we must balance the environmental aspects of the Bill with the reality of farming in those areas. I am trying to identify the issue that the Uplands Alliance asked us to address in the amendment, which is about looking at traditional and sustainable forms of agriculture. As has been said, agro-ecology is a new term, but in many respects it is revisiting the past; it is about how we have always tended to consider farming in certain parts of the world as traditional. How we maintain that landscape—a farmed and managed landscape—depends on a relationship between what is farmed and the environment being managed by those farmers.
The alternative is rewilding or having much larger holdings. In essence, we would end up ranching those holdings; they would have to be on such a large scale because the money would not be there in any other way. That would be deleterious to our countryside, and many farmers who want to remain would have to be moved off the land.
It is important that we have this debate. I support the important agro-ecological points of my hon. Friend the Member for Bristol East, because we are giving the Bill some substance. We disagree with the Government: we need examples of how such agricultural improvement will work and how to deliver it. Many others support the amendments, as my hon. Friend said, such as the Soil Association. In its written evidence, which we have all looked at, the Landworkers’ Alliance very much encouraged this direction of travel, to see how agriculture can be improved, made sustainable and meet our sustainable development goals. We will talk in detail later about climate change, which is central to this debate.
I support my hon. Friend’s amendments, and I make no apology for saying that they improve, as we said we would, the status and clarity of the Bill on how agriculture should move. I hope the Government will look positively at what we are trying to do.
Dr Drew
The nature of the food we produce is another area of the Bill that needs to be improved and strengthened. This is the Agriculture Bill—although, some say that there is not enough agriculture in it—and it should take, by every stretch of the imagination, more account of access to food and the improved quality and distribution of that food. We pass legislation to try to improve the current situation.
Many of us on this side feel that the use of food banks, as well as the poor quality of food and problems with access to food, are a tragedy and a scandal. We are not here to get involved in the politics of that, but to look at the practicalities of ways in which we can help. We would all acknowledge that the distribution of food is as much of a problem as the production of food, which is why organisations such as FareShare are so important; they work with food producers to distribute food to people who cannot afford to buy it through the normal market mechanism. Recognising those problems is important to us, both as Labour politicians and as human beings. This is the appropriate part of the Bill for amendment 51.
The biggest single challenge facing the NHS is obesity, and we need to do something about that in the Bill—it may be called the Agriculture Bill, but it is also about food. We ask the Government at least to acknowledge that this is an issue worthy of discussion, debate and improvement.
Mr Goodwill
Healthy and unhealthy people shop at the same supermarkets. Is it not their choices that make the difference to their health, rather than the food on the shelves?
Dr Drew
That is an interesting view, but it depends on what food is on the shelves. Maybe I have misled the right hon. Gentleman, because it is not just about supermarkets and the retail end; it is also about fast-food business, which has to be part of today’s debate on the food we produce, who buys it, and how we can help them if they cannot afford it.