Cost of Living

Debate between Tim Farron and Pat Glass

Wednesday 16th May 2012 Commons Chamber

[Tim Farron (Westmorland and Lonsdale) (LD)]

I want to focus my remarks on the parts of the Queen’s Speech relating to rural affairs, particularly farming and the groceries code adjudicator, as mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for South Thanet (Laura Sandys).

I hope that all of us, whatever our politics, would at least have been relieved and encouraged when we saw this morning’s unemployment figures, while not finding them the source of a desire to punch the air and celebrate. I guess that during the day most of us will have seen in our inboxes reference to the unemployment levels in our own constituencies; we always look at those, as I did. I can claim pretty much no credit whatsoever for the fact that Westmorland and Lonsdale has the lowest unemployment in England. When we look at these stats and what they mean for the cost of living and for people’s ability to keep their heads above water, we see that nothing is more important than whether someone has a job and whether it pays well. The latter is equally important. The fact that we have very low unemployment in our part of the world is a credit to businesses and the public sector, both local and national, but it overlooks the fact that our local average income is less than £20,000 a year while the average house price in Westmorland is £240,000. That means that the average person is earning a twelfth of what it costs to buy a home. That is why we have so many people on the social housing waiting list and why so many people find it a struggle. If someone lives on my patch, the chances are that they are in work but that they are still struggling because the cost of living is a significant problem given the nature of what it is to live in a rural area.

When we talk about the cost of living, it is worth reflecting on something that has changed drastically during the post-war period. In 1954, 33% of the average household budget was spent on food; today, that figure is about 11%. Of course, that progress is welcome, but it has not happened entirely for good reasons. It is good that food is less expensive these days—Members will be delighted to know that I do not claim credit for that either—but we need to remember that one of the reasons for that is the imbalance in the food market. We have a handful of very powerful retailers who do a good job; they do what any of us would do if we were given the freedom to do what the supermarkets are enabled to do. We have a handful of processors and many hundreds of suppliers. In such a market, as everyone knows, the powerful few are able to take advantage of the relatively powerless many. Let us be honest—the reason why food prices have been as they have over the decades has as much to do with exploitation as with progress.

[Pat Glass]

Last year, during the long summer holidays, I was told by the chief executive of the local hospital trust that children in my constituency had been admitted to hospital with malnutrition. Would the hon. Gentleman and his Government like to take responsibility for that?

[Tim Farron]

As a human being and as someone who is involved in politics, I do take responsibility and do not pretend that it is somebody else’s fault. It is not peculiar, two years into a particular Government, to point the finger at them for something that is a moral crime. If those things are genuinely happening—I am absolutely prepared to believe that they are—then we all take responsibility. One of things that I find unseemly about this world of politics in which we work is how we can sometimes be delighted at people’s misfortune because there is a political point to be made. I try to be reasonable, non-partisan and non-tribal, although I do not always succeed, and I try not to bracket together those in one party or another as having a collective psyche. However, similarly to the hon. Lady’s stance on this issue, I suspect, I observed earlier Labour Members cheering when someone mentioned that we are in recession, as if that were a good thing; I suppose that it might be seen as a political benefit. There was almost embarrassment on the part of Labour Front Benchers about the fact that there was some good news today on unemployment. We must be prepared to take collective responsibility for the things that are wrong and celebrate the things that are positive.

Let me therefore point out something that is wrong. Over the past month, there has been a drop of 2p a litre in the amount paid to dairy farmers for milk. That means that the average dairy farmer is now getting 3p to 4p less per litre than it costs him to produce it. At the back end of the previous Government’s time in office, I tabled some parliamentary questions which showed that the average annual income of a hill farmer, after all the relatively small payments that they get through the single farm payments scheme, was £5,000. Now, I do not know how many hours most hill farmers work each day, but the ones that I know work 16, 17 or 18-hour days. That means that they make about a quarter of the minimum wage. That is an outrage. I wonder whether the hon. Member for North West Durham (Pat Glass) would take responsibility for that, given that it happened under her Government. Of course, we all bear collective responsibility and it is right to say so. The exploitation of dairy farmers, sheep farmers and farmers in general happens because of an imbalance in our market and because of market failure.

Everyone in this House ought to be committed—I am sure that we all are—to fair trade. However, there is something peculiar about the fact that we can wander down one aisle in a shop and buy some Colombian fair trade coffee, and feel good about ourselves for having done so, and then go down the next aisle to buy the milk to put in that coffee, which has been ripped out of the hands of some underpaid Cumbrian farmer. We want fair trade for British farmers, as well as for farmers across the world. Fair trade at home matters. That is why the announcement in the Queen’s Speech of a groceries code adjudicator with teeth is a massive step forward for rural areas and for food producers of all kinds. It is fair and just to do that, but it is also sensible because unfairness damages us all.

Over the 15-year period of 1995 to 2010, which is not entirely coterminous with the Labour Government, there was a 50% drop in the number of dairy farmers in this country. Over the past 30 years, there has been a 25% drop in our country’s capacity to feed itself. If we do not take account of that, we will go down together. It has happened partly because the supermarkets and the food processors are too keen to make a quick buck at the expense of the exploited supplier and producer, rather than looking to the long term.