Agriculture Bill (Sixth sitting)

Sandy Martin Excerpts

Tuesday 30th October 2018 Public Bill Committees

[Simon Hoare]

“Gripped”, says the hon. Lady. The point I make is serious: we cannot put an onus on our food producers for what consumers choose to consume or what the processors decide to process.

[Sandy Martin (Ipswich) (Lab)]

rose—

[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.

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[Simon Hoare]

I am unleashing my inner Tom Watson, which is a scary prospect. However, this is a serious point. We as policy makers should focus our attention on the educators. People need more education. We are entirely wrong to knock our supermarkets, which are the principal food retailers in this country. They provide food on the shelves at all price points and of ranging quality, allowing people access to the fullest and widest range of foodstuffs ever available to food consumers in our history.

[Sandy Martin]

rose—

[Simon Hoare]

I will not give way. I am also told by my local branch of the National Farmers Union that at no time has a lower percentage of domestic income been spent on food than today. I take that as a rather good piece of news.

We have to ensure that people have education and a range of choices on the shelves. That is why it is important to have a diverse agricultural sector and food production industry in this country. To put the onus on those producers would be entirely inappropriate. If the hon. Member for Stroud pushes his amendment to a vote, I will oppose it.

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[The Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (George Eustice)]

I want to take the amendments from this group in turn, starting with amendment 51. Elements of the policy and the purposes that we have spelled out will often lead to incidental improvements in and contributions to public health, which I will come to describe.

A number of hon. Members have pointed out that this is predominantly a consumer choice issue. The Department of Health and Social Care and Public Health England do a lot of work to promote healthy eating.

[Sandy Martin]

I said on Second Reading that certain horticultural products, such as broad beans, are not easily found in the shops. We may well have a situation where, because of a change in demand and education in this country, people want to move to different foodstuffs, but it is not easy for farmers to change over. Does the Minister accept that there may need to be investment in farms to enable them to change over to other foodstuffs? Where does he see that investment coming in this Bill, if not in this amendment?

[George Eustice]

I was going to say that that could be provided for under clause 1(2), which enables us to support businesses to improve their productivity if that were necessary. Broad beans, as a leguminous crop, often need less or no fertiliser at all, so that can be an environmental benefit. The current EU scheme enables broad beans and other leguminous crops to be used as one of the contributory factors to the environmental focus area. That is already recognised in the existing scheme, and there would be nothing to prevent us from recognising that in a future scheme.

Under subsection (2), a lot of things can be done to support the delivery of the local sustainably produced food objective. In the last 20 years, there has been exponential growth in consumer interest in food provenance, large growth and expansion of farm shops, and growth in box schemes and farmers markets—I know the hon. Member for Stroud has a well known farmers market in his constituency. There has been huge growth in consumer interest in this area. Under subsection (2), it would be possible for the Government to design a grant scheme to support farmers to open farm shops and to develop their own marketing and box schemes.

Subsection (1) is on the purposes for the delivery of environmental goods. We can pursue a lot of policies under those purposes and objectives that would deliver increased health outcomes. For instance, under subsection (1)(f) on animal health, we could support schemes that lead to a reduction in the use of antibiotics, which would have an impact on public health and safeguard some of our critical antibiotics for the medical sphere.

Under subsection (1)(a), as I described earlier, it would be absolutely possible for us to support an integrated pest management approach, leading to a reduction in the use of pesticides where they were seen to be of concern. Under subsection (1)(a) we could also support a pasture-based livestock system; there is some evidence, although mixed, that livestock such as sheep and cattle raised on pasture and grass have higher levels of omega-3 oils, which are good for public health. There are a number of areas where the purposes we have set out under clause 1(1) also reinforce public health measures.

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[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?

[Sandy Martin]

I want to add briefly to what my hon. Friend the Member for Bristol East said about amendment 71. I worked in a British-built chicken broiler plant in Israel. It was some time ago, and no doubt improvements have been made since, but it was sufficient to make me a vegetarian, although I have not yet gone as far as to become a vegan. Ipswich is rather a long way from Bristol, but if I was a bit closer, maybe I would be a vegan by now.

[Kerry McCarthy]

Thursday is World Vegan Day, and I think there will be people outside between Committee sittings giving out free vegan pizza. If my hon. Friend wants to join our hon. Friend the Member for Bristol West and me to get a slice, he would be welcome. In fact, all Members can come.

[Sandy Martin]

I would very much welcome a slice of free pizza, whether it had cheese on it or not.

[Kerry McCarthy]

It is vegan cheese.

[Sandy Martin]

Or whether it was vegan cheese or cheese made from milk.

I want to focus mainly on amendments 74 and 75. On amendment 74, as Members may know, the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee had extensive evidence and debate on the Secretary of State’s proposed Bill covering animal cruelty sentencing and incorporating animal sentience into UK law. The Committee took the very sensible view that it was important to stiffen the sentences for cruelty without further delay. We therefore advised the Secretary of State that it would be sensible to separate the sentence on sentience from the section on sentencing. However, we felt that the whole issue of animal sentience needed to be taken seriously, and that a way should be found to take on board the significance of the issue and incorporate it into UK law once we had left the European Union. I believe that the proposed new subsection in amendment 74 covers just one of the vital areas where an adherence to the concept of animal sentience would have a material effect on agricultural practice in this country and ensure that the default support for animal welfare implied by the concept of sentience is not lost when we have left the EU.

It is not just me who believes that, but the Secretary of State as well; otherwise why did he want to pass a Bill that supported the concept of animal sentience? If he did wish to pass such a Bill—and he clearly did, because otherwise he would not have put it forward—why would he not want it to have a real effect on actual animals and their welfare? Amendment 74 is a way of ensuring that the concept of animal sentience actually has some effect, and I cannot really understand why the Government are not happy to accept it.

I am sure that the hon. Member for North Dorset made some of the comments that he has with the best of intentions, but the overall feeling appears to be, “We intend to do the right thing, so leave it to us.” That is not the way that law works; it is not the way that Bills are meant to work. The whole point of having Bills, Acts, debate, amendments and so on is to make sure that things are written down in such a way that people know what will happen and do not just have to rely on the good will of the Secretary of State.

We need to look at what amendment 75 says. Clause 1(1)(e) refers to

“preventing, reducing or protecting from environmental hazards”,

which should be good things, but only so long as they actually meet up with the protection of the environment, as we provide for in amendment 75. I will give a good example of supposed prevention, reduction or protection from environmental hazards that clearly does not meet up with the proposals in our amendment: the flood defences in Ipswich, where serious amounts of concrete and large sheets of metal were shoved in on either side of the river to prevent flooding. Clearly, I do not want Ipswich to be flooded, and I am very glad that we have flood defences. In fact, Ipswich was seriously flooded before the war, before those defences went in. However, they are not in the slightest bit environmentally friendly, and I am quite sure that flood defences in other parts of the country are seriously damaging to the environment too.

There are far better ways of doing these things now, and there are all sorts of other activities that people might want to undertake that would be damaging to the environment, even though they protected us from environmental hazards. All that we are asking for is that work done to offer protection from environmental hazards is not done in an environmentally damaging way. Again, I cannot really understand why the Government are not willing to support that amendment.

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[Mr Dunne]

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Sandy Martin]

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

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

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

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

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

“The Secretary of State may also give financial assistance”

to

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

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

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

[Chris Davies]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Sandy Martin]

I am sorry, but I have finished.

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[Chris Davies]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Wilson. I, too, have taken great pleasure in supporting amendments 88, 89 and 90. I think that farmers—I am sure that the many farmers glued to the TV watching this debate will feel the same—are now back in the debate and back in the Bill as a result of these amendments. We have emphasised the environment today—quite rightly so, many would say. This is an agriculture Bill, and it is important that our farmers out there are respected and represented within the Bill.

I am disappointed that the hon. Member for Ipswich disagrees with the amendments. Our greatest environmentalists in this country are our farmers. The landscape that we enjoy was created by them over not just decades, but centuries. They know exactly where the water flows when there are floods, they know on which bank the soil is better for their grass, and we should be listening to them. These amendments put farmers back in the game.

[Sandy Martin]

The initial problem with the common agricultural policy was that it was producing unsaleable gluts of certain foods. We have moved from that to a common agricultural policy that has the opposite problem, whereby people are being paid simply for owning land. That, I assume, is the main motivating factor behind the Secretary of State’s desire to move towards a system based on public goods, which we support. We believe that helping farmers to produce food is a public good, but we are not here talking about that. The main thrust of the amendments is about paying landowners for owning land.

[Chris Davies]

There are many faults with the common agricultural policy. The hon. Gentleman seems to be well versed in the written word, but we on the Government side of the Committee understand how it is implemented. There are many farmers on these Benches who completely understand how the agricultural world works. There are many issues with the CAP. These amendments do not state that we should have direct payments to farmers. They are probing amendments that clearly state that farmers should be part of the package and part of the discussion as we go forward, and I am happy to support them.

I class the hon. Member for Ceredigion as an hon. Friend, even though he is on the other side of the Committee, and he and I agree on many things. My constituency of Brecon and Radnorshire shares a boundary with Ceredigion, and our farmers cross that boundary regularly. We have similar faiths, meanings and needs—certainly for our agricultural and rural communities.

On schedule 3, we agree on most things, but it is important, if not vital, that the framework enables the devolved nations to work exceptionally closely together. I fear that it will have to be led by one particular region, with everybody coming to a consensus rather than a clear agreement, and I would like to see it led by Westminster. I share a border not only with the hon. Gentleman in Wales, but with England, and it is clear that we need a common framework for cross-border farming, whether it relates to Wales and England, or to England and Scotland, so that everybody works together in the same direction. We have one market and one new agricultural policy, so it is vital that the four devolved nations work together closely and in the same way for the benefit of agriculture throughout the United Kingdom.

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[George Eustice]

One Bill at a time. When legislation is introduced on the future shared prosperity fund—I understand that there will be a consultation later this year—everyone will then have an opportunity to participate in that debate, but it is a debate for another time. We have enough issues on our hands at the moment.

Amendment 88, tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Ludlow, is similar to amendment 52, with the exception that he has added a paragraph (d) that would effectively require us to have regard for self-sufficiency. I note that he has borrowed the language in paragraph (d) from section 1 of the Agriculture Act 1947. Obviously it was a very different time—1947 was immediately after the second world war. We still had rationing books; we did not end rationing in this country until 1954. Our levels of self-sufficiency in the run-up to the second world war had been woefully low.

To put that in context, self-sufficiency today is very high by historical standards. In the late 19th century, and up until the second world war, our level of self-sufficiency hovered between 30% and 40%—far lower than it is today. It was a series of interventions, including the 1947 Act and others, that meant that it peaked at somewhere close to 70% in the late ’80s. As a number of hon. Members pointed out, there was a cost to self-sufficiency at that level: appalling levels of intervention, perfectly good food being destroyed, and production subsidies to produce food for which there was no market. The old-style production subsidy regime that used to pertain to the common agricultural policy was totally dysfunctional and severely discredited, and was therefore dismantled some time ago.

It is important to recognise a distinction between self-sufficiency and food security. Sometimes people conflate those terms. Food security depends on far more than self-sufficiency. We know that to deliver genuine food security both nationally and internationally, vibrant and successful domestic production and open markets are necessary. Just look at this summer, when we had an horrendous drought and crop failures across the board. That happens. It is the nature of farming, and it is therefore important, in order to protect food security, that we have open markets and trade. That has always been the case.

The other reality is that in a modern context the greatest threat to food security is probably a global one. We have a rapidly growing population, set to reach 9 billion by 2050, and we have the countervailing force of climate change and a lack of water resources, which means that in parts of the world where we are currently producing food it may be more difficult to do so in 10 or 15 years’ time. Scarcity of water could be a global challenge. The issue of food security is less about national self-sufficiency in case there is another world war—our negotiations with the EU are challenging but we do not envisage it getting to the state of our requiring something like the Emergency Powers (Defence) Act 1939. The challenge on food security, insofar as it exists, is ensuring that we can feed the world.

Another question is how best to deliver food security and a successful farming industry. Is it best to do so through direct payments—subsidy payments based on how much land farmers have? Direct payments were decoupled from production some 15 years ago, so those who suggest that direct payments are somehow a guarantor of food security are wrong. Many hundreds, or possibly thousands, of people own a bit of land, have a job in the City where they earn their income, mow the grass a couple of times a year and keep a few pet sheep on the land, but nevertheless hit the collect button on their single farm payment. That cannot be a viable, long-term approach.

The question therefore is how do we best support a vibrant and successful farming industry? Our view is that we should not do it through subsidies of the old style, but by supporting farms to become more profitable, to reduce costs, and to produce and sell more around the world. That is why the approach that we have taken to deliver food security, such as it is, is included in subsection (2), which covers the power to give grants to help farmers to invest, and the power to support research and development so that we can see the next leap forward in plant breeding or in animal genetics. There are powers later in the Bill that we will debate at a future date to allow producer organisations to be formed so that farmers have more clout in the marketplace and get a fairer price. There are powers to improve fairness and transparency in the supply chain. Where we want to end up is with a successful, vibrant, profitable farming industry that is able to produce more food.

[Sandy Martin]

I am listening carefully to what the Minister is saying, but subsection (2) does not mention food. It mentions some of the activities that may be invested in in the production of different foods, but there are all sorts of people who would want to produce very good, sustainably produced, healthy food, who would not be able to get any support whatsoever from the Government under subsection (2).

[George Eustice]

I do not agree. Subsection (2) is very clear. It gives us the power to

“give financial assistance for or in connection with the purpose of starting, or improving the productivity of, an agricultural, horticultural...activity.”

It could not be clearer. It gives us the power to invest in the way that I have described.