Agriculture Bill (Fifth sitting)

Sandy Martin Excerpts

Tuesday 30th October 2018 Public Bill Committees

[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.

[Sandy Martin (Ipswich) (Lab)]

Is not the main point that if we have laws that allow Secretaries of State to do things or not to do things in the future, then to a certain extent we are reducing the ability of this place to scrutinise law? In some ways, we are moving law making or regulation into the hands of people rather than into the hands of the law itself.

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[George Eustice]

Ultimately, reassurance is given to people in the farming industry, and others with an interest in the farmed landscape, through manifesto commitments and Government commitments. We have a commitment to keep the agricultural budget at the current level until at least 2022. We also have a manifesto commitment to roll out a new scheme to replace the current basic payment scheme, and the Bill sets out a transition period that implies an ongoing budget well into the future. That is what gives farmers the reassurance that they need, not sophistry about whether we should have the word “must” or “may”. I respectfully suggest that we should pursue the approach to drafting that we have always had, that has stood the test of time and that worked wonderfully well in the 1947 Act and in other Labour Acts since, and accept that “may” is the correct terminology to use, as a point of legal drafting.

I will touch briefly on amendment 45, which is linked, and which the hon. Member for Stroud also addressed. The amendment creates a requirement through changing the word “may” to “must”, converting a power to make provisions for enforcement on issues such as eligibility into a requirement. I simply say to the hon. Gentleman that I do not think it is necessary. We have in this country well established procedures that put enormous scrutiny on the spending of public money. We have the National Audit Office, and codes of governance within the civil service and the Cabinet Office. We have very detailed procedures in place to ensure that we check eligibility and look after public money.

Say we were to introduce a scheme and have no type of enforcement or eligibility checking whatever—literally handing out money. As all hon. Members know, it would not be long before we had National Audit Office reports, Public Accounts Committee hearings and accounting officer issues from within the civil service. The reality is that converting the power into a requirement is unnecessary in the context of all the other requirements that we already make on Government. What we seek in this power and in the Bill—what we need in the Bill—is simply a power to be able to introduce those checks.

I hope that I have been able to give the hon. Member for Stroud reassurance. I hope he will accept the approach taken by previous Labour Governments in such areas and also that the existing drafting—using “may”—is entirely consistent with the past. I hope that he will withdraw both amendments.

[Sandy Martin]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Wilson.

The Bill is intended to facilitate the support of agriculture and the countryside after Brexit. The situation at the moment is that all sorts of supports are in place through the European Union, so all sorts of changes, discussions and votes will be needed to change them. The Government have characterised that process as deeply bureaucratic, but it enables farmers and those engaged in agriculture to know what they will receive money for and how much they will receive well in advance, so that they may make decisions about how to carry out their business.

If the Secretary of State ever decided not to give any financial assistance of any sort to agriculture in this country, that would change the entire nature of our society. It would be inconceivable for the Secretary of State to be able to change the decision to award any financial support to agriculture without the consent of Parliament, yet by making this a power rather than a duty, the Bill does exactly that.

We heard about flexibility and the need for it. The Secretary of State, however, has plenty of flexibility even with our amendments. We are not tying the Secretary of State down to any particular way of offering financial assistance; we are only asking that he should have to do it. The flexibility that remains if our amendment is adopted is the flexibility of our Parliament to repeal the resulting Act if ever it decides to do so. Anything else puts the power to support agriculture in this country in the hands of the Secretary of State and not in the hands of Parliament. I do not believe that people were voting for that when they voted to leave the European Union. I believe that we need to tell the Secretary of State that he “must” give financial assistance to agriculture in this country.

[Simon Hoare]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Wilson.

I shall be incredibly brief. I feel that the issue is one that the Minister has addressed in terms of the historical precedent in legislation of using “may” over “must”. In the interests of the speedy progress of the Bill, if the shadow Minister presses his amendment to a vote, I shall be voting for the Government side of the argument—the Whip will be relieved to hear that.

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[Sandy Martin]

I well remember that in 1972—when I was still quite young, I hasten to add—in Suffolk we had strong windstorms in the summer, and a significant amount of soil blew off the wheat fields. It was a notorious case at the time, and the farmers—including major farmers—learned a lot of lessons. Agriculture is a lot better than it was in the 1970s, but we continue to learn and to improve. I would have thought that any sensible agriculturalist would support any amendment that enhances soil health.

[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.

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[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.

[Sandy Martin]

Does my hon. Friend agree that advertising, taxation, supply and various other aspects determine people’s choices about what foods to eat, and their knowledge of what foods are available to them, and that we should seek some sort of food strategy so that we know what sorts of foods we want to be available to the population?

[Dr Drew]

I thank my hon. Friend, because that is exactly the point we are making. This concerns not only obesity but its consequences, such as the rise of diabetes, which has doubled over the past 20 years. I am told—although I cannot source this—that the UK already has the most ultra-processed diet in Europe. I think that means we eat too much fast food, which the Bill must recognise is a huge public health issue.

Despite the title of the White Paper, “Health and Harmony: the future for food, farming and the environment in a Green Brexit”, health has been marginalised. That is disappointing. Health should be central to the whole debate on the food we produce, who it is produced for, and whether it is affordable.