Farming

Steven Bonnar Excerpts

Monday 4th March 2024 Commons Chamber

[Steven Bonnar (Coatbridge, Chryston and Bellshill) (SNP)]

Today’s debate had to be rescheduled, but we welcome what is still a timely debate on farming. The Scottish National party will always welcome any opportunity to speak on this issue and especially to give Scottish farmers a voice in this place.

I will talk today about the vital role farmers and farming play in the rich fabric of Scottish tradition and outline the impact of Scottish farmers on our nation’s economy, the health of our people, and the protection and management of our environment. I will also detail just some of the mounting pressures they face largely due to this Conservative Government’s long-held obsession with Brexit.

This debate is timely for several reasons. The first is that the Prime Minister spoke at the NFU annual conference a fortnight ago. “Brave” is a word that absolutely nobody would attribute to the current Prime Minister, but he is the first Tory Prime Minister to address the conference since 1992 and the first UK Prime Minister to do so since 2008. If anyone in this Chamber, or indeed any of our constituents, were looking for a telling insight into Westminster’s attitude to farming and agriculture, they need look no further than that.

I cannot help but wonder what it was that kept the Tory leadership away from such a meeting for so long. Why, despite having four Prime Ministers in that time, was the current Prime Minister the first in 28 years to make such a commitment—although in the interests of fairness it is only right that we acknowledge that the Prime Minister’s immediate predecessor was not in office long enough to have received an invitation? What might have been the cause of that historic hiatus? Perhaps it was a long-held tradition of successive Tory Governments taking the rural vote and communities for granted. Perhaps it was a fear of scrutiny from the sector itself, or perhaps it was the crippling knowledge that the Tory obsession with Brexit is playing the defining role in the decline of our once great agricultural industries. It was probably a combination of all three.

We on the SNP Benches believe that the Prime Minister’s address to the NFU should have begun with an outright apology. The Westminster Government have hammered farmers with their Brexit obsession, leaving them to fend for themselves in facing the devastating impact of higher costs, mountains of red tape, labour shortages and eyewatering delays over border controls.

[Wendy Chamberlain (North East Fife) (LD)]

Alongside my right hon. Friend the Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr Carmichael), I am grateful to be here as a Scottish MP who can also give a voice to Scottish farmers. The hon. Gentleman is making good points on Brexit, and I agree with him, but does he agree with me on the importance of skills for farming and having training where the communities are? Scotland’s Rural College received a Queen’s anniversary award for innovation a couple of weeks ago, and I was in London to see that, but the SRUC Elmwood campus in Cupar is facing devastating cuts, largely as a result of the Scottish Government’s cuts to higher and further education. Its golf course will be sold off, and there are doubts over the future of its animal care unit. Does he agree that the SRUC is an integral part of Cupar and that the Scottish Government should be helping the SRUC with funding to keep it there as a going concern?

--- Later in debate ---

[Steven Bonnar]

I agree with the hon. Member, and I will make representations as such. I look forward to all contributions in the Chamber from all Members across Scotland today.

The debate is timely, as we finally saw the UK Government responding to decade-long calls for fairer contracts for dairy farmers. Since as long ago as 2011, NFU Scotland has been desperately pushing on behalf of its members for reform in that area, so we welcome legislation to regulate dairy contracts, but we join NFU Scotland and other unions in highlighting the devastating delay shown by the Westminster Government in listening to our dairy farmers and that sector.

Farming is vital to the Scottish economy. The sector in Scotland delivers an annual production output of £3.3 billion, employing 67,000 workers directly on farm and supporting a further 300,000 jobs within agricultural activities. It has long been the backbone of rural communities in Scotland and our surrounding landscapes. We are a nation with a proud agricultural history of crofters, growers and farmers shaping global methods of food production that are still practised today. Scottish salmon, Aberdeen Angus, oat-based products and Scotch whisky all represent modern success stories for our resilient food and drink sector. Exports of those Scottish products and others reached a total export value of £8 billion in 2022.

While those products have success in common, they are also united by a far darker shared trait: their new-found precarious position as a result of Brexit red tape, staffing shortages, and a poorly negotiated trade deal that has left them vulnerable to cheap imports. Our farmers, growers and crofters are resilient and have been for centuries. They have had to be—forging a livelihood in often remote and weather-beaten locations, feeding the people of Scotland and those far beyond our shores—but they are struggling. Scottish farmers deserve far better than the blatant disregard and damage they continue to receive from Westminster.

While Labour in Wales and the Tories here in England fail to deliver for farmers, with EU replacement support schemes falling far short of what was promised, the SNP Scottish Government have provided the most generous package of support for farmers and crofters across the UK. We are lucky that farming is a devolved matter, so we can make these interventions back in Scotland. We can try our best to support this vital part of our economy, our history and our culture. With both the main parties here in Westminster in lockstep in their support of Brexit and the damage it is doing, Scottish Government support for farmers in Scotland can only do so much and only stretch so far. We aspire to much more than mitigating the worst of this place.

The general nature of the debate makes it hard for us to shortlist all the damage that this place is doing to farming communities; many aspects of farming deserve to be debated on the Floor of the House. I will touch on some of them, and hon. Members may detect an underlying theme that connects them. I will start with animal welfare, which has been mentioned. Members on all Benches will know that it is of huge importance to me and the SNP. This Tory Government like to talk about standards and the world-leading role that they see us playing on the global stage. It is true that Scottish farmers have some of the highest animal welfare standards in the world, thanks largely to the Welfare of Farmed Animals (Scotland) Regulations 2010 introduced by the Scottish Government.

The actions of the Conservative Government here in Westminster since Brexit have made an absolute mockery of their claims to be concerned about animal welfare. For example, the free trade agreement struck with Australia in 2021 does not honour the Westminster Government’s supposed commitment not to undercut our farmers through unfair competition. We were sold that deal on the laughable pitch that it would save consumers up to £34 million a year—a measly 52p per person. At what cost? At a cost to our farmers. Their high animal welfare standards go unrewarded, and they are penalised by being undercut by imports of a far lower standard. Of course, it is also at a cost to the planet, as we fly goods across the world rather than support local food economies.

Surely the time has come for the UK Government to listen to calls from farmers across Scotland, as well as organisations such as the Landworkers’ Alliance. Through a recent consultation, its Scottish policy team, led by Dr Tara White, has provided invaluable insights into the Scottish Government as they shape our enforced post-Brexit agricultural direction. Organisations such as Compassion in World Farming call for a smarter, more ethical approach to rewarding farmers—through making core minimum animal welfare standards a condition of any tariff or quota-free trade deal; through efficient labelling, so that consumers are better informed about the origin and welfare standards of the product that they are going to consume; and through a localised approach to supply that bolsters local food economies.

Nobody needs reminding of the impacts of the pandemic in revealing weaknesses in our over-reliance on long supply chains and those that rely on the international trade, or of the importance of local food supply systems and meeting our domestic needs. The need for shorter supply chains is only compounded by the climate crisis, and importing food from other countries—especially those as far away as Australia—will serve only to increase greenhouse gas emissions. That contradicts any UK Government claim that they are tackling the climate challenge head on.

Another issue of concern to all of us in the SNP is the cost of our food and the unavoidable reality that while costs for consumers rise, the share of that cost that finds its way to our farmers remains completely stagnant. The Centre for Economic Performance has stated that leaving the European Union added an average of £210 per household to food bills over the two years to the end of 2021. That is the legacy of this place—and that was before the Tory party elected its previous leader, whose reckless relationship with economic reality heaped further costs on each and every one of our constituents.

For any Members who need to be reminded of the impact of the Tory-engineered crisis, data from the Office for National Statistics shows that the overall price of food rose by about 25% between January 2022 and January 2024. In the 10 years prior to that, food prices rose by only 9% in total. We know that farmers have not benefited from those price increases; in fact, the opposite is true. Farmers are paying higher costs for essentials such as feed and fertiliser.

Research for Sustain by Professor Lisa Jack found that of the entire price we might pay for one grocery item, about 98% or 99% of that goes to production and overheads for intermediary companies such as processors and distributors, and then the retailers. That means our farmers, our crofters and our growers are left with crumbs: sometimes as little as 1p of profit for each item they produce.

Let me take this opportunity to ask the Minister, once again, to consider price caps to stop the supermarkets profiteering and to help ensure that basic essentials are not beyond the reach of many people. Better still, the UK Government could answer calls from organisations such as Sustain and force supermarkets to publish more information about their own supply chains. We in the SNP are clear that farmers must be paid what they are owed, because they provide a secure, fair and sustainable future for family farms across all these nations. We need urgently to review existing frameworks that are supposed to enshrine that fairness but are not acting as well as they should, including looking at the efficacy of the grocery supply code of practice.

Another issue raised by the SNP in this place consistently is the crippling effect of Brexit on the ability of our farmers to staff their farms. Currently, the UK relies on some 58,000 seasonal workers to harvest the crops grown by our domestic system, not counting those working in the wider food production and farming system. Despite constant warnings from farmers and unions in Scotland during the referendum and after, Brexit has had a devastating impact on the ability of farmers to find staff at peak times of the harvest cycle. Despite the introduction of short-term visas for overseas workers to fill those roles, significant immigration issues remain, especially for seasonal workers, those forced to work in food manufacturing and, as we have heard, those working in abattoirs. The introduction of short-term visas not only failed to address worker shortages in agricultural and food production in Scotland but posed another serious challenge. The complexities of the system and associated costs of the move to the UK mean that many workers are often at the sharp end of exploitation—a great deal of which occurs in the application process itself, where third parties take advantage of applicants struggling to navigate the UK system.

What have we been left with? We have an immigration system that allows exploitation at its outset and has not effectively filled the vacancies, and a hostile environment created by the attitude of this Tory Government, which deters workers with the appropriate skillset from even considering coming to the UK to carry out that work. I said earlier that consistent themes emanate from Westminster, the painful reality of which have become all too familiar to the people of Scotland: Tory chaos, Tory mismanagement and the enduring damage of Brexit, which threatens to decimate our hard-working and admirably resilient farmers in Scotland.

In stark contrast, we in the SNP stand up for Scottish farmers wherever we can on matters that are fully devolved. We have given clarity and assurances that we will support our farming industry. We have introduced the Agriculture and Rural Communities (Scotland) Bill, which is a milestone in our work to transform how we support farming and food production in Scotland, to become a global leader in sustainable and regenerative agriculture. A final example of the differences between the clear leadership shown in Scotland and the approach favoured down here is that, in his address to the National Farmers Union Scottish conference, the First Minister announced that the Scottish Government have now committed up to 70% of the budget made available through tiers 1 and 2 of the frameworks.

Today’s debate is welcome and incredibly important. Farmers in Scotland are close to breaking point. Despite the constant commitment of support from the Scottish Government, there is only so much we can do to clean up the mess that has been left by the Tory Government. This Government continue to bury their heads in the sand, but we in the SNP will continue to work hard to secure the fair and sustainable future that Scottish family farms deserve. There is only one way to properly address the challenges that farmers face and support and protect Scotland’s agricultural history: an independent Scotland taking its place within the European Union. Only one party is making the case for that: the SNP.