British Meat and Dairy Products

Victoria Prentis Excerpts

Wednesday 28th April 2021 Westminster Hall

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Victoria Prentis)]

It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Ghani, and to take part in this debate secured by my hon. Friend the Member for North Devon (Selaine Saxby). British meat and dairy products have a really good reputation for quality, built on high animal welfare standards, strong environmental protections, traceability and sustainability. This Government will always support our farmers and producers, not only during Great British Beef Week.

It is great to be in a room full of such enthusiasts for their own local products. I will not, however, judge between Angus cattle and South Devon cattle, both of which we have kept at home. Other products are available and are kept by the farmers in the constituencies of those in this room. It is good to hear the enthusiasm in the room for buying local, buying sustainable and buying British. It is encouraging that, despite the challenges of the pandemic, and aside from the recent difficulties in the pig sector, generally our meat and dairy markets remain relatively strong, with good prices for milk, poultry, beef and especially lamb, which has been at 10-year highs since the beginning of this year.

I will not have time to respond to every issue raised, but I briefly mention the Chairman of the Select Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Neil Parish), who raised the problem of re-tagging animals moving from GB to NI. This is not required, as I am sure he knows, for animals going for slaughter only, but rather for breeding animals. We are aware of the burdens on those moving livestock and are working closely with the Department of Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs where we can to try to minimise those issues taking place at the moment.

We heard about a desire to buy British from many Members, and about the commitment that some of our supermarkets have shown to selling British-sourced meat and dairy products. I was grateful to be able to speak to many representatives from our supermarkets on a call last week, specifically, in fact, about pork. The right hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr Carmichael) made a thoughtful speech about the interrelationships in the rural supply chain. My hon. Friend the Member for Truro and Falmouth (Cherilyn Mackrory) was keen to support farm shops and, as ever, the fishing industry in her constituency in doing more direct selling to customers.

We are really ambitious, as a Government. We had a manifesto commitment that we want people at home and abroad lining up to buy British. We are working closely with the AHDB, and Members may have noticed that we had a number of successful campaigns during the pandemic, including Milk Your Moments, which is slightly more modern but just as good as that mentioned by the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon)—“Go to work on an egg”.

On trade, the successful conclusion of negotiations with the EU with a deal, ratified only yesterday, based on zero tariffs and zero quotas means that we can now develop new relationships with our trading partners in the EU and globally. We are keen to grow our markets through the Department for International Trade’s new Open Doors campaign and increased market support and help in this area. We have a great agreement with Japan, which opens the Japanese market to UK exports of lamb and beef for the first time in two decades.

It was good to hear the level of ambition from the Cotswolds, represented so ably by a farmer, my hon. Friend the Member for The Cotswolds (Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown); from my hon. Friend the Member for Gloucester (Richard Graham), who spoke specifically about the Indonesian market—I will follow up with him directly on some of the points he raised; and from my hon. Friend the Member for Somerton and Frome (David Warburton), who particularly mentioned the cheese that he is keen to export.

The Government are clear, to reassure the hon. Member for Upper Bann (Carla Lockhart) and other Members, that we are not compromising on the UK’s high environmental protection, animal welfare and food safety standards. The strong British reputation for our food is the basis on which we intend to sell our produce, both at home and abroad.

On other points—my hon. Friend the Member for Isle of Wight (Bob Seely) mentioned the possibility of looking at a mobile abattoir scheme. I have spoken to him about that before, and am keen to do so again. We are piloting such a scheme, and look forward to learning from that and if it is appropriate to roll out more widely. A number of Members, including my hon. Friend the Member for St Austell and Newquay (Steve Double), spoke about labelling—an important issue for all the food we sell. We spent time this morning on a complicated Statutory Instrument on changes to labelling. We will talk more about that this year as we go into consultation on labelling, and I encourage him to get involved.

On the environment, the PM has declared that tackling climate change and preserving biodiversity is the UK’s number one foreign policy priority. He saw this first hand when he visited a livestock farm in Derbyshire last week. Achieving net zero for 2050 is an absolute priority for this Government. We were the first major economy to bring this target into law, and this is just the beginning. We acknowledge the ambition of the farming industry in this space, and have great examples of UK dairy companies and others leading the way on this. There is a great deal that the livestock sector can, and will do, to help move towards these ambitious targets.

As many Members have said, we have one of the most efficient and sustainable systems of livestock in the world. Reducing production of our own, increasingly carbon efficient products, and importing less carbon efficient products from overseas, is clearly not the solution. Nor is it sensible to import feeds grown in ways that are damaging to the global environment just to fit our targets—[Interruption.] I will not give way, I have a great deal to get through—I apologise. New feeds will be of a real benefit, and good work is being done to understand ruminant digestion and target both nutrition use and reduce methane emissions.

We must be honest about possible trade-offs with animal welfare when we have this debate. We need to do further work on the use of nitrogen fertilizers and nitrogen fixing mixes in grass. It was interesting to hear my hon. Friend the Member for Tiverton and Honiton talking passionately about herbal leys, which I would echo if I had longer. Carbon sequestered by hedgerows and on farm woodland can help meet our targets, though some of that will not be recognised for many years. It must be recognised that well-managed livestock provides huge benefits, such as supporting biodiversity, protecting the character of some of our most beautiful landscapes, and creating employment for rural communities. It provides important nutrition as well, and we must remember that food is at the heart of what we do. We recognise the delicate balance between these outcomes and the potential environmental trade-offs, and will ensure that decision making is evidence led, but takes into account the full sweep of trade-offs.

I need to let the hon. Lady finish the debate, but I will say briefly that, despite the views of the Opposition spokesman, the hon. Member for Cambridge (Daniel Zeichner), targeted support for our farmers is definitely the way to go. Paying people for public goods is a much better way of optimising the environmental solutions than merely sticking with CAP. Henry Dimbleby will report in July. We look forward to a major conversation across the country about buying British, buying local and buying sustainable, and all other aspects of food production, until the Government’s response in December to his report. This has been a great debate, and I thank hon. Members for taking part.