Sustainable Livestock Bill

Simon Hart Excerpts

Friday 12th November 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Nuttall]

I thank my hon. Friend for that point. It seems to me that there are many groups—and I will mention this later—who have supported the Bill and led their supporters to believe that it will bring about what they have been campaigning for. However, if any of their supporters had actually been sent a copy of the Bill, I fear that they would be very sadly disappointed, because it is silent on the specifics of those campaigns.

[Simon Hart (Carmarthen West and South Pembrokeshire) (Con)]

Does my hon. Friend have a view on why almost no land use or agricultural organisation in the whole of the UK is enthusiastic about the Bill?

[Mr Nuttall]

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Carmarthen and wherever for that good point. The people most closely connected with farming in this country, while they support the aims of the Bill’s sponsors, do not support the Bill itself. We have to ask why that is.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Nuttall]

Any farmer will tell us that an unhappy—if we can use that term—animal does not produce milk.

[Simon Hart]

I hesitate to interrupt my hon. Friend again so early in his speech, but is he aware of any peer-reviewed or emerging evidence to suggest that animals kept in sheds in any number are somehow at a disadvantage compared with those that might not be? It would be interesting to hear what evidence exists for that, other than hearsay, and what sounds to me like a slight Disney-fication of the problem.

[Mr Nuttall]

The National Farmers Union would say that there is no disadvantage and no evidence that larger-scale dairying or housing has a negative impact on the environment.

--- Later in debate ---

[Ian Paisley]

The hon. Lady can take that up with the Minister if she wishes. However, it is unrealistic to claim that, as we drive from the north of Scotland to the south of Devon, all that we will see in our countryside are huge sheds, inside which are animals that will never see the light of day. That is preposterous. It will not happen. It is a scare tactic that undermines the promoter’s good intention.

[Simon Hart]

Does the hon. Gentleman agree that milking dairy cows is only one part of the dairy industry? Farmers also have calves and young stock, and produce beef—

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)]

Order. We are in danger of going into a general debate. This is not a general debate—we must stick to the Bill.

--- Later in debate ---

[Simon Hart (Carmarthen West and South Pembrokeshire) (Con)]

May I apologise for chancing my arm with my earlier intervention, Mr Deputy Speaker? I shall have to find another opportunity, when you are not looking, to make the same point.

Let me join in the general feeling in the House by congratulating the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent South (Robert Flello) on introducing the Bill and the debate. It is always good to have a lengthy debate in the House about rural affairs, particularly in quite measured conditions. I should start by declaring a bit of an interest because in the 10 years before my election to the House I was involved in the largest European group with an interest in rural affairs—the ever-excellent Countryside Alliance. I mention that because this issue is all about people, and Members of this Parliament and others sometimes forget that there is always a consequence for communities, individuals and jobs, as the hon. Member for North Antrim (Ian Paisley) accurately stated. I shall restrict my comments to those issues and I hope that the House will forgive me for not going into quite as much detail as my hon. Friend the Member for Bury North (Mr Nuttall) did in dealing with different aspects of the Bill.

I want to start by bigging up our farmers because in the past 20 years they have sometimes got a pretty bad press, and undeservedly so. Farmers, particularly those in my area and members of the Farmers Union of Wales, of the National Farmers Union Cymru and of the Country Land and Business Association, have been at the vanguard of sustainable land use and food production for longer than it has been fashionable to talk about those issues in this House, and they do not often get the praise they deserve for their fantastic work in producing good-quality food and maintaining the landscape as we expect to find it when we visit the countryside.

[Mr Nuttall]

When my hon. Friend has had discussions with farmers in his constituency, have any of them ever expressed a desire for more direction from the Secretary of State on how to do their job?

[Simon Hart]

I think that my hon. Friend probably knows the answer to that question, which is, of course, no—but not in an aggressive sense. Farmers simply want a chance to compete on a level playing field not only with other farmers across Europe and the world but with other industries in the UK. This is not about special pleading, but about their pleading to be treated in a similar manner to everybody else. The Bill contributes to a suspicion that individual Members of Parliament want to do things to agriculture rather than for it. If there has been a long-running problem it is the latent suspicion hanging over everything we do that we act in our interests rather than those of farmers.

[Kerry McCarthy]

Does the hon. Gentleman accept that there is a trade-off here, given that the UK agriculture industry benefits from billions of pounds-worth of subsidy from UK taxpayers? Do not the taxpayers who are not involved in the farming industry have a rightto express an opinion on how farming is conducted? If they think it important that higher environmental standards are met, that is a perfectly valid point for them to make.

[Simon Hart]

Yes, I do agree. That is perfectly reasonable and the evidence clearly shows that nobody in agricultural food production would disagree. Indeed, people in the industry have been making such points for longer than the hon. Lady or I have. This is all about fairness, to use a word that is also becoming rather fashionable. On that point, our countryside and industry are the envy of Europe not because of politicians but despite them. My hon. Friend the Member for Bury North, who has just left his place, accurately raised that issue in his intervention. We have to be careful that when we pass legislation that affects rural Britain, particularly agriculture, we do not create a more complicated and therefore less competitive agriculture industry, thereby failing to achieve the benefits that the supporters of the Bill have quite reasonably set out to achieve.

[Sarah Newton (Truro and Falmouth) (Con)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that much of the subsidy to farmers that the hon. Member for Bristol East (Kerry McCarthy) mentioned is for benefiting biodiversity, for stewardship and for taking great care of the environment being farmed?

[Simon Hart]

I do, and that is a very visible shift in subsidy policy that has taken place over the past 10 or 20 years. Instead of subsidy of food production simply for food production’s sake, we have moved much more towards environmental stewardship. The point I was trying to make was that we should not assume for one moment that environmental stewardship is not taken extremely seriously by farmers across all aspects of agriculture, not just food production; they value environmental stewardship and have been part of it because they feel that that is their duty, not only to their farms but to the community. That has always been the case, yet that gets lost in these debates. Somehow, there is the underlying view that we have to make farmers take environmental stewardship seriously. That is not the case. The farmers whom I know take it extremely seriously. The only barrier between them and successful environmental stewardship has generally been politicians, not a desire to make money at the expense of the environment.

If I were to shine a bright light on the Bill I would point out that surely any decent Secretary of State of whatever party would automatically insert into their thinking, if not their legislation, all the checks and balances that we are told are now so essential that they have to be enshrined in law. I have to ask why, over the past 13, 15 or 20 years, successive Secretaries of State at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and its predecessor, the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, did not do that as a matter of routine.

I recall the creation of something called the Rural Advocate under the previous Government. I am not even sure, to my great shame, whether he still exists, but his job was to oversee a sort of rural-proofing exercise to ensure that any legislation—not just that sponsored by DEFRA, but legislation from any Government Department —passed the test as far as rural communities were concerned. My criticism is that perhaps the Bill takes far too narrow a line of attack, at this stage, at any rate.

I want to move on to the vexed question of sustainability. It is difficult to define it as accurately as we might like in this debate. I suspect that it is tempting for Members, particularly new Members, to resist the chance of objecting to anything that has “sustainability” in the title, because we may somehow be seen as regressive or as dinosaurs if we do.

As far as the Bill is concerned, most of us have come under heavy bombardment over the past few weeks from various pressure groups, some of which have had more compelling arguments than others. Three particular people have pushed me as close as I was happy to go towards supporting the measure. One was my hon. Friend the Member for Richmond Park (Zac Goldsmith); I value his opinion on every subject, but we cannot quite agree on this one. I was subject to some late-night lobbying yesterday from Mr Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, but even his persuasive argument, including the promise of a River Cottage hamper for Christmas if I changed my mind, was insufficient. I should also mention the fantastic efforts and unique lobbying skills of Mr Stanley Johnson, who is up in the Public Gallery today, but even the combined heavy bombardment from those three expert individuals, whom I respect greatly, failed to convince me that we are anywhere near defining sustainability as well as we might, for the purposes of the Bill becoming an Act.

[Henry Smith (Crawley) (Con)]

I agree that sustainability is a much abused word, but does my hon. Friend not agree that sustainability involves economic, social and environmental concerns, both in this country and around the world?

[Simon Hart]

I do, and we sometimes forget that there is a strong social and economic ingredient in that definition; it has been missing so far in this debate. I am sure that the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent South will tell us that we have got that wrong, but I have seen nothing, in the hundreds of e-mails that we have had so far, to convince me that the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Crawley (Henry Smith) has been properly addressed.

It is odd that the Bill focuses purely on livestock production. It seems obvious that if we are to talk about sustainable farming, we should not restrict ourselves purely to livestock. I am not convinced that the Bill has been properly considered in that respect. To pluck one example from the sky—no pun intended—let us consider poultry production. It seems odd that we have not properly examined the argument that intensive poultry production has less of an adverse carbon footprint than extensive poultry production. That has not been addressed, nor had consumer purchasing habits until the hon. Member for North Antrim raised them. There is a reference in the Bill to rural resilience. I do not know what that is, in the context of the Bill, but I do know that it is something with which I have been extremely familiar for 10 years. The resilience of the rural community is far from being a satisfactory excuse to increase the burden of regulation on the rural community. We cannot possibly simply depend on the resilience of our friends in the livestock industry for the purposes of the Bill.

We have not discussed in any great detail the Bill’s possible adverse effects on livestock producers. There was one reference, and only one, this morning to profit—a sort of dirty word, it seems, when we talk about sustainability. Unless there is profit in farming, and unless there is the sort of profit that enables farmers to invest long term as opposed to short term, then there will be no sustainability of any sort—no environmental sustainability, no social sustainability and no economic sustainability. There was a famous bumper sticker in America a year or so ago, which quite simply said, “No farmers, no food”.

We overlook the sustainability question and the long-term profitability of farming at our peril. While there has been a bit of a debate about intensive dairy units and what number of cows constitutes unacceptability, it seems interesting that, at long last, there are people out there who are prepared to consider investing several million pounds in UK agriculture. We have been striving for generations to persuade people to do that. The moment somebody comes up with a cost-effective way of doing so, we fall on them like a pack of wolves and try to stop them. We have got to be careful about being carried away by a scare story.

[Steve McCabe (Birmingham, Selly Oak) (Lab)]

As I listen to the hon. Gentleman, I wonder whether he is talking about the same Bill as I have been looking at. One of its central themes is to try to reduce dependency on imported meat and the risky practices that happen outside this country. I thought that that was a major defence of British farming and I am surprised that he does not support that.

[Simon Hart]

I think we are reading the same Bill, but it strikes me as odd that, of 1,000 livestock producers in my own part of west Wales, not a single one has written to me suggesting that I support this measure—not one.

[Steve McCabe]

The hon. Gentleman should have explained the Bill to them.

[Simon Hart]

Does the hon. Gentleman wish to intervene? I suspect that the sponsors of the Bill are responsible for explaining it to the people whom it affects. My earlier comments about having to be careful that legislation is not seen to over-regulate our farming industry, and thereby make it less competitive, must be taken seriously. In the hon. Gentleman’s favour, I would say that the aspirational elements of the measure are to be commended. It is fair to say that there are a number of Members across the House who might not be able to support the Bill today, but who support its aspirational elements, particularly local procurement for institutions such as the NHS and the Ministry of Defence. Indeed, I think the Conservative party manifesto said that we would pursue such a measure. Perhaps the Minister could expand on that. Equally, as we have heard, farmers have signed up enthusiastically to a number of environmental schemes, with the possible exception of Glastir in Wales, which has proved to be a bureaucratic nightmare, unlike its excellent predecessor.

To conclude, I want to deal with the question of balance. With all these things, it is difficult to strike the right balance between encouraging and generating economic sustainability in the farming industry which, in my opinion at any rate, leads to environmental sustainability, and the interests of those who wish to use the land for non-agricultural or non-food production purposes. It is difficult to strike the right balance between those who have a duty to produce good-quality, affordable food and those who maintain sensible, measured and worthy considerations. Perhaps my greatest concern is that the Bill does not seem to strike that balance. Although it rightly puts the focus of responsibility on the Secretary of State and on the politicians, it does not deal with that in a way that, if enshrined in law, would be fair, reasonable or balanced. It is good to see a measure that regulates us rather than farmers, but it is not quite in the right condition yet. For that reason, for anybody who has a real interest in striking that balance and in supporting the desire of rural communities to be economically, socially and environmentally sustainable and responsible, it is impossible, at least on this occasion, to support the measure.