Agriculture Bill (Ninth sitting)

Sandy Martin Excerpts

Tuesday 13th November 2018 Public Bill Committees

[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.

[Sandy Martin (Ipswich) (Lab)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that although additional, more specific regulations might be more complicated, they would be clearer?

[Jenny Chapman]

I agree, yes. The change we are seeking in the amendment is to include “necessary”, because the Secretary of State has powers under the clause to make changes that he or she thinks would simplify or improve, but that is so subjective. The power that the Government seek would be through the negative procedure, so any change ought to be needed and not just used for things that the Secretary of State desires to do, for motives that we could not discern.

If the Secretary of State wishes to change the scheme in ways that today we can only guess at, we want to know more about how that power can be used. It could be said that it is very generous to allow the Secretary of State to make changes that, in his or her opinion, simplify or improve—he or she could say that just about any change was an improvement if he or she wanted to.

All amendment 79 seeks to do is to place a duty on the Secretary of State to ensure that any future changes are really needed: these measures will potentially have a significant impact on rural communities. The Secretary of State may decide to do nothing in this policy area, despite having the powers. People watching our deliberations will want to know an awful lot more about what will happen as a consequence of the clause.

I move on to amendment 80, which subjects regulations under the clause to the affirmative procedure—not the negative procedure, as the Secretary of State desires. We went over this point at length last time when we discussed the difference between the two processes. I do not see any benefit in going over all that again. It would be helpful if the Minister justified why he thinks the affirmative procedure is not appropriate in this instance.

As we discussed at some length previously, amendment 81 requires the Secretary of State to consult persons who,

“in his or her opinion, are representative of the sector to which the regulations will apply, or who may otherwise be affected.”

The Opposition believe that that is a necessary safeguard. We want the amendment on the face of the Bill because the clause affords such great power and discretion to the Secretary of State.

We know, because he said it last time, that the Minister has good intentions to consult, but the majority of consultations conducted by his Department take place because they are required in legislation. We talked about there being several hundred consultations—could he tell us how many of those come about because they are required in legislation? How many happen because the Department feels that it is the right thing to do?

There is no requirement at all in the clause to consult, but perhaps there ought to be. The Minister is asking us to rely just on his good will and the custom and practice that he says exists in the Department, but I question whether that is the case and whether the consultations that take place in the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs are by and large required by legislation. They are often required for very good reasons and are an important safeguard that ought to apply when we are talking about support for rural development.

As we discussed last time and as is worth repeating, done correctly, consultation improves decision making and avoids costly mistakes and unintended consequences. Why does the Secretary of State believe it is not appropriate to require consultation in this case?

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[Kerry McCarthy]

Amendment 113 revisits the issue of food waste, which we discussed last week. I declare that I am chair of the all-party group on food waste. We submitted a response to the “Health and Harmony” consultation paper, along with organisations involved in food waste campaigning—This is Rubbish and Feedback. I am pleased to see that the Government have made some progress recently, particularly in the food waste reduction road map, but their approach still seems to be based on voluntary action. It is important that we see something more specific that binds the Government to future action.

There are powers in the Bill that could be used to require those in the agri-food supply chain to supply information on waste in the supply chain. The explanatory notes state that clause 14(4)(f)

“allows data to be collected for minimising waste from agri-food supply chains, which may include food waste”.

Mandatory food waste audits are crucial if we are to get any idea of the scale of the food waste problem and who is responsible for where it occurs in the supply chain. We said last week that too often there is a focus on the consumer end, and I am keen to ensure that it is not just the farmers who are blamed for this. Many of the problems are caused by what happens in the middle—the pressures that supermarkets and food manufacturers put on farmers, and the way that products are marketed and sold to consumers .

[Sandy Martin]

We had a debate yesterday about plastic packaging. One of the barriers to the reduction of plastic packaging in supermarkets is that they are very reluctant to let anybody know exactly what is happening. If we are going to reduce food waste, we need to make sure that supermarkets give that information.

[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.

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[Kerry McCarthy]

There is certainly evidence that, whereas under the Groceries Code Adjudicator regime produce should not be rejected because supermarket buyers have just decided they do not actually need what they are contracted to buy, they are increasingly using cosmetic reasons as an excuse, because they are still allowed to reject on cosmetic grounds. A crop of potatoes in one period might be entirely acceptable to the supermarkets because they need those potatoes, but then, on cosmetic grounds, they will reject produce that looks almost identical, because they have got their predictions wrong and do not actually need the potatoes they thought they would. Sometimes this produce is not going to be sold as nicely smooth and rounded baking potatoes packaged up in the supermarket; it will be going into products where the shape does not matter, but the supermarkets have got their predictions and buying calculations wrong and do not actually want it, so they use cosmetic reasons as an excuse.

The memorandum on the delegated powers in the Bill says that clause 20 provides powers for new marketing standards that could be used to

“reduce food waste (for example, by having the flexibility to change any standards that are purely visual)”.

That picks up the contention about EU marketing specifications being responsible for some produce being rejected. As I understand it, the supermarket standards are actually much higher than the EU marketing standards, so the fault does not lie with EU standards; the issue might be supermarkets trying to employ them as an excuse. I think that having more flexibility in relation to marketing standards is unlikely to make a difference, and I hope that the Minister addresses that point.

My key point is this. When we discussed amendment 85, I think, the Minister said we should not make farmers responsible for meeting the food waste target, as most of the time they are not responsible for food waste, and I absolutely agree. That is why the mandatory target should sit in this part of the Bill, where we are talking about the supply chain.

I have said that the Courtauld 2025 commitment is a helpful tool, but it is not ambitious enough. The fact that participation is voluntary means that it will never achieve as much as we would like and will certainly not get us towards the sustainable development goal. However, when Courtauld 2025 was announced, the Waste and Resources Action Programme was meant to be generating a baseline for primary production by the end of 2018. Can the Minister update us on that? My understanding is that it might now be only an estimate rather than a set figure. The fact that there have been funding cuts to WRAP and the industry is still being secretive with its data means that we cannot come up with the baseline that we would like to see.

Finally on amendment 113, I just reiterate the point that we want to see a level playing field. At the moment, 89 businesses have signed up to the food waste reduction roadmap, but that is fewer than half of the top 250 food businesses. Again, the good guys will sign up and get a lot of credit, and then the Government can say, “This is really working. We’ve got companies that are doing their best to reduce food waste.” But what about those companies that have not signed up? I will leave the food waste side of things there.

Amendment 114 is a probing amendment to follow up on a debate that I had a few weeks ago, on international Anti-Slavery Day, about modern slavery and labour exploitation in supermarket supply chains. We know that the sector has a really serious problem with that. The International Labour Organisation estimates that agriculture, if grouped with forestry and fishing, is the sector with the fourth highest proportion of victims of forced labour worldwide. Other sectors, such as apparel—the fashion or clothing industry—seem to be getting to grips with the problem, but the food sector does not appear to be. I mentioned many examples during that debate, so I will not go into detail now, but they ranged from organised crime in the Italian tomato-growing sector to workers in the Thai seafood industry—cases of torture, enslavement and workers being kept at sea and passed from ship to ship for years at a time, with 59% of workers, I think, saying that they had seen the murder of a fellow worker. In this country, we still very much have an issue with gangmasters and poor conditions in the sector.

Oxfam has sent up the Behind the Barcodes scorecard, which rates supermarkets on their transparency, accountability and treatment of workers and farmers. There is also a gender element, because women tend to be more likely to be victims. On that scorecard, Tesco again comes out best—at 23%. It did actually come along to a meeting of the all-party group on human trafficking and modern slavery, which I thought was good. It listened to the clothing industry talk about what it had done, and it seemed keen to do more. So Tesco was on 23%. Morrisons and Lidl are on 5%, and Aldi is on 1%, so we have a discrepancy between the supermarkets trying to do the right thing and others not taking it seriously at all.

[Sandy Martin]

Does my hon. Friend share my frustration that, when supermarkets or anyone else involved in the agri-food supply chain do not want to give information that would enable some of the problems to be dealt with, they can hide behind the cloak of commercial confidentiality? Amendments 114 and 113 would enable the Secretary of State and people engaged in the purposes of the Bill to overcome the commercial confidentiality blanket used by some.

[Kerry McCarthy]

Supply chains can be so opaque and so long. I am very much in favour of shorter supply chains so that we know where the produce comes from. Again, as I mentioned in the debate in the Chamber, when the horsemeat scandal broke and we were discussing lasagne that might contain horsemeat, it was astonishing to discover that it had been on an around-Europe trip to at least a dozen different countries—perhaps more—before it ended up as a finished 99p lasagne in the frozen food section of a supermarket. It is amazing how something so cheap can be produced by going on that journey. Some products have dozens and dozens of ingredients, and it becomes almost impossible to trace the origin of those ingredients. I am all in favour of shorter supply chains and less-processed food.

The key point with both amendments, as my hon. Friend the Member for Stroud said, is that it is all well and good for the Government to put transparency provisions in the Bill, but we would like to know a bit more about how they intend to use them to ensure that we root out not only food waste but labour exploitation in supply chains. The information I was given—in a new briefing from the Independent Anti-Slavery Commissioner and the University of Nottingham—is that only 19% of companies in the agriculture sector abide by the terms of the Modern Slavery Act 2016. It is not enough to say that we already have the legislation when fewer than only one in five adheres to it. We need a wider definition of supply chain liabilities, so that participants in that supply chain cannot feign ignorance or rely on real ignorance. The companies are huge, and they need to know what is going on in their supply chain.

I also want to ask the Minister about the EU’s unfair trading practices directive and how we will seek to replicate that in the UK supply chain. We have been told that the UK supports the broad aim of the directive but that we want to do our own thing. I am interested to know how that will relate to the supply chain provisions in the Bill.

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[George Eustice]

I understand that point, but there is obviously a limit to what we can deliver internationally. We have international forums through which we argue for such issues to be addressed.

Coming back to this particular clause, which links to another point that the hon. Lady raised about unfair trading practices in the EU dossier currently under discussion, the purpose of this part of the Bill around collection and sharing of data, and this requirement in clause 14 for people to provide information, is linked to unfair trading practices. The purpose of subsection (4)(b) is to promote transparency and fairness around the price of goods, and it is about the terms and conditions that individual purchasers or processors might have for farmers. The purpose is to improve fairness for producers, so that they have better transparency and can make more informed choices about who they sell their goods to.

[Sandy Martin]

Clause 14(3) states:

“Each purpose specified must be in, or covered by, the list of purposes in subsection 4.”

If these amendments are not passed, is there not a danger that various players within the supply chain might wish to use the fact that these were not specified in subsection (4) to say that they would not give information to the Secretary of State in the pursuit of the purposes for which the Bill stands?

[George Eustice]

In the precise design we have, clauses 12 and 13—particularly clause 12—create quite a big power for the Secretary of State to require people to provide information. Therefore, we need clause 14 to place boundaries and scope on that. We have had criticism from Committees in the House of Lords and from hon. Members on this Committee, saying that there is too much free power for a Secretary of State—it is not defined or constrained enough. In clause 14, we are placing clear parameters on the purposes for which we will require data to be provided. That is right and proper, and what we are trying to achieve with clause 14. We do not want it to be an open-ended power.

[Sandy Martin]

Surely, you have reinforced what I am trying to say. You are placing parameters.

[The Chair]

No, I have not.

[Sandy Martin]

I am sorry. The Minister is placing parameters around what the Secretary of State may do. Those parameters do not include, in terms of employment, pay for persons, welfare for animals or reduction of food waste. There is a real danger that the Secretary of State will not be able to bring in the information he needs to achieve the purposes of the Bill.

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[Jenny Chapman]

That is a really important point. If I was a farmer, I would be incredibly worried by the Bill in general, but my anxiety would be heightened by this clause and by what I might anticipate happening, given the reports we are reading in the press. I do not think that any hon. Members present have any certainty about whether a deal will be reached, what a deal will look like if it is reached, whether it will be approved by Parliament, or whether it will be approved by the Cabinet, so to blithely assert that there will be a deal and that everything will be fine is not good enough.

We have one opportunity to get the Bill right. This clause could be the lifeboat for many people in the industry. It is important that we understand what the Government intend and what they would do, under the powers given to them through the clause, should we leave without a deal and without being in a customs union.

The National Audit Office report states that the Government are generally underprepared for a no-deal outcome. To be fair, DEFRA has done more than many Departments, but that is because it has had to, because so much of its activity is affected by Brexit. Because the Government are underprepared, there is now panic. A year ago, we anticipated having a deal in October, then it was last week, this week and probably next week. Where is the deal? The anxiety in Parliament is palpable, and it is starting to be felt in the country too. There is an emerging sense of panic, whether about transferring staff from valuable wildlife protection work in Natural England or about the need to stockpile food. We know that the industry has already rented out virtually all the available food storage in the country, and people are incredibly worried about that. Given the lack of clarity and information, their concern is understandable and valid.

The Government have a duty to ensure that there will be food in the shops in April. I know I will be accused of “Project Fear” mark II, mark III or whatever—I understand that, and I am being careful not to enter into that kind of thing—but we must be honest. I do not know whether hon. Members had a chance to read the Government’s technical notices, which were published this summer, but they make pretty grim reading. The Government now acknowledge and anticipate many of the concerns that were deemed to be part of “Project Fear”.

[Sandy Martin]

Does my hon. Friend agree that one of the points made in amendment 122 is that Brexit is likely to have a serious impact on the cost of production? It is not just about markets for produce; it is also about the cost of production. We already see some of those costs changing as a result of the decision to leave the European Union.