Oral Answers to Questions Debate
Full Debate: Read Full DebateDepartment: Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs
Daniel Zeichner
Main Page: Daniel Zeichner (Labour - Cambridge)Department Debates - View all Daniel Zeichner's debates with the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs
(10 months, 1 week ago)
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Daniel Zeichner (Cambridge) (Lab)
Last week, past failures caught up with the DEFRA ministerial team. First, the Climate Change Committee castigated them for lack of progress on agriculture and land use, and then the report they had commissioned from John Shropshire and his team detailed the crop losses and lost productivity and production caused by their failure to address labour supply issues. This week, could the Minister tell the House if he knows whether the UK is more or less food-secure than this time last year, and will he explain how he has reached that conclusion?
Mark Spencer
We have extensive conversations with the food supply market. We are blessed in the UK with very robust food supply chains, which are some of the most secure anywhere in the world. Of course, I acknowledge that the Shropshire review has indicated some areas in which we can improve and assist, but we have delivered the 45,000 visas that are available through the seasonal agricultural workers scheme. Not all of those visas have been taken up, and an extra 10,000 are available if required, but nobody has asked for that to be triggered.