Water Companies: Environmental Pollution

Lord Rooker Excerpts

Tuesday 19th July 2022 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Rooker]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what plans they have to change the penalties for environmental pollution by water companies.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Lord Benyon) (Con)]

My Lords, the law currently allows Ofwat to issue fines of up to 10% of annual turnover and the Environment Agency to prosecute water companies and their directors, leading to court-imposed fines. We have been clear that regulators should not hesitate to bring the strongest enforcement action where companies have broken the law. The independent Sentencing Council has agreed to review guidelines to ensure that fines, applied by the courts, remain an effective deterrent.

[Lord Rooker (Lab)]

Does the Minister support the call by the chair of the Environment Agency for prison sentences for chief executives and board members of the worst water company offenders and for their directors to be struck off, so they cannot simply alter their CV and move on to another role? The two water companies outlined last week as “terrible across the board” are Southern Water and South West Water. Is the Minister aware that the chairs and CEOs of those two companies—Keith Lough, Lawrence Gosden, Gill Rider and Susan Davy—have at least eight other roles between them? Should they not be removed from those external roles so they can concentrate on what they are being paid for—delivering clean water and cleanly getting rid of wastewater?

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

The Environment Agency is part of Defra, so absolutely I agree with what the chair of the Environment Agency said in relation to a report that was published on Thursday. I shall read a section of it:

“The sector’s performance on pollution was shocking, much worse than previous years … Company directors let this occur and it is simply unacceptable. Over the years the public have seen water company executives and investors rewarded handsomely while the environment pays the price. The water companies are behaving like this for a simple reason: because they can. We intend to make it too painful for them to continue as they are.”


That report speaks for the Government.

Food Security

Lord Rooker Excerpts

Monday 13th June 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

I am well aware of this case in Suffolk and the concerns of local people about loss of good agricultural land. The food strategy published today sets out the ambition to maintain our high levels of food security and production. Those sorts of developments need to be seen in the context of that ambition, and very strict rules relate to both planning and the use of the best agricultural land. That may well apply in the case that my noble friend refers to.

[Lord Rooker (Lab)]

With about 7 billion trees, I think, we are one of the least forested countries in Europe, and there is a case for more trees—the right trees in the right place. I cannot understand why there is not a complete ban on using food-producing land for solar farms, when all the flat roofs of the warehouses and factories in this country could be used for that. There would be more space available; it is a given that it does not take good agricultural food-producing land.

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

There are many grants that people can source, even at a household level, to acquire and install solar panels on roofs, and the noble Lord is entirely right to point that out. He is also right that we need more trees. We have very ambitious targets of planting 30,000 hectares of additional trees every year by the end of this Parliament. That can be achieved without impacting our food security, and there are many areas of renewable energy production that can be done in accordance with food production as well.

Veterinary Personnel

Lord Rooker Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd March 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

The noble Lord makes a very good point. That committee could well have a very beneficial effect, and I will go back and ask officials when it is next due to meet and let him know.

[Lord Rooker (Lab)]

My Lords, all this was exactly predicted by the EU scrutiny committees of this House before and after Brexit. We took evidence and knew what was going to happen. The noble Lord is quite right: the shortage did occur before Brexit; I do not deny that. The last Labour Government started scholarships; this Government started Keele and Harper Adams in particular. However, what we need is food-production animal vets, not companion animal vets. That is the problem and given the current situation of banning people coming here from Europe, I do not see how we are going to solve it. While there is no safety issue in the abattoirs at present, there will be if things carry on like this.

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

The noble Lord is quite right to point out that this has been a long-running problem. In fact, it is large-animal vets we want to see more of. We want to encourage people into the profession and to go not just for the smaller animal sector, but for farm animals as well. We were, however, successful in negotiating with the Home Office to have this profession listed as a shortage occupation, and that has resulted in more vets coming into this country. We want to see more of that.

Climate Change

Lord Rooker Excerpts

Tuesday 1st March 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

My colleagues at Defra—my noble friend Lord Goldsmith, who led on this at COP, and my colleague Jo Churchill, who leads on climate change adaptation—and I would certainly be happy to meet the noble Lord to explain how we hope we are still on track for 1.5 degrees, while ensuring that we adapt to all the risks in the report we are responding to that we could face in the coming decades.

[Lord Rooker (Lab)]

Does the Minister accept that one of the problems with renewables is intermittency of supply? Surely one way round that serious problem for the next decade would be to use gas like we do now but capture the carbon. The Government have never taken carbon capture and storage seriously and are now putting all their eggs in the hydrogen basket. Carbon capture and storage will enable us to deal with the intermittency, I accept by burning a fossil fuel, but allow no carbon to go into the atmosphere. Why are the Government so reluctant to push carbon capture and storage?

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

The Government have co-financed a number of research projects on this. It remains a technology that has potential. We are working to understand it, its viability and all its implications to ensure that our infrastructure in the North Sea can be used as we develop it.

Eggs (England) Regulations 2021

Lord Rooker Excerpts

Tuesday 23rd November 2021 Grand Committee

[Lord Rooker (Lab)]

My Lords, before I start, I want to register a complaint about this Room. Since 2013, I have sat on this side of the Room, previously being a Minister and chair of the FSA. I am fed up to the back teeth; that light up there has been flashing for over eight years. It does not affect people on the other side. I fully accept that you have to be pretty sensitive to it, but it has been like that for eight years and no one has done anything about it.

Having got that off my chest, I thank the Minister for bringing forward these regulations. I accept, as he said, that they are very narrow, but this is a golden opportunity to raise other issues relating to eggs, as has been the case. I agree entirely with the speech of the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh of Pickering. Some time, I would like the Minister to answer the point just made by the noble Lord: what is our latest self-sufficiency figure? I found a figure of 89% of imports, or £1.7 billion, and exports of only £315 million. It is not a big issue. I just wondered what it was.

People joked about egg fraud when I raised it as a Minister, but it is big business. We must take steps to stamp it out. I will give only a snapshot. In 2010, Mr Owen of Bromsgrove was fined £3 million and did three years inside. That case started while I was at Defra, from 2006 to 2008, because of the way it was tipped off. Some 100 million eggs were mis-sold due to mislabelling. The defence had the brass neck to argue that Owen was not the only person “creating mischief in the egg industry”. That is the kind of class act of barristers. That was the defence argument—a bit of mischief. Some 100 million eggs were mis-sold; basically, low-level stuff sold as free range.

In 2018—it has not gone away—there was payback of £500,000 and 30 months inside for Anthony Clarkson of Preston. Again, it was free-range egg fraud—buying barn eggs and selling them free range. There are plenty available. In February 2019, a Netherlands trader was convicted of selling eggs unfit for human consumption. The other thing is: can we trust the statistics on eggs? We are talking about big figures by definition. I regret to say that I have only just discovered that, from 1996, hopefully not until now, HMRC showed errors in its imports and exports of three times the real figure. For 2008, the claim was that 600,000 cases—a case is a lot of eggs, at least 360—were exported, but it turned out to be less than 200,000.

In February 2013, Defra reported that the UK imported 267,000 cases, but, in reality, it turned out to be 127,000 cases. The exports in the same year were given as 61,000 cases, but, in reality, it was only 16,000 cases. There is a brilliant graph of what HMRC was producing. I take exception to this because, at some point during that period, I would have answered Parliamentary Questions, both in 1997-99 and 2006-08, giving false information. I have never been informed about this; it has come about only because I was searching the web in preparation for this debate. I had no idea about the revised figures of this HMRC miscalculation. Quite a serious issue is: can we trust the figures that we are given?

As the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh, said, this is all about the EU and Brexit. The EU’s export figures and documentation are brilliantly accessible, unlike ours. I gather that, in 2019, the EU exported to the UK 12,048 tonnes of eggs for consumption—I have dealt only with eggs for consumption; I have not dealt with eggs for food production or day-old chicks. That figure is down in 2021 to 7,358 tonnes. The UK exported almost a similar figure in 2019: we exported to the EU 11,022 tonnes. That is now down to 6,685 tonnes. The EU imports eggs from all over the world. I am not familiar with the sanitary checks at the ports or the others. We are facilitating food imports from the EU without lots of checks because we accept it; we trust it. If anything is going around and being marketed in the EU, then it is okay by us—that is what we said—and it is why we are not employing loads of people to go round the world checking on food production, which is what the EU was doing for us before Brexit. We are relying on the EU to do it for us. If it is okay for the EU, it is okay for the UK.

The EU imports eggs from around the world—and I mean around the world: from Ukraine, USA and Argentina. It also imports from China—I repeat, China: the equivalent of 1,348 tonnes of eggs in 2020. Other countries include North Macedonia, Albania, Norway, Switzerland, Kazakhstan and Bosnia-Herzegovina. How do we know that the eggs that we import from the EU are only from the 27 member states? If eggs are being moved around the EU—and let us not forget that many of them will come in unmarked; they will be marked in the EU—how do we know that we are not importing from outside the 27?

I would hate to think, for example, that we were importing eggs from China without any checks. We would not know whether they were produced via slave labour, which, as we know, the cotton pickers are in Xinjiang. Who is checking on this? There are some serious issues. In 2020, the EU exported to the UK 100,160 tonnes equivalent. The UK was the biggest destination of eggs from the EU. The next were Japan, with 68,163 tonnes, Israel, with 14,809 and Russia, with 45,378, so the UK was by far the biggest recipient of exported eggs from the EU, with Japan being the next.

Where are they coming from and how do we know? Those are legitimate questions for me, for regulators, for food producers, for customers and for supermarkets. A lot has been done to improve the standards of egg production in the UK—I fully accept that—but how do we know that eggs are coming only from the 27 EU member states? There are some serious issues here that the Minister will, I hope, be fully briefed to answer.

My final point concerns another aspect of this. The eggs that are coming in will not all be for consumption; some of them will be for food production. I picked up from Food Manufacture magazine concerns about the importing of eggs to the UK for use in “British” products—that is, as ingredients in pre-prepared foods. We use imported eggs. If the fact is that we are only 89% or 90% self-sufficient, that 10% represents a hell of a lot of eggs.

I understand that there is a petition asking UK supermarkets, although this is not their full responsibility, and food producers to stop such imports. There is a complete lack of transparency in the sourcing of egg products in such foods. Customers today are faced with eggs on the shelves in supermarkets with the British Lion brand and the name of the farm on them —great—but nobody knows where the eggs they are consuming in the pre-prepared foods they buy on the shelf next door come from, because there is a lack of transparency. They will certainly not all come from the UK as, by definition, they are imports. British Lion egg producers are quoted as saying:

“In recent years there have been a number of food safety issues associated with egg products produced in Europe and further afield.”


“Further afield” means outside of Europe. They go on:

“Using them also adds unnecessary food miles and does not meet the guaranteed, high standards provided by the Code of Practice for the production of Lion Quality Egg Products.”


What is the Minister’s view of the petition?

I have a soft spot for Defra and MAFF, having spent four years in total in both departments. It is the producers’ ministry; that is what I used to say when we were setting up the FSA. “We want the consumer to be looked at. Carry on being the producers’ ministry”, I used to say—but, listening to what the Minister said, it is no longer the producers’ ministry if its approach is to smash up the UK industry by saying that it wants lots of cheap imports. If that is its attitude on eggs, that will be the policy attitude on other foods and ingredients, which is what some of us said would happen before Brexit. We were constantly told by the noble Lord, Lord Gardiner, who was the Minister concerned—I must have a dozen cases of this in my files upstairs—that there would be no diminution in the quality of and food standards for imported food. That was repeated day after day, month after month, with great sincerity. Nobody is questioning the noble Lord’s sincerity but the reality is that the department is seeking to go back on that commitment. That is the only conclusion to draw in talking about cheaper food. Cheaper food comes about only because of less regulation, lower welfare conditions and worse pay and working conditions for workers. That is the only way it happens. It is what happens in this country, which is why we must be careful about the work of the gangmasters organisation.

The reality is that this is a good example. It is an egg. We all know what an egg looks like and what we can do with it. It is not so easy with other products, such as cuts of meat and grains; that is all too technical. The public understand that, if we as the public are being cheated on egg imports, how do we know we are not being cheated on other food imports when the ministry that is supposed to be looking after this and guarding the regulations is now hell-bent on trying to reduce standards? It is no good the Minister shaking his head; he has to give chapter and verse to answer exactly what his current department’s attitude is.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

The noble Baroness is right to raise this point, as others have done, about the ongoing negotiations around the Northern Ireland protocol. I do not feel qualified give an accurate, up-to-date report. After this Committee, I will find out whether there is going to be an immediate communication about the status of the Northern Ireland protocol and an analysis of its functioning, particularly in relation to this matter. If there is not, I will make sure that she receives more information. The noble Baroness, Lady Jones, raised that as well.

I have answered quite a few of the questions—probably not every single one.

[Lord Rooker (Lab)]

The Minister has been very helpful; I fully accept that. I do not expect him to know the answer to this, but I hope that he will take my word for it that if any of us in this Room is wearing any cotton fabric or garment, it is possible using element analysis to find out where the cotton was grown. The same technique can be used to decide whether lamb was created in Wales or New Zealand. Does the technique of element analysis figure in any of the checks about where eggs have come from?

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

That is a very good point, and I will seek further information. I hope to reassure him and my noble friend Lord Cathcart that the idea that we are somehow allowing the import of substandard products that discriminate against our domestic producers is easily detectable through the measure that he mentioned which shows precisely how that egg is produced. I do not know whether it can deal with the point about fraud, or whether it can say, for example, that the egg came from Argentina or China, but this is a fresh food product, so obviously there is an issue about timing. I think that would militate some of the fraudsters who might want to try to enter the supply chain, but I assure the noble Lord that no undercutting of our producers will be facilitated by this measure or by my department in our determination to support the producers of this country. I really want to re-emphasise that point.

I hope that noble Lords fully understand the need for this instrument, which is to ensure that marketing standards checks on class A eggs imported from third countries continue to happen at the locations where they take place today. As I outlined in my opening speech, the instrument will also avoid any disruption to the level of checks that currently take place and will allow egg marketing inspectors to continue to uphold our high standards. I believe I have answered all the questions, but if I have not, I am very happy to provide written answers, I will check Hansard and respond in writing to any questions I may have missed.

Food, Poverty, Health and the Environment Committee Report

Lord Rooker Excerpts

Thursday 10th June 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Rooker (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, it is a privilege to follow the noble Lord, Lord Krebs. I much regret my very early departure, due to health circumstances, from the Select Committee after one meeting in summer 2019. I was looking forward to its work and was not disappointed in the outcome. It is a very good analysis of the food system and its failures, and it provides solution after solution.

Food poverty, health and the environment provide a social picture of the present UK, and it is not a pleasing one. There is not a single one of the report’s recommendations I take exception to, which is more than can be said for the Government. The strong recommendations regarding the universal credit £20 uplift, free school meals, an obesity strategy, commercial incentives on processed foods and long-term food insecurity all require action this day.

I am afraid that the silo-working of government comes through loud and clear in the report. The present Government cannot be wholly to blame for that—it is a culture of which I have first-hand experience. What is more, I do not have the answer, except to say that strong and firm ministerial leadership from the top can have a major effect. We saw that with the programme to set up the Social Exclusion Unit in December 1997. Civil servants from across Whitehall queued up to work there.

Although it deals with England, the report also explores Scotland and Wales. There is far less silo working in the devolved Administrations—at least, that is how it appears from the outside. Certainly, the role of Food Standards Scotland is more holistic than that of the agency in England, because it retains the original remit of food safety, as well as nutrition and health.

I too was disappointed on reading the Government’s response to the report, given its flat refusal to consider some poverty issues and a constant refrain of “waiting for Dimbleby”. There are some points I refuse to believe or take seriously. Paragraph 129 states:

“The Government are also putting public health at the heart of everything we do.”


The evidence is the opposite. One sentence, which I will quote when I conclude, is a massive porky. I am afraid the Government’s response to the recommendations on food imports—from paragraphs 133 and 134 onwards—is simply not believable. All the evidence from trade talks points in the opposite direction. In the main, the Government’s response is shoddy and second rate.

I accept that the report is a year old, which is nothing in the scale of things. The note for this debate from the excellent Food Foundation is not a year old. I will list just a few of the policy changes it recommends, which support those of the Select Committee. It says that our food environment does not support healthy choices, particularly in low-income neighbourhoods. One in four places to buy food is a fast-food outlet. That is the average; it is higher in low-income authorities. Food and drink advertising is focused on unhealthy options: 17% on confectionary, 12% on soft drinks, 16% on snacks—and just 2.5% on fruit and vegetables.

On the affordability of healthy food, the Food Foundation points out that the poorest fifth of UK households would need to spend almost 40% of disposable income on food to meet the Eatwell Guide standards compared to 7% for the well-off. Calorie for calorie, healthier foods are three times more expensive than less healthy foods.

Finally, the Food Foundation finds that children from more deprived families have less healthy diets and experience worse outcomes from the food system. By ages four to six, the most deprived fifth of households are twice as likely to be obese than those in the least deprived fifth. In paragraph 31 of their shoddy response, the Government give a flat refusal to consider the committee’s recommendation to embed the cost of the Eatwell Guide in the social security system.

I want finally to refer to a key aspect of the consequences of lack of action. I realise that what I am about to say will not go down well in some quarters, but given that healthy eating leads to a healthy, longer life, it is clear that lack of action and attention leads to the conclusion that the Government are not too concerned about people not living longer, especially if they are poorer and maybe less likely to vote for them. The evidence is abundant.

Paragraph 165 of the report states clearly:

“The food environment has a substantially more negative impact on lower-income groups than … wealthier counterparts, and therefore directly contributes to rising health inequalities.”


This is a serious conclusion. The Food Foundation also says in its note that increasing vegetable intake, while reducing meat and sugar, so that everybody gets a five-a-day, could contribute eight additional months to the UK’s average life expectancy. The national life tables from the Office for National Statistics, published in September 2020 and after the report, show that life expectancy has slowed in the last decade compared with the previous decade. The ONS’s note says that

“a marked slowdown in the rate of improvements has been observed since 2011”.

According to the Marmot review, life expectancy has flatlined since 2010, which is the first time since 1900. According to Sir Michael Marmot’s evidence to the people’s Covid review, since 2010 we have lost a decade in terms of the public’s health. Marmot’s report in 2010, Fair Society, Healthy Lives, commissioned by Gordon Brown, was welcomed by the coalition Government, but they did not put any of the principles into practice. There was no interest in doing so. On 17 December last year, the noble Lord, Lord Bethell, said in answer to a question of mine about the stalling of life expectancy that it was “extremely worrying”. In fact, I can almost hear Johnson saying, “Poor people are poor because of their own fault and they die earlier as a result of their own lifestyles.” The Government’s response indicates that they plan to do nothing about this.

The executive summary to the latest Marmot review, Health Equity in England: The Marmot Review 10 Years On, states:

“The national government has not prioritised health inequalities, despite the concerning trends and there has been no national health inequalities strategy since 2010.”


That brings me to the porky in the Governments response—it is the final sentence:

“The Government of the day is always accountable to Parliament.”


I do not believe that this Government think that they are accountable. In my, now long, experience in both Houses, they are certainly far less accountable to Parliament than the Government of Margaret Thatcher. Frankly, we all need to wake up to this fact. Otherwise, we will get no action at all, which is at the moment causing poorer people to die earlier.

Direct Payments to Farmers (Reductions and Simplifications) (England) (Amendment) Regulations 2021

Lord Rooker Excerpts

Monday 22nd March 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Rooker (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the Minister. He represents Defra, which is the key Brexit department—there is no question about that, and I know that the staff will have worked their socks off in the past year, with the pressures they have been under from all the various changes.

I took the opportunity to read the Commons debate on these important financial regulations last Thursday and I could not help but notice that four Conservative Back-Benchers were put on the committee, one from Scotland, one from Wales and two from England; that is, the Members for Aldershot and Corby. I can well understand why the Members from Scotland and Wales can find other things to do on England-only orders, but why on earth did the two English Tories not turn up to speak for the farming businesses in their constituencies? I am just amazed. It could not have had anything to do with Covid; people could come in and out of the room. This is a key, fundamental issue for farming businesses.

It is all uncharted territory for farm payments; it is new. Is that why we have only one year? The excellent Defra booklet, Farming is Changing, set out quite clearly the seven-year transition from the EU payments, but is it not crucial that farmers have a detailed forward plan for business decisions? When will the details for years 2, 3, 4 et cetera be published? In my view, it must be by October at the latest. We cannot wait to get to the end of the first year before we start to make key decisions for people and businesses for the following years. After all, with Brexit, we are in control. There should be no need for last-minute, one-year-at-a-time processes. Or is it the fact that the Treasury has plans to grab more of the EU money so that it leeches away from farming?

It is good that the publication of payments will remain, which is important for public consumption—it is still public money going to private businesses—but I certainly agree that pilot phases of any kind should not be published. Pilots are there for testing ideas. Some will work and some will not. You can have analysis of the pilots, but not under the public gaze, because it will simply stop people doing them.

I want to talk about a couple of wider issues, because I do not want to take too long. I know that the delinked payments and the lump sum payments are not intrinsically tied up with these regulations, but they are connected. Will those payments be directly linked to assist new entrants into farming rather than enabling existing companies to get bigger? It is a golden opportunity and it should not be missed.

How will hill farmers be treated and protected? They simply do not have the flexibility that other farmers have, not just with the environment but with the land and everything else. It is all self-evident and we understand the reasons, but they must not be forgotten.

As today is the 22 March, can the Minister say whether phase 2 of the farm resilience scheme will be provided as promised this month, with a start date in May? It is getting pretty close to the start of May. Can he assure us that the Rural Payments Agency has the trained staff and resources to deal with the claims? Will the claims be less onerous than under the EU system? The Explanatory Memorandum says that they will be “not … significantly more onerous”, but the point is that they will be more onerous. Why on earth are they not less onerous than under the EU system now that we are in control of designing the system?

Official Controls (Animals, Feed and Food, Plant Health etc.) (Amendment) (EU Exit) (No. 2) Regulations 2020

Lord Rooker Excerpts

Tuesday 19th January 2021 Grand Committee

[Lord Rooker (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, that was a commendable introduction from a commendable Minister. I have read Defra’s detailed answers to the memo submitted by Friends of the Earth which appears in the annexe to the recent 41st report from the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee. I have no problem with the use of these powers. They may need to be used very quickly, and I see more than one reference to their being used on the strength of appropriate scientific and technical advice. As such, I ask the Minister to say a bit more about the use of reference laboratories and animal feed. Neither of these areas is politically sexy, yet they are vital for public health and animal health. Will the arrangements be dependent on new IT systems? How will we share information with the EU and the EEA? Finally on this one, can the Minister say something about the supply and training of veterinarians?

On the second statutory instrument, relating to plant health, can the Minister say a little more about the work of the UK plant health risk group? I would like confirmation that the new, so-called bonfire of regulations will not be used to keep the public from knowing about the work of the risk group. I know from my own experience at the Food Standards Agency about the balance of competences exercise conducted by the coalition Government. Most regulations are for public protection, which of course is why that exercise was buried after the 36 reports were published. That completes my list of questions for the Minister.

Agriculture Bill

Lord Rooker Excerpts

Report stage & Report: 3rd sitting (Hansard) & Report: 3rd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 22nd September 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Rooker (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, I briefly give my full-hearted support to the noble Earl and his proposal. Again, I draw on my own experience at both MAFF and Defra and, at one time, as the Planning Minister, when I had a predisposition to facilitate the use of what you could term redundant farm buildings for other uses, be they housing or small enterprises—sometimes start-up or incubator units. I realise that it is not easy, and I know local authorities are suspicious because there have been abuses in the past. I realise that they sometimes want to limit the footprint of redundant buildings being extended too much, but the fact is that we need a national guideline for the flexibility.

The noble Earl pointed out that there are two classes of situation here. Local authorities could be deemed to be giving planning permission to themselves— or, indeed, not giving it—where they own the county farms. It is always a problem when one has to have these separate walls in local authorities. It does not always look fair.

I give my support for all the flexibility the Minister can give, by way of encouragement to local authorities under the planning system, for more modern uses of agricultural buildings. The idea of affordable housing and issues ancillary to farming are fine; I would go much further than that, but I rest on supporting the noble Earl.

[Lord Young of Norwood Green (Lab) [V]]

I first declare an interest as a member of the EU Energy and Environment Sub-Committee, which has done a lot of work on agriculture. I congratulate the noble Earl, Lord Dundee, on an excellent amendment. We certainly need to encourage new entrants and young farmers.

Looking at some statistics about farming apprenticeships, I was interested that they talked about a 2.7% growth in the industry as a whole and something like 137,000 people leaving the industry, so there are plenty of opportunities there. Is it currently easy for new entrants and young farmers? All the evidence we see is that you have to be very determined.

This is a really worthwhile amendment. It falls in line with our new approach to farming subsidies and the 25-year plan. It is a golden opportunity to put the emphasis, as it says, on sustainability and care of the environment. New young people coming into the industry will give it a fresh look; they are much better versed in the new technology. The point the noble Earl, Lord Dundee, made about housing is also important. We need to recognise that it is not enough just to create the opportunity; we also need to enable people to live near their place of work.

The other point I would like to emphasise is that there is, as we have heard in this debate, an awful lot of best practice out there and a lot of good farming going on. Finding the opportunity for those farmers to buddy up with new entrants to act as mentors would be really good.

The noble Earl, Lord Dundee, mentioned food security and fresh produce. In addition, there would likely be less food waste. Giving guidance to local authorities also seems a sensible part of this amendment. I welcome the amendment and give it my full support. I trust we will have a positive and constructive response from the Minister.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Earl of Dundee (Con) [V]]

My Lords, within this grouping, I support my noble friend Lord Trenchard’s helpful amendments. First, on United Kingdom and EU standards, he corrects a misapprehension or, maybe, he forestalls it before it has time within the Bill to solidify as a regular misunderstanding. For, as he points out, there is no difference between domestic standards and European Union ones. They are identical.

Secondly, what is also insufficiently known—and as my noble friend also usefully observes—in certain respects, the UK and EU are not compliant with World Trade Organization rules. I am in favour of Amendment 103 of the noble Lord, Lord Wigley, which urges that United Kingdom global tariff rates should take into account the well-being of the agricultural sector and that imported goods must be equivalent to, or exceed, domestic standards.

[Lord Rooker (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, I will make a brief contribution. In fact, I was going to opt out altogether because I did not want to repeat anything that anyone else had said. Certainly, I support the questions that the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, asked at the beginning of the debate and, frankly, I expect the Minister to answer all six of them. They were quite specific.

It is worth pointing out that, unlike Ministers, the Food Standards Agency is actually required to do things by law. I will read out Section 1(2) of the Food Standards Act 1999:

“The main objective of the Agency in carrying out its functions is to protect public health from risks which may arise in connection with the consumption of food (including risks caused by the way in which it is produced or supplied) and otherwise to protect the interests of consumers in relation to food.”


By law, Ministers do not have that obligation. They think they can hump it away in the Commons, but I have news for them: if they want to take on the role of Food Safety Minister, they ought to have a bit of a history lesson about salmonella, orange juice, BSE and CJD. Then they will realise why the FSA was put there in the first place. It was not a happy experience for previous Ministers without its support.

I will make one further point relating to what the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh, has said about chlorinated chicken. I do not think I have got her wrong, but I do not want to mislead. She said that she could eat it safely because the issue was about animal welfare, not the safety of the food, and she is right. However, published research from the University of Southampton has shown that chlorine washing of food does not take away all the nasty bits. They started off, I think, by washing vegetables, but they have since looked at meat—I am not sure whether this was chicken or other meat. However, the fact is that this is not a solution to the problem.

The other thing that is also worth point out is that, in the United States of America, over 400 people a year die from salmonella. In this country, no one has died—I think there was one case in the last eight years—compared to 400-plus in the United States. I am not saying that it is because they ate chlorinated chicken, but I am saying that it is pretty unsafe in respect of deaths from salmonella in the United States, which seeks to push its food onto us without necessarily labelling it. Therefore, there are some issues here that must be carefully looked at.

As for the Minister, I have not been in my office or at my desk for well over 12 months, but I have a little file up there with at least a dozen quotes from the noble Lord, Lord Gardiner, who is a reputable Minister, on food standards over the last three or four years. He has more of a claim than any other Minister to reassure the public and Parliament.

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[Lord Wallace of Tankerness (LD) [V]]

My Lords, I very much support the amendment, the purposes of which have been so well articulated by the noble Lord, Lord Curry of Kirkharle; I was pleased to add my name to it. The noble Lord clearly sets out the progress that has been made, and the need to ensure that that is sustained and not undermined.

In Committee, I subscribed to and supported a similar amendment in the noble Lord’s name. On that occasion, I quoted from a letter which the president of the National Farmers Union of Scotland, Mr Andrew McCornick, had sent to MPs during the passage of this Bill in another place. It was admittedly before the Government announced their Trade and Agriculture Commission; nevertheless, I believe that the sentiments expressed are still relevant and worth repeating.

Mr McCornick wrote

“it is vital that future trade deals do not curtail our ability to grow our reputation as a nation of provenance and quality by undercutting domestic production with imported produce, with which we cannot compete on price and production method.”

This amendment is drafted in similar terms to the one tabled in Committee, but there is a crucial difference. We have heeded the concerns expressed during the debate in Committee about the short life of the Trade and Agriculture Commission which was proposed then. So this amendment proposes a continuing existence for the commission, after producing its important primary report, to make recommendations to the Secretary of State to promote, maintain and safeguard current standards of food production through international trade policy, including standards relating to food safety, the environment and animal welfare. This continuing role may be achieved by the Secretary of State prescribing further functions for the Trade and Agriculture Commission after its initial report is published, and in any event, because the TAC will have a continuing responsibility to report on any trade agreement negotiated by the Government, to consider its impact on the trade of agri-food products and to assess its impact on the ability of the Secretary of State to promote, maintain and safeguard standards of agri-food production, including in relation to food safety, the environment and animal welfare.

The amendment would give the commission an explicit additional duty to advise Parliament on all trade deals and how they would impact on food and farming standards. That is one of the reasons the National Farmers’ Union of Scotland has indicated that it would encourage support for the amendment.

I shall conclude by giving two compelling reasons why this amendment should commend itself to Parliament, and an equally good reason why it should appeal to the Government. While providing for the Trade and Agriculture Commission to make recommendations, the amendment gives a key role to Parliament to consider recommendations as well as to determine Motions on the Government’s response to them—so Parliament would have a direct role.

Secondly, the provisions in relation to the new trade treaties supplement the rather limited role given to Parliament under the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act 2010 in relation to the ratification of treaties. Both bring back more control to Parliament. As for the Government, the amendment would help them to secure their pledge set out on page 57 of their 2019 manifesto:

“In all of our trade negotiations, we will not compromise on our high environmental protection, animal welfare and food standards.”


It seems to me that this is a win-win situation all round.

[Lord Rooker (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, I am pleased to follow the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace, and particularly the noble Lord, Lord Curry, in supporting this amendment. Indeed, it is the only amendment tabled on Report which has my name attached to it. I shall be brief.

The point encapsulated in the last two speeches is very important. The National Farmers’ Union of England and Wales, the National Farmers’ Union of Scotland and the Ulster Farmers’ Union, which I worked very closely with when I was the farming Minister in Northern Ireland, all support this amendment. It is also supported by the CLA. That is incredibly widespread support that should enable the Minister to grab it with both hands. It cannot be anything but good for the Government to have the kind of support from the farming community that an amendment such as this carries.

Before I make my other comments, I want to respond to the noble Viscount, Lord Trenchard, who was kindly paying attention, or partly paying attention, to what I said in the previous debate. What I said was that in the United States of America, over 400 people a year die of salmonella. You can get the figures from the Centers for Disease Control. I did not say that they all died from eating chicken. What I also said was that nobody has died from this in the UK in the past 10 years. There may have been one case, but there was a dispute about it.

So it is not a question of looking at populations. The number of deaths in America is huge. Per head of population, food poisoning cases in the United States are 10 times higher than in Great Britain—although I did not go into that. People in America die from salmonella, but here it is not a cause of death. That is the difference, and the point I was making.

This amendment is very important for providing the checks and balances for what is a somewhat haphazard Government. I am not criticising the Minister or his team in this respect, or indeed the Bill team, but it is a haphazard Government, and this would provide checks and balances. The Government cannot rely on the existing structure. For example, I do not think that the Food Standards Agency is resourced or has the overall competence to get involved in the details of trade deals, as the proposed commission would. Of course, bodies such as the FSA and Food Standards Scotland would advise the commission, but the commission would have the main role.

It is also quite important that Amendment 101 not just involves but respects the primacy of Parliament, which Amendment 97 clearly does not. As I read that amendment, it seeks to give a veto over trade deals, and that cannot be right. I shall not recite the contents of Amendment 101, as that would be quite wrong. However, proposed new subsection (4)(d) in Amendment 101 is quite useful. In fact, I think that the Minister himself would probably quite like a list of the existing powers of the Minister, as it would be useful to know. Basically, we would like to know which powers they have got that they are not using. The powers are spread throughout a massive amount of legislation and it would be useful to have a list of them so that we could check which ones they are not using. Proposed new paragraph (f), which ties in with paragraph (c), would make the monitoring of imported foods—something that will not be easy—practical and workable.

We also have to remember that the EU does that for us now. The EU, on behalf of the member states, sends inspectors all over the world to check that farms and food factories are safe and of sufficient quality to supply the EU. We will have to repeat all that ourselves, and therefore it is very important that we have a system for monitoring the situation.

On the efficiency of UK agriculture—I am speaking from memory here—I think that the UK is so efficient in producing milk from dairy cattle that, if the rest of the world replicated our systems, there would be less than half the number of dairy cattle in the world. In other words, we are very efficient, and if we could spread that technology around the world, we would have fewer dairy cattle, less methane, less pollution and much more efficient production.

In short, on the idea of a standing rather than a temporary commission, a standing commission would consist of consumers, traders and producers, and it would instil far more confidence than the six-month commission that the Government have set up. The Minister and his team would be very wise to embrace Amendment 101.

[The Lord Bishop of St Albans [V]]

My Lords, I too will speak on Amendment 101, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Curry of Kirkharle, to which I have added my name. The previous three speakers have more than adequately spelled out why it makes a great deal of sense, so I can limit my comments.

The Government, through the joint letter from the Environment Secretary and the Secretary of State for International Trade, have assured us that standards will not be compromised as part of trade negotiations. Furthermore, I am reassured by the breadth of experience among the agri-food trade advisory group. However, welcome though these developments are, fundamentally they lack the legally binding requirement that properly guarantees that Parliament will have recourse to ensuring that our standards are not diluted.

We all recognise the value of our agricultural standards in promoting the well-being of consumers, producers and the environment. As part of the Government’s ambition to conclude new trade deals, compromises will be required, but it is imperative that they do not encroach on our standards, which must remain a red line. The amendment seeks to turn verbal and written guarantees into a comprehensive legal mechanism that combines independent expertise with parliamentary scrutiny to ensure that the necessary measures are taken to protect our agricultural sector, the environment and, above all, consumers.

Agriculture Bill

Lord Rooker Excerpts

Report stage & Report: 2nd sitting (Hansard) & Report: 2nd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Thursday 17th September 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Rooker (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, took less than three minutes to move the amendment. I hope to copy that and avoid some of the Second Reading-type points that I have just been listening to.

The new clause is titled “National Food Strategy” and I think the word “national” is important. I shall touch on only three points. Subsection 2(d) concerns public procurement. We do need central control to do something about public procurement. We have devolved so much to bodies such as schools, prisons, the MoD and the NHS in terms of the budgeting. Trying to get national policy without dictating the detail to them is very difficult and needs a cross-government effort. I know how difficult it is to do because I tried and failed. So that is one issue.

My second point concerns paragraph 3 and “developing an assurance scheme”. There needs to be a good government kitemark assurance scheme. To be honest, what we have is not satisfactory, whether it is Red Tractor or the RSPCA. They are all over the place. The public need to have something they can be absolutely confident about, and I therefore think that an assurance scheme that the Government have developed —in consultation, obviously—would carry an awful lot of weight.

My third point concerns the fourth paragraph, on marketing and promotion. Something like 40% of the food in the supermarkets is on promotion. On restriction, I am also in favour of the voluntary changes in reformulation. When I joined the Food Standards Agency, it was almost at the end of its programme to launch the reformulation to reduce salt, which was on a voluntary basis and was incredibly successful. The UN supported it at its conference in London because of the work of the FSA. That work was then removed to the Department of Health behind closed doors by the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, and that was the end of it, in a way. The reductions we have had are nowhere near as good as in the past.

That brings me to my final point. Much of what was required on obesity, and changing the attitude to promotion and marketing, was set out years ago. I only reluctantly mention the names of civil servants, but they have said things in public. Dr Alison Tedstone of Public Health England, who was formerly at the FSA, had all this planned out. She spoke to all-party groups about it when Theresa May was Prime Minister. Theresa May dumped it all—absolutely dumped the programme in terms of advertisements before the watershed and the obesity programme for children. So it is all there; we do not have to invent anything.

My final point ties in with what the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh, said. I have been in the Minister’s place, getting up to say to the House, “Well, it’s in the Bill, we’re going to do it, you’re pre-empting something”, when deep down I really know that if I can get this in the Bill, it will be so much easier when I am back in the department to actually get the policy through. Because I do not believe the timetable that has been set out following Dimbleby 2 can be maintained unless there is a real parliamentary push, and the way to do that is to adopt Amendment 58.

[The Earl of Caithness (Con)]

My Lords, I too had the privilege of sitting on the committee chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Krebs—the Food, Poverty, Health and Environment Committee—and I am grateful to the Government for their response to our report. I would classify it in English as “disappointing,” in Scottish as “peely-wally,” and I think the amendment before us goes a long way towards implementing what was unanimously agreed in the report. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, that to have it in the Bill now is the right way forward to help Defra in the future.

The quality of the food we eat is costing us all billions—costing this country a great deal of money, and unnecessarily. We are the processed food capital of Europe, and that is a number one spot that we should not be holding. It was the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, who said that we want to encourage the production of good, healthy food. I argue that the farmers do produce good, healthy food now: it is the industry, as the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, said on the previous group of amendments, that turns decent, good food into the poison that we are fed by supermarkets—all this ghastly processed food. Some of it is absolutely delicious, and you have to go for a second helping, but it is poison: it is doing us no good and it is costing the NHS, in due course, one heck of a lot of money.

So it is the industry. I remember that on one occasion we were interviewing Judith Batchelar of Sainsbury’s and then the British Retail Consortium. I pressed hard and it took a long time to get a final answer from Judith Batchelar, but she did finally say that Sainsbury’s would not sell chlorinated chicken. The British Retail Consortium, on the other hand, said, “Oh, no, we have no control over our members”. In other words, “We are not going to say anything, and we are certainly going to produce the cheapest food that we can find on the market.” The industry will be called to the table kicking and screaming against any change.

As so much of the food we eat is either fast food or from restaurants, we have absolutely no idea what we are being served. It is one thing to buy something with a label on it in a supermarket or a shop, but it is quite another when we eat outside our home and have absolutely no idea where the food comes from.

On a point of nitpicking detail with the amendment, I would have liked in subsection (4)(d), on food labelling, to have included the effects of climate change. I mentioned this quite a lot in Committee, and I hope my noble friend has read the book by Professor Bridle that I recommended to him, or at least his officials have and given him a precis of it.

Another point we raised in Committee which is hugely important to the whole of our national food strategy is what I would term Whitehall governance. It is not just Defra; there are numerous departments within government that are all involved in the food we eat, whether it is education—through schools—or the National Health Service, or whoever it is. Whitehall governance has also got to improve. It was quite clear from the number of Ministers we had to interview to get any sort of idea of what the Government were trying to do that it is not a joined-up process.

I believe this amendment would go a long way to push that in the right direction. I do not think my noble friend Lady McIntosh is right in saying that it will pre-empt part 2; it will strengthen the Government’s hand when part 2 is published. By that stage, the Government will be a little bit more ahead of the game than they are at the moment.

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[Baroness McIntosh of Pickering (Con)]

My Lords, I am most grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Wigley, and my noble friend the Duke of Montrose, for introducing their respective amendments. These two amendments refer back to comments that I made earlier about the status of the common framework agreements. It is very clear at this time that this is a fuzzy area and it is not quite clear what the status of the common framework agreements is—and yet, in the very specific circumstances that both noble Lords speaking to Amendments 68 and 68A referred to, time is pressing on and we need to know how the different Administrations across the United Kingdom will administer this part of the Bill.

My question to the Minister is: what is the status of the common frameworks at this time? I understand that they have been reduced to 21, but obviously the process is ongoing. It would be helpful to know whether this level of detail has been reached in the current negotiations and how circumstances referred to in Amendments 68 and 68A can be avoided if at all possible.

[Lord Rooker (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, I avoided devolved issues in Committee and was seeking to avoid them on Report, but I want to come in to support the noble Lord, Lord Wigley.

I have a couple of points to make. One is a general one, and it is no reflection whatever on the Ministers on the Front Bench: the Government do not do devolution. My experience of that comes from 2010 to 2013, some years ago now, when I was chair of the Food Standards Agency and the coalition Government came in. It was quite clear that there was a major problem with their attitude towards devolution, and I think that has carried on. I realise that there are relations between Ministers and they talk to each other, but the government machine does not do devolution.

My more specific point is that I plead guilty on two issues, really. The Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board was one of my babies when I went back to MAFF, or Defra, in 2006. The merger of the six levy boards was done under my watch. Of course, I realised at the time that I was the English farming Minister, not the Great Britain farming Minister, and the issue applied only to England. Furthermore, before that—this shows, I freely admit, that as the years go by I get a bit out of date, and I have had a year when I have not been on the ball, as it were—the cattle tracing service for passports and birth information, located in Workington at the time, was a UK-wide body; indeed, we recruited Welsh speakers. It could be that that has been taken apart and is no longer there, but the fundamental issue behind all this is traceability.

One reason we do it is self-interest, but the reason we were forced to do it by the European Union, as it does elsewhere, is so that we know what animal has been where if a disease breaks out. The issue should not be one of a dispute between devolved Administrations not being able to access the information; it is absolutely fundamental that the traceability of animals, their movements, the feed they have had and other matters is available if an animal disease breaks out—I hope that it does not happen but we have to prepare for the worst—particularly where there is a transfer to humans, or indeed if it is widely spread to other animals because they move around the country, as has just been said, east, west, north and south, and that leads to real problems.

So, first, I fundamentally doubt that the Government really do devolution. Secondly, in an area like this, Clause 32 is quite specific that the Government are in fact taking on board UK-wide information; indeed, relating to Scotland as well. The Minister is going to have to explain exactly what the detail is in terms of the devolved Administrations and how traceability—and the way we need it to operate in an emergency, because it is always an emergency when you actually need it—will actually function.

[Baroness Northover (LD) [V]]

My Lords, we are, again, addressing how matters might be properly devolved. The noble Lord, Lord Wigley, has identified some key challenges in his amendment, and the amendment in the name of the noble Duke, the Duke of Montrose, is complementary to it. It seems to me that these amendments need to be taken very seriously by the Government, who need to assess the implications laid out by noble Lords.

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[Baroness McIntosh of Pickering (Con)]

My Lords, I thank and congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Whitchurch, and those noble Lords who have added their names to this amendment, on bringing it forward again.

I would be interested to know from my noble friend the Minister what share of the workforce agricultural workers make up. My impression is that their numbers have declined quite steeply in recent times. If that is the case, there is a strong argument for hoping to maintain a sustainable agricultural industry workforce. Clearly, many smaller farms are relying expressly on family members, but we are hoping to rely on SAWS—the seasonal agricultural workers scheme—to help farmers and growers. I believe that the numbers are increasing, and they will make a big contribution.

I have a question that I would like to put to my noble friend, which I think was raised in Committee, although I do not recall the answer. Subsection 1(c) of the new clause proposed by Amendment 70 refers to ensuring that

“agricultural workers have sufficient access to … financial advice”.

The number of providers of such advice is quite large already; I do not know whether the noble Baroness is thinking of a new source. In our earlier debates on the Bill’s provisions, we discussed the proposal that financial advice be provided to those applying for the scheme. Under the new scheme, what financial advice will be available to ensure a sustainable workforce? Am I right in thinking that agricultural societies and charities might have a role to play in this regard, in guiding farmers to sources of income and providing advice for the workforce in this sector?

[Lord Rooker (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, this is an absolutely first-class proposed new clause. It is completely rounded in many ways.

I want to deal with the first part of the amendment, which relates to seasonal workers. Again, I plead guilty because I have some history here. I realise that it means seasonal workers, and not overseas workers, some of whom are permanent—indeed, in many of our meat plants and abattoirs, their occupations are permanent. Returning to seasonal workers, we have a problem. I plead guilty to the fact that when I was the Home Office immigration and nationality Minister in 2001-02, it crossed my desk that we had to abandon the seasonal workers scheme because we were getting ready for the accession of eight new EU members in 2004, where we would recruit openly, and it was always known that Romania and Bulgaria would be ready-made sources of agricultural workers.

The one thing about the previous scheme that was almost unique was that it was based, in a way, on higher education around the world. We had, I think, workers from over 100 countries who came to the UK on a seasonal basis. I was told at the Home Office, “The thing is, they all went back home.” That was the whole point. It was very much based on higher education—they had courses to go back to, but Britain probably benefited economically for much of their time here.

Now, we are leaving the EU and we have not done anything. It is no good the Home Office simply saying that we have to recruit British people. That has not worked this year, notwithstanding the problem with the virus, and it will not work next year either. Therefore, it is not about turning the clock back, but we need a professional, strategic seasonal workers scheme. In many ways, we are unique in the things that we grow, in our climate and in the difficulty of recruiting our own people on a seasonal basis. It used to be easy to do in my younger days, as I know—as an engineering apprentice, I picked fruit in Scotland.

The fact of the matter is that we had a scheme that worked. As I say, the only reason we abandoned it was in getting ready for the accession of eight new countries to the EU—but we are leaving the EU, are we not? The point is that it was not that seasonal with the eight new countries.

It is not easy, I know, having been at the Home Office in the years I mentioned. When I turned up at Defra in 2006-08, I was on the receiving end, and thought, “Oh dear me, I made a mistake there.” Even though we were recruiting lots, we were still in trouble with the flexibility on our farms. We have now reached a point where we ought to have such a scheme. The Home Office should not be concerned or worried about it. All the evidence shows that it was based on higher education. The students were flexible; they were in different academic years and came from around the world, so they fitted in quite well. As I say, they came from more than 100 countries—and they went back home. The Home Office seems to be obsessed with people coming to this country and staying here. That is not what the scheme was for.

Having made that point earlier, I do not wish to say anything else except that I agree very much with what my noble friend said about the work of the noble Lord, Lord Curry. I absolutely 100% support the thrust of this rounded amendment.

[Lord Judd (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, I strongly support this amendment, as indeed I did in Committee. I thank my noble friend for being so resolute in standing by it. I express my appreciation for the way in which she so warmly welcomed my small but important amendment in Committee; it is now incorporated in the proposals before us.

The position on housing can be dire for those who wish to work on the land. It is simply impossible to find housing that is affordable. The absence of other public services and support services is a great hazard too because, let us face it, so much of the countryside has been turned into a middle-class urban extension.

Affordable housing is crucial, but the main point that I want to make in support of the amendment as a whole is that we can debate how we want the land organised, arrangements for ownership and so on, but in the end it is the motivation, quality, training and preparation of the workforce who are going to work the land that is crucial. This amendment is the result of an utterly sensible understanding that if we want to have successful agriculture, we need an enlightened, positive approach to the preparation of people, particularly young people, wanting to enter the profession in order that they may be as well equipped as possible to work it effectively.