Agriculture Bill (First sitting)

Alicia Kearns Excerpts

Committee stage & Committee Debate: 1st sitting: House of Commons
Tuesday 11th February 2020 Public Bill Committees

[Daniel Zeichner]

Q I would like to return to the vexed issue of imports to potentially lower standards. ffinlo, you mentioned some of the potential impacts. I would like everyone to comment on the potential environmental impact, given that people are so positive about the potential here. If we do find ourselves being undercut by lower-standard imports, what would be the effect on the environmental aims in the Bill?

Caroline Drummond: I think potentially farmers will walk away from supporting them ultimately, if the marketplace is not delivering against the requirements expected of the imported produce and farmers are increasingly required to deliver against goods that are costing them from a business perspective. That is one of the big dangers. A bigger issue is offshoring, and the fact that we have nine years to deliver against the sustainable development goals. We have the Paris agreements. We have a fantastic opportunity with the conference of the parties talks on climate change being held in this country later this year to herald our ambitions for delivering and demonstrating leadership in environmental delivery and in climate change mitigation delivery.

We might think we can compete on a global level in terms of a huge productivity market, but actually we are just small producers on a global scale. Our real opportunity lies in being the best at what we do. We already have such a good background: despite all the criticism that farmers get for delivering or not delivering against the environment, they have been hugely committed since 2001, after foot and mouth, through entry level stewardship and higher level stewardship agreements, to deliver vast changes and improvements, with strong ownership in how farmers are farming in this country. It would be a real shame to lose that. The Bill is an opportunity to build on that backbone and to place our farmers in a position whereby we continue to be world leading, but with more focused ambition and strong clarity on what we deliver from an environmental perspective.

Jack Ward: In terms of delivering environmental outcomes, we are looking at a balance between a farmer or grower’s own investment and public money. If you start to cut away at the farmer’s ability to invest as an individual, you lose an important part of the funding that will deliver the overall environmental improvements that you are looking for.

ffinlo Costain: I think the future for UK farmers has to be in quality. Volume production will increasingly become a mug’s game. I would not advise farmers to go into it. It should be about environmental excellence, animal welfare excellence and sustainability excellence. The danger is that if it comes into the country, some customers—perhaps quite a lot of customers—will buy it. That is where the undermining happens: it undermines our ability to develop that comprehensive basis for environmental excellence, and it will challenge emerging supply chains in particular. Part of our big challenge over the next 10 years is to shorten supply chains and to make sure that farmers are better able to claim decent farm-gate prices by selling direct or through many fewer cogs before they reach the customer. I worry about those smaller and emerging supply chains being undermined.

[Alicia Kearns (Rutland and Melton) (Con)]

How do you assess that the security of food supply will be improved by the Bill? What do you see as the UK’s greatest threat to food security?

Martin Lines: Food security can only come from healthy soil and a healthy environment. If we over-produce from our soils, we degrade them and there will be no food security for future generations. We need a balance of how we manage our landscape and how much we can produce from that balanced landscape. We can then consider what products we need to import, and whether we need to do other things or change diets or change tjhe system. There needs to be an assessment of how our landscape looks, with a joined-up approach to landscape productivity.

ffinlo Costain: Traditionally, food security has been about volume and about being able to feed everybody. That has led us to the challenges we now face, which Martin just referred to. Food security comes from being able to produce good, nutritious, diverse and seasonally available food. That means we need to restore soil, have good water management, and good community dynamics, with complexity returned to our swards and landscapes where nature works with farmers to produce that food.

Looking forward 40 years to how society could break down as a result of climate change and biodiversity loss, food is the critical factor. If you look around the world at conflicts, including Syria, food is the critical factor that creates conflict. The way that we deliver national security is not by producing volume, but by ensuring that every hectare of our land can produce really good food, and by maintaining the rural economies and the ability of farmers to farm that land. That is why it is critical that we do not go down the route of sequestration here, wilding there, and food here. We need to be able to build broad diversity so that we have national food security in the future.

Caroline Drummond: There is often a lot of confusion around food security. There is the issue of our capability to grow, and having the infrastructure to support farmers with seed, fertiliser, tractor tyres, and investment in that area. There is the issue of what we actually mean by self-sufficiency, how we build our targets, and whether we are ambitious enough. There is food safety. We have some concerns about imported produce in terms of food safety challenges. That has been well heralded. There is also the issue of food defence—our capability to trade confidently, and to have the opportunity to receive food where we do not have self-sufficiency or sufficient produce.

It is a highly complex area. I think it is one area in the Bill where we would report every five years. Perhaps that could be amended to reporting every year, because it is so important.

Jack Ward: In the fresh produce industry, we are very dependent on imports to meet our needs. Arguably, it is the one area of food production where we want to increase consumption. Ultimately, the ability to increase our food security is down to grower confidence, and a willingness by growers to keep investing, and the returns that they can generate from that activity. The last six months have not done great things for grower confidence.

[Daniel Zeichner]

Q I would like to go back to the question of food security, and to some of the points that people have made. I am very concerned by some of what I am hearing, because it seems to me that there is a danger of a two-tier system emerging. A very high-quality, high-value system is, to ffinlo’s point, not about chasing volume. Is there not a potential problem ahead for us if we are not careful, in that we will not produce nearly as much of our own food as we would like? Going back to my earlier question, that also has environmental consequences. It goes back to a point that I think Jack made at the beginning: the sector needs to be profitable to keep people working. Is there a real danger here?

Martin Lines: If I am producing wheat, I can increase my yield by putting more products on, but that has a higher environmental risk, because a lot of those nitrates and products will leave the soil, because the crop has not used them in some years. If we hit the sweet spot with the productivity of our landscape, we can produce what the landscape can cope with, and push it some years, when needed, as well as ease off. It is about finding the balance point. We know from many livestock farmers that reducing livestock numbers actually makes them healthier, better animals, and they produce quicker because there are fewer there and the grass is better.

We have focused for so long just on yield and output, not profitability. Reducing my overall output gives me more profit at the end of the day. It is a funny way to look at how it works, but you end up spending more than you get in return. You chase the extra yield by spending more money. We need to find the place where we deliver as much as we can. Sometimes we can push that if we need to—if there are weather challenges, or other issues—but we should not be out there just to push it, doing environmental damage as a consequence of my farming operations.

ffinlo Costain: The most intensive food systems are environmentally damaging. They are damaging in terms of farm animal welfare, and often just in terms of the jobs that are provided for people, which are not pleasant. The death knell needs to be rung for those sorts of farms.

There is an assumption that with environmental excellence, because of our association with going from mainstream to organic, comes a reduction in yield. There does not need to be a reduction. There are so many examples, here and around the world—Martin being one—of regenerative agriculture, which is giving environmental excellence and social excellence. Farm animal welfare is not an issue on his farm, but elsewhere there are regenerative beef and cattle systems where yield is being maintained in terms of mainstream amounts, and even increased.

There is an assumption that high environmental standards mean a reduction in yield; that is not necessarily the case. It is not just about looking at volume; it is about looking at a whole range of different changes. We need a dietary shift in Britain. That does not mean no meat and dairy, but it probably does mean a bit less meat and dairy as we go forward, and a bit more fruit and vegetables. We can deliver that, with agroforestry approaches and regenerative approaches. We can more than sufficiently provide food for the people of this country—I have no doubt about that—but it will mean changes in diet, and a little bit of change in the way that we farm, at the same time as focusing on multiple outcomes, rather than simply the outcome of producing lots of food. It is food, climate and biodiversity.

Caroline Drummond: We have a tremendous amount of evidence and case studies to demonstrate the importance of integrated farm management practices and how farmers have increasingly adopted them, in terms of economic viability, good performance and optimising the capability of the land. That is a really strong driver. One of the big keys will be how we link the Agriculture Bill with the Environment Bill and the national food strategy—this is such an opportunity for really trying to work out what it is that we want to develop and to balance and to build in what we grow, how we grow it and how we improve the health of our nation as well.

--- Later in debate ---

[Kerry McCarthy]

Q May I return to the regulatory baseline issue I raised with the previous witnesses? The RSPB was involved in the Institute for European Environmental Policy report published this week that suggests that, now we have left the EU, there is a real gap in the regulatory baseline because so many regulations were set at EU level. Is there a need for a firmer regulatory baseline in the Bill so that we know what we reward in terms of farmers going above that baseline, and so on?

Thomas Lancaster: We, the Wildlife Trusts and WWF commissioned the report from IEEP, who are independent consultants, to look at a future regulatory framework. Because the Bill includes provisions to move away from cross-compliance, and in particular to delink payments from land, that potentially opens up gaps in aspects of current environmental regulatory protections that exist only in cross-compliance, particularly around soils and hedgerows—for example, cutting of hedgerows during birds’ breeding season and hedgerow buffer strips. We think there is a gap in the Bill in terms of powers necessary for Ministers to bring forward regulatory protections for soils, hedgerows and other environmental features, and we would like to see the Bill amended to plug that gap.

There is a big opportunity coming off Dame Glenys Stacey’s review. The farm inspection and regulation review the Government commissioned reported in 2018. It called for a more comprehensive regulatory framework that enables a more advice-led approach to enforcement, so that, rather than farmers being penalised but not really understanding the underlying issue and therefore not able to address it, the approach would seek to blend penalties with advice and incentives to ensure that you get better environmental outcomes.

There is an existing model of that in the Scottish Environment Protection Agency and its approach. When a breach is detected, there is a visit from an adviser or a member of staff, who says, “You have to address this breach. You can either go and seek advice or invest in infrastructure if necessary.” They come back a second time. If the breach has been addressed, everything is fine; if it is not, they give them a third visit and, if it is still there, then they penalise them. That approach, which Dame Glenys Stacey supported, and we supported at the time, gets better environmental outcomes in a way that farmers also appreciate and can understand, whereas at the moment our regulatory enforcement is very substandard, it is fair to say.

Again, Dame Glenys Stacey found that of 10,600 staff at the Environment Agency, only 40 do farm inspections. As a farmer, you have a one in 200 chance of being inspected by the Environment Agency, and we know that the agency is again cutting back on some of those regulatory compliance visits. There is a huge challenge in the future, not just in how we reward good practice but in how we ensure a level playing field so that the progressive best farmers out there are not undercut by, effectively, cowboys—unfortunately, there are some. The Bill is silent on that, and for us that is one of the biggest gaps and omissions.

John Cross: The only comment I would make—again as a farmer—is that any more regulation would need to be fit for purpose, logical, proportionate and enforceable. Regulation is fine, but unless it is logical so people can understand it, and it is relatively easy to comply with, it is just a source of frustration to everyone. Certainly, the industry is very keen to move towards an outcome-based form of regulation as opposed to constantly arguing about whether a particular margin is six inches too narrow or not. The industry would be interested in seeing a much more outcome-focused approach.

David Bowles: The EU has been moving towards an outcomes approach, but obviously leaving the EU gives us huge opportunities in the animal welfare sectors, such as sheep, beef and dairy, where there are no specific baseline species standards at the moment. There is a real opportunity to introduce those baseline standards, which will help not just the Bill, but in establishing what the baseline is—and then establishing how to move farmers up the scale, through capital inputs or through specific measures, and paying them where the market does not deliver. There are huge opportunities to improve the baseline regulatory standards in those areas where they do not exist now.

[Alicia Kearns]

Q This question is mainly for you, Mr Price. My constituency of Rutland and Melton has quite a few farmers who farm rare breeds. Is there sufficient support for rare breeds in the Bill? Conversely, is that support the right thing to be doing? My farmers who do not farm rare breeds would say that there is a question of fairness in giving too much support to rare breeds.

Christopher Price: I will take the second part first. Should we be supporting rare breeds? Yes, we should. You probably expected me to say that.

[Alicia Kearns]

I thought you might, but you never know.

Christopher Price: We should do it, first, for economic reasons. These breeds were bred to be in a British landscape. They can survive in parts of the country that other breeds cannot, or cannot without significant inputs. In many parts of the country, people are farming the wrong animals and are doing so expensively, because they are using certain inputs to support them. We need some help in getting farmers to transition away from the old way of doing things into going back to native breeds.

Native breeds can also provide a wider range of products than many other breeds. I mentioned wools, skins, horns and so on, which all have markets, if people think about it, or are incentivised to start thinking about it rather more. There is a role for Government in that.

Then there is the environmental side of things. The grassland habitats that we so cherish are there because they were grazed by certain animals over generations. If we are going to restore those habitats, the easiest, most straightforward way to do it is by using the animals that created them in the first place.

Lastly, there is the social side. Many of these breeds are part of our history. White Park cows came over Dogger island from mainland Europe before Stonehenge was built. They were part of the Cistercian monks’ currency. Some of the earliest Welsh laws are about how you regulate and use those animals. Herdwick sheep were bred to live on top of hills in the Lake district. Swaledales were bred to be a bit further down the fells. They are an immense part of our culture.

Those are all reasons for supporting them. In terms of how you support them, I would be reluctant for us to go down a simple headage route; I think that would just create the wrong sort of incentives. If a farmer chooses to use native breeds to graze for particular conservation purposes that do not bring him or her a direct financial benefit, that is about the public benefit, which should be rewarded, but it is more about making sure that we have the right infrastructure in place.

There is a lot to do with promoting local produce. We have talked a bit about creating local markets. Some of the more savvy farmers I was talking about are doing an excellent job of that, and part of their brand is selling local breeds and local products from those breeds within a fairly narrow radius—30-odd miles. That is where the premium comes from. It is not for everyone, but people are starting to do it, which is interesting.

Perhaps the single most important thing—we touched on this a bit in the earlier session—is abattoirs. For many of the people that I work for and represent, abattoirs are at least as important an issue as support going forward. We have huge numbers of people who are producing the right animals to the right standards in a very environmentally friendly way. You hear people talking about how their motivation in life is to ensure that their animals have a life worth living and then only one bad day—the day they go to the abattoir—and you have people who want to buy the products, but the whole thing is being stymied in significant parts of the country because there is no abattoir that can cope. If there is an abattoir, it generally will not be able to take the small numbers of non-standard animals and give you back the by-products—the horns, the skins and so on. In many cases, there is no abattoir at all.

If we are talking about short-term Government capital investments, it seems to me that there is a desperate need to invest in pop-up abattoirs or mobile abattoirs. There are practical problems with all of that, but if I could get anything across to the Committee, it would be the need to make sure that we have an abattoir network that is fit for purpose over the next few years, and for the Government to invest in creating that. It does not need to be a long-term investment; once it is there, the market can function and support it, but it is getting us there that matters.

[Daniel Zeichner]

Q I should like to take you up a level, in the sense that since the initial iteration of this Bill, we have become very aware of the climate crisis and Parliament has declared a climate emergency. Do you think there is enough in this Bill to reflect that need for urgent action, particularly given the recommendations from the Committee on Climate Change on policies for net zero referred to earlier? If the NFU can look for a target for 2040, should there not be something in this Bill referencing that?

Thomas Lancaster: We have supported in the past, and would still support, a sector-specific target for net zero by 2040, to reflect the ambition of the NFU and others. We would support an amendment to that effect in Committee and beyond. As a statement of intent and clarity on the role that the sector could play in that climate emergency, it is still a really useful thing to look at. We would also stress that, although this is the Agriculture Bill, in the climate change world there is a lot of talk about nature-based solutions such as peatland restoration, coastal habitats and woodland creation, and the Agriculture Bill, particularly through the land management schemes that flow from it, will be the central mechanism for delivering those nature-based solutions and the aims of the Environment Bill.

Thinking about how public money for public goods can support more sustainable food production that is also carbon and climate friendly, it has an important role to play in building soil carbon, potentially supporting minimum tillage systems, cover crops and other land management interventions that build resilience to climate change in the future. We see climate change running through public money for public goods, from farmed and non-farmed landscapes, and the Agriculture Bill is one of the most important pieces of legislation that we have had in the past decade or probably will have for decades to come in helping to meet the climate emergency that we all face.

Christopher Price: I would support—

Agriculture Bill (Third sitting)

Alicia Kearns Excerpts

Committee stage & Committee Debate: 3rd sitting: House of Commons
Thursday 13th February 2020 Public Bill Committees

[Ruth Jones (Newport West) (Lab)]

Q Mr Render, can I press you a bit further? You were saying that the legislation from Wales will have to be set in law. Yes, absolutely, but when will it actually be up and running? We accept that there will be a time lag, but it is important that it is as close as possible, because what we do not want is divergence, which you have already alluded to. We know that the border is porous, and that livestock and crops travel across it all the time. It is important that where key parts of the Bill do not apply to Wales, such as the environmental land management schemes, we make sure that Welsh farmers are not suffering detriment. I wondered what the panel’s thoughts on that were.

Tim Render: Of course, agriculture is a fully devolved policy area, so we will be developing our own equivalents of the land management approaches that England is proposing. We have already issued two major consultation documents with a lot of detail on that. What we are looking to do through this Bill is to ensure continuity: to make sure that a lot of the important operational elements that mean the agricultural market can work effectively and we continue to have the powers to pay agricultural support to farmers, will be in place and can be maintained beyond the end of this year. From a Welsh perspective, the main thing this Bill does is give us those continuity and keeping pace powers.

However, what we have explicitly decided not to take through this Bill—this is a change from the previous Bill—are powers to make radically new types of payments, analogous to the ELMS in England. We discussed that with the Assembly, and they felt that it was potentially such a large change that they wanted to be able to influence that development of a Welsh agriculture policy, so we have not taken those powers to make major changes in the future; that is what we would do through a Welsh Bill. Obviously, this will depend on the Government after the Assembly elections in May 2021, but we would expect that to be taken forward fairly rapidly as a new Welsh agriculture Bill in that period. As I say, we will be setting out detailed ideas as to what would go in that Bill, particularly the new powers, building on the very detailed proposals we have already set out in consultation documents.

John Davies: It is vital that we take our time over this, because we still do not know what trading environment we will be operating in, and there is an awful lot of volatility out there. It is absolutely vital that we get this right and do it in a co-production way. If we get it right, there are real opportunities; it needs to be a co-operative model that we not only design with the industry, but across different Departments of the Welsh Government. Recently, the Welsh Government have announced that we have hit our target for food sales from Wales, which is £7.5 billion. If we get our “sustainable farming and our land”—that is the name of our new agricultural policy —and sustainable brand values right, we will have two gears meshing, which will really benefit our climate credentials and validity by being able to prove that what we do and how we do it are totally sustainable. It is vital that we get this right and do not rush it.

[Alicia Kearns (Rutland and Melton) (Con)]

Q What assessment have you made of the impact of the Bill on food producers, particularly the agri-food supply chain, and are there any missed opportunities in the Bill that you would like to see us take action on?

Huw Thomas: Probably the biggest missed opportunity is the one about standards, which we have already covered, but there are certainly provisions in the Bill that we welcome. The food security provision, for example, is new and something we have been pressing for for quite a while. The requirement to report every five years is not especially ambitious; it should be every year. Especially as we are transitioning out of the EU and leaving those structures behind, we need to ensure we have a review every year. I would also suggest that the Bill does not impose any positive obligations on a DEFRA Minister—for example, in the light of an adverse finding in a report on food security. You could consider placing obligations on Ministers if we are found to be deficient in food security.

Dr Fenwick: From our point of view, it is about more than farming and food production per se; it is about the families that farm on the land. There are certain types of farming that continue, but effectively the communities do not. We see that in parts of England; thankfully we do not see it so much in Wales, if at all. We would say there has been a missed opportunity to include among key priorities the sort of ambition that is there at EU level in terms of the reforms that are going through, which relate to looking after farming families and communities and to laying out sentences explicitly in legislation.

I refer you back to what Tom Williams said about the 1947 Act, which was in place until it was superseded by EU regulations. He said it was based on providing

“adequate remuneration and decent living standards for farmers and workers”—[Official Report, 17 December 1945; Vol. 417, c. 931.]

with a reasonable return on capital investment. We would welcome that sort of aspiration being inserted into the Bill.

[Deidre Brock (Edinburgh North and Leith) (SNP)]

The other day, we heard evidence from John Cross of the Traceability Design User Group and Simon Hall, who is the managing director of Livestock Information Ltd, which is a new organisation. I thought they were a little vague on details of the traceability service that they are setting up in England, and on how it will integrate or potentially even overrule existing traceability services in the devolved nations. I would be very interested to hear your thoughts on that.

Dr Fenwick: Having only had the time to look at this and go through it as thoroughly as I could yesterday, that clause did ring alarm bells for me. Compared with other systems, Wales has a very successful sheep traceability system that it took into public ownership, rather than farming it out to a private body. It works very well. It could work better, as is the case with all systems, but we hope to develop it into an improved system that will encompass more species. That is certainly the aspiration, and that clause of the Bill certainly raises questions about how those two things interact.

It certainly makes sense to have some form of central data collection point for the UK, given that we are a single country and that it is important for our trading arrangements with other countries. Nevertheless, it depends on how that functions. That part of the legislation would effectively grant powers to non-public bodies—boards that are given certain powers by the Secretary of State. That in itself raises questions; indeed, it is why you took evidence from the witnesses that you mentioned.

Tim Render: To build on that, there are clearly some really important operational issues with the livestock identification systems. We are developing the livestock identification system that we already have in Wales, which works very well. It was co-designed with the industry for ease of operation. We also built it with expansion to different species in mind, so we are looking to turn it into a full livestock ID system, building on a proven IT platform and user interface. It is absolutely vital that we get the behind the scenes IT with what happens in England, Wales and Northern Ireland to have that interchange of data, because you have got cross-border trade and that is how you manage animal health issues, which do not respect borders. That is the big piece of IT work that we are doing with colleagues in DEFRA and colleagues in the other Administrations around the livestock identification system. We will build our own front-end system for Welsh farmers to use, building on what the industry sees as a successful system.

John Davies: It is vital that we get this right. Animal disease does not respect boundaries well, and I concur with everything said in terms of the databases talking to each other. There is also an opportunity here to bring realtime information to purchasing decisions around animal health and the likes, and we need to get this right.

Dr Fenwick: If I may come back, to lessen the potential adverse impacts of clause 32, which amends the Natural Environment and Rural Communities Act 2006, there needs to be at the very least a duty to consult and reach agreements with Welsh Ministers, the Scottish Government and so on to ensure that this does not hand over an extreme power to, in effect, an English board.

Agriculture Bill (Fourth sitting)

Alicia Kearns Excerpts

Committee stage & Committee Debate: 4th sitting: House of Commons
Thursday 13th February 2020 Public Bill Committees

[Dave Doogan]

In terms of those things that you would have them do, are these elements of rewilding or some form of carbon—

George Monbiot: Rewilding, carbon storage, watershed restoration—there is a whole series of additional ecological interventions that you could consider that would clearly fit the notion of public goods, but I worry when I see things like, “Animal welfare will attract public payments.” Surely animal welfare should be something that we legislate for. Hopefully we legislate for ever higher animal welfare standards.

[Alicia Kearns (Rutland and Melton) (Con)]

Q I apologise, perhaps Mr Zeichner planned to ask this, as he is an east of England MP, but I found your description of the east of England as an arable desert slightly confusing, having grown up there. It is better known as Britain’s breadbasket, so I wonder how you came to that conclusion.

George Monbiot: It can be both. It can be highly productive in producing a handful of crop species and deserted in terms of wildlife. There are large areas of arable land, particularly in East Anglia, where there is little wildlife. We see a lot of nitrate pollution, soil erosion and water pollution. It is not in a good ecological state, even though, thanks to lashings of NPK and lots of pesticides, we are producing a lot of food there.

We must recognise that what is great on one metric is not so great on another. The attempt to pretend that they are one and the same—that agriculture is good for ecosystems and that the more we have, the better it will be for ecosystems—clouds this whole debate. There is an inherent conflict between an extractive economy, which simplifies ecosystems, and the complex, rich ecosystems, with food webs that are both wide and deep, which an ecologist like me wants to see.

[Nadia Whittome (Nottingham East) (Lab)]

Q George, Parliament has declared a climate emergency since the last agriculture Bill. What changes can you see in this Bill that deliver the urgent action needed?

George Monbiot: I am afraid I have not seen changes commensurate with the declaration of a climate emergency. This should be front and centre. An emergency is an emergency. We should be maximising mitigation and absorption of carbon from the atmosphere. The Paris agreement asks us for the greatest possible ambition; we do not see that in the Agriculture Bill.

Agriculture Bill (Eighth sitting)

Alicia Kearns Excerpts

Committee stage & Committee Debate: 8th sitting: House of Commons
Thursday 27th February 2020 Public Bill Committees

[Daniel Zeichner]

I was rather anticipating that we would have a discussion about this issue. This is public money for public goods. We are trying to reflect what we believe is the strong view of the British public that they would not want public money to be used to support hunting. Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that we should try to reflect the will of the people?

[Alicia Kearns (Rutland and Melton) (Con)]

rose—

[Mr Goodwill]

I will take the other intervention, which I suspect may be on the same subject, before I reply to them both, if I may.

[Alicia Kearns]

If this legislation is meant to be pragmatic —if it is there to support farmers and ensure they act in the right way to steward our environment and our communities—should we not therefore be doing pragmatic things, rather than virtue signalling? We should recognise that cats have every right to hunt down mice if that is what they want to do, and therefore restricting what farmers can do in this way is neither sensible nor the place of legislation; rather, it is the place of press releases.

[Mr Goodwill]

My hon. Friend makes a good point, which answers the shadow Minister’s point very well. He has talked about the will of the people: the will of the people was expressed on 12 December last year, when they elected a majority Conservative Government.

I conducted an extensive survey of my constituents prior to my election. We got about 20,000 replies to that questionnaire, which asked lots of questions, including one about hunting. The Whitby part of my constituency was about 60/40 in favour of hunting; in the Scarborough part, it was about 60/40 the other way. I went to a primary school not long before the election, and as we all do when we visit schools, I talked about the issues that the children wanted to talk about. Hunting did come up, and one child who came from a farming family made it very clear that she took a dim view of foxes, and the fact that they had been in her family’s hen coop and were taking newborn lambs. She underlined the need to control foxes.

We are not revisiting the hunting legislation in this Committee; rather, we are looking at what the practical implications would be if this amendment were on the face of the Bill, with its provisions being retrospective and applicable to exempt activities such as one dog killing one rat or two dogs being used to flush a rabbit to be shot. If those exemptions were removed, almost every farm in the country would be covered by that retrospective application.

Agriculture Bill (Eleventh sitting)

Alicia Kearns Excerpts

Committee stage & Committee Debate: 11th sitting: House of Commons
Thursday 5th March 2020 Public Bill Committees

[Daniel Zeichner]

It is a pleasure to continue serving under your chairmanship, Sir David. I am afraid that we will not be rattling on at quite the pace you have managed so far.

Hon. Members on both sides of the Committee will be delighted that today we are going to unleash, as the Prime Minister would say, the full talents of the shadow Front-Bench team and Labour Back-Bench Members. Again, I encourage the Government to do the same. Yesterday morning, while eating my porridge, I enjoyed a thoughtful contribution on the “Today” programme—territory currently uninhabited by Ministers of course—from the hon. Member for Devizes. It is an odd world where Back-Bench Members are free to speak on national media but are constrained on detailed scrutiny. The Government love power but may be less keen on responsibility.

A document relevant to our discussion has once again been released in the middle of a morning. This time, it is a 109-page document on bovine TB. Although it is another favourite document of mine, hon. Members will be grateful that I will not subject it to rigorous scrutiny, but one of my hon. Friends will talk to it this afternoon.

Let me get to the core business. Throughout the Committee, we have said that it is crucial that, in any future trade deals, imported agricultural goods meet our animal welfare, environmental and food safety standards to protect our consumers and prevent our farmers being undercut by lower-standard imports. The Bill improves the standards that we set ourselves by reducing environmental impacts and incentivising public goods, such as high welfare standards. If we do not have coherency between our agricultural and trade policies, however, the Government might as well make the entire Bill null and void.

Hon. Members will have noticed in the oral evidence sessions that I asked almost every witness the same question. Although they put it in different ways, they all gave similar answers and agreed that it is the key issue. The Government have said that they are committed not to allow future trade deals to weaken our food standards—I anticipate the Minister’s response—but the problem is that we have yet to find anyone who believes that. I suspect the same goes for most Government Members. There is a simple solution, which we will say again and again: put it in the Bill. I am tempted to follow the Prime Minister’s lead and get Opposition Members to chant, but I think that is a bit naff, so we will not do that. We will try to do better.

We are sceptical because the actions of the Government and the Prime Minister seem to point in a different direction. On Sunday, the Secretary of State had the opportunity, but again refused to rule out chlorinated chicken and hormone-treated beef being imported from the US under a new deal.

[Alicia Kearns (Rutland and Melton) (Con)]

Does the hon. Gentleman not recognise that we have put it into law that we cannot import chlorinated chicken? We would require primary legislation for that to be removed once we have left the EU, so it is not up for discussion. It is in the legislation. All hon. Members will have a chance to vote on that.

The hon. Gentleman says that the Government are giving all the signs of having no interest in protecting standards, but did he not note Liz Truss’ announcement of our red lines, which are standards? That has reassured my farmers locally, who are very happy for all amendments on trade standards to go into a trade Bill, not the Agriculture Bill.

[Daniel Zeichner]

I am delighted that we are getting some rumbustious debate. I will come to the point later of the exact legal position on the current status, which I suspect is not nearly so clear. I am not convinced that many are as reassured by the Secretary of State for International Trade’s document, which I have started reading, as the hon. Lady has, but I am glad that some of her constituents are satisfied, because many are not.

We know that the Prime Minister will not prioritise alignment with EU standards in the upcoming EU trade deal. When asked last month about lower-standard American products coming to the UK, he described such fears as “hysterical” and “mumbo-jumbo”. Given his past record, as I take that as, “Yes, we should be very worried indeed.”

If the Minister is in any doubt about the need to include a safeguard for our production standards in the Bill, I point to the comments made by a Government adviser on food strategy at the weekend, which reveal that the iconoclasts running the show have little regard for protecting our farmers and the domestic production of food. The Mail on Sunday article was a classic of its type, including comments such as

“Britain doesn’t need famers,”

according to the adviser, and

“the food sector is not ‘critically important’ to the economy.”

It concluded with the memorable message from the Mail on Sunday to the Government:

“Britain doesn’t need farms? Find another box to think outside!”

[Alicia Kearns]

Does the hon. Gentleman recognise that that email was sent in a personal capacity by an adviser? It is MPs and Ministers who make legislation, not advisers—I am pretty sure about that. [Interruption.] I do not know who that individual adviser is, so clearly he is not advising my views. The Secretary of State for International Trade, the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and the Prime Minister have all made it clear that the points the adviser makes are not Government policy. We can either listen to nonsensical personal emails or pay attention to what those on the Front Bench are saying. I think they have been clear that the Mail on Sunday story was complete nonsense. Does the hon. Gentleman agree?

[The Chair]

Order. I remind hon. Members that when they refer to other hon. Members they need to use their constituency titles.

Agriculture Bill (Twelfth sitting)

Alicia Kearns Excerpts

Committee stage & Committee Debate: 12th sitting: House of Commons
Thursday 5th March 2020 Public Bill Committees

[Thangam Debbonaire (Bristol West) (Lab)]

I rise to say on behalf of the shadow European affairs team—in the spirit of transitioning from one state of affairs to another—that Labour Front-Benchers have a lot of sympathy with what the hon. Member for Edinburgh North and Leith and the SNP are trying to do. Of course, we want to protect GIs and people’s ability to trade using them, which is a strength. We particularly want to make sure that, given that—I have to reiterate this—the prediction that moving to World Trade Organisation trading rules will be the worst-case scenario, we do everything we can to protect our specialist food producers. However, the Labour party cannot support the new clause as worded because of subsection (2), which would give Scottish Ministers a veto. I will not go over old ground, but it is consistent with Labour policy that we could not support it because of that part, but we support the spirit of what the hon. Lady is trying to achieve.

I urge the Minister to work with all parties and producers across the whole United Kingdom so that we can protect our GI products. They are dear to us and to our sense of who we are, and as we leave the European Union, they may matter even more. There are Members across the Committee who feel very strongly about GIs in their own constituencies.

[Alicia Kearns (Rutland and Melton) (Con)]

Work is ongoing on this exact issue. I encourage Labour Members to join the all-party parliamentary group on geographically protected foods, at which we will discuss this, so that we can hold the Minister to account.

[Thangam Debbonaire]

What a wonderful invitation. I was mentally running through Government Committee members and trying to think of a geographical indicator in the constituency of each one, and I think I did pretty well, actually. Probably all of us have a product in our constituencies whose GI status we want to protect, so the hon. Lady’s offer is useful.

In that spirit, as I said, we support the sentiment behind the new clause. We cannot support subsection (2), but in every other way we support making this law, because we need to do everything we can to protect our GIs. I am sorry if that disappoints the hon. Member for Edinburgh North and Leith, but that is where we are at the moment.