Agriculture Bill

Lord Whitty Excerpts

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

[Lord Whitty (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, I welcome the somewhat belated arrival of the Bill in this House, and I welcome its general sense of direction. However, we have only half the picture in the Bill. We do not yet know the trading environment in which we will be operating and in which these measures will be delivered; nor is the mechanism for delivery and enforcement clear.

During the Brexit campaign, one lot of Brexiteers foresaw a future of cheap food for consumers coming from trade agreements with low-cost countries, while another group envisaged a renaissance of British agriculture where we made our own rules to attain a high degree of self-sufficiency, protected from the burden of Brussels bureaucracy on the one hand and European competition on the other. Of course, those positions were contradictory but they had in common an assumption of a seriously reduced burden of regulation. Cheap food and self-sufficiency both meant lower standards.

Those pressures are still there, but thankfully Ministers have taken a third position: maintain our standards and subsidise public goods. However, we do not know the trading context and the Bill does not really make clear how we deliver a radically different, sustainable and healthier food production system in this country.

As a point of history, the CAP was never popular. We have been in the system for nearly 50 years. Just half way through that I became a Minister for Agriculture when we switched from the much-derided and distorted production subsidy system to the almost equally derided land-based system. There were some supposed advantages of the switch in the Fischler reforms of 2005 but they were not fully realised. At the time, we thought that we would be moving to a new system of multilateral trade agreements in the Doha round. In practice, that never materialised but would have required a substantial dismantling of the production subsidy. As I said, that never happened and we are now in a much more anarchic world trade position.

Applying the direct payment to all agricultural land meant that food, welfare and environmental standards could be made to apply to all agriculture: you lost the subsidy, or part of it, if you did not comply. In practice, regrettably that system of cross-compliance was never properly implemented here or across Europe. However, the fact is that the Bill takes away some of that universality, and that is dangerous, unless we have a wider plan to which we are working, as my noble friend Lady Young said, for an overall framework for land use.

There are three or four omissions from the Bill to which I want to return. First, the defects of the last CAP reforms were seriously compounded in this country by the failure to administer the system effectively. The RPA seriously failed, yet the Bill gives no clarity over how the new system, much more complex and granular, will be administered or what the relation of that is to the machinery to come in the environment Bill.

Secondly, we need tougher measures against the overchemicalisation of farming. I have heard that the reason why pesticide regulation is not explicitly referred to in the Bill is that we have a perfectly adequate domestic system for pesticide regulation. We do not. There are dangers to human health as well as damage to air, soil and water, livestock and biodiversity if we do not reduce the dependence on chemical solutions.

Thirdly, for a new era in agriculture we need to ensure a new generation of those who work the land. We need to make it easier for new, younger farmers to come into the business without necessarily having inherited the land. I want to see a revival of county farms. We also need a wider home-based, skilled and better-paid workforce on the land. Our immigration policy will make dependency on overseas labour impossible for a range of jobs, from seasonal fruit pickers to livestock vets. We need to upgrade the whole domestic labour force. I hope to return to these issues at later stages of the Bill.