Agriculture Bill

Baroness Parminter Excerpts

2nd reading & 2nd reading (Hansard) & 2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 10th June 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Parminter (LD) [V]]

My Lords,

“God made the land for the people”.


I was reminded of that rallying cry from the Liberal anthem “The Land” as I considered this Bill. There have been many political struggles down the years over the ownership and management of land, of which nearly three quarters in the UK is farmed. This Bill righty seeks a new consensus on how we manage the sometimes competing demands of farmed land and how we reward those who steward it on the people’s behalf.

So, whilst we are saddened this has been necessitated by our leaving the European Union, Liberal Democrats welcome the new approach proposed by the Government of paying farmers and land managers public money for delivering public goods: namely, protecting the environment, on which we depend, to produce healthy food; enhancing biodiversity; and tackling the impacts of climate change—all this at the same time as maintaining the patchwork quilt of fields and rolling hills which create a sense of local place, so valued for our physical and mental well-being. But this is only an enabling Bill, and much remains unclear about how those welcome ambitions will become more than aspirations.

In the past, the more land you had, the more money you received. Thankfully, in the future, payments will depend on delivering agreed legal targets. But, despite the welcome multiannual financial plans, there is no requirement for a budget to be set for the individual component schemes or clarity on the long-term funding framework for farmers.

While the Bill allows for drawing up targets and metrics to deliver the public goods, there is no clarity as to how the new measures will be regulated and enforced. It has been estimated that, at present, farms have just a one in 200 chance of being inspected each year by the Environment Agency. The system already needed radical overhauling, as the government-commissioned review by Dame Glenys Stacey outlined. In future, with a far more complex new system to monitor, it doubly needs it.

Yet the Government have sat on the Stacey review since 2018 and the Bill is silent on any objectives or indications of how a new regulatory framework and anybody administering it might exercise its functions. The Government managed to set these out for the Office for Environmental Protection in the Environment Bill. It is deeply disappointing that the Agriculture Bill gives no sense of how we can guarantee the delivery of the environmental and animal welfare ambitions in it.

It is essential that those ambitions are delivered. Tackling Covid-19 has reminded us how vital it is that our farmers contribute to public health goals by supplying healthy food, while helping us tackle the nature emergency and the worrying decline in biodiversity and wildlife—there has been a 54% drop in farmland birds during my lifetime—and mitigating the effects of climate change by planting trees and restoring peat bogs. The agriculture sector accounts for about 10% of the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions, and we must bring those down, including by cutting on-farm food waste. If food waste was a country, it would be the third-biggest emitter of CO₂ on the planet. Among other amendments that my Liberal Democrat colleagues will speak to at later stages of the Bill, we will introduce one requiring that the Secretary of State’s five-yearly UK food security report includes data on how much food is wasted, since we will not be food secure if we produce plenty but much of it is wasted.

Those ambitions will not be delivered either if all government policy does not support them, including future trade policy. Existing UK agriculture policy, agreed as a member of the European Union, has been pivotal in guaranteeing consumers the safety of their food and respecting the welfare of livestock. It has kept out pork from pigs confined in sow stalls, beef from cattle injected with hormones to enhance their growth and chlorinated chicken to wash away the shame of poor husbandry. The Government say that they are sincere in their commitments to maintaining those standards, so why not put it in the Bill? Liberal Democrats will work with others, including the Labour Front Bench and anyone else in the House, to support amendments to the Bill to ensure our high environmental protections and animal welfare standards are not compromised in trade negotiations, which would also fatally undermine farmers who seek to do the right thing for our health, our animals and our countryside.

No financial support or policy changes on productivity measures should undermine the delivery of other public goods. I will oppose any attempt to use the Bill to overturn existing legislation on gene editing, which would be a serious step backwards for animal welfare and public trust in our food. We need to retain the European model of regulation that we are currently signed up to, where no gene editing is allowed outside the lab and mandatory labelling is required, and we should not enable trade deals with countries such as America, where products from genetically modified animals can be marketed. Rather than amending this Bill to obtain even more productivity and profit from individual animals, who are sentient and have intrinsic worth, I hope that this House will endorse the aim of the Bill to support sustainable agriculture that respects the welfare of farmed animals and enhances biodiversity. The direction of travel in this Bill is welcome, but there is more to be done to ensure that we end up rightly rewarding the careful stewardship of the people’s precious countryside.