Climate Change and Flooding

Debate between Kerry McCarthy and Huw Irranca-Davies

Tuesday 15th December 2015 Commons Chamber

[Kerry McCarthy]

I accept that nuclear is part of the mix—that is our policy—but it is not the only solution to green energy in this country, which seems to be the Government’s point of view.

[Huw Irranca-Davies (Ogmore) (Lab)]

Whatever the solutions, one of the key conclusions from COP 21 is that, in order to drive down from 3.5° to 2.7°, 2° or 1.5°, the UK will have to reset its rest—as it has been phrased. We need to do more faster and with greater urgency, and that is exactly what Lord Deben and the CCC have said. Does she agree that, whatever the solutions, one of the most important things is for the Government to accept the fifth carbon budget and narrow the gap with the fourth carbon budget?

[Kerry McCarthy]

I agree entirely with my hon. Friend. There is almost a consensus that the UK needs to do more, go faster and introduce stronger targets.

Business needs certainty, but people in Cumbria and other flood zones need it too. Last week, I visited Carlisle and Cockermouth with my right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition. We are grateful to the councillors, business owners and residents who showed us around their communities and homes, and we left impressed by their resilience and determined that the Government must do all they can to rebuild their communities and reduce their future flood risk. They should never have to go through this again.

Elliott Review and Food Crime

Debate between Kerry McCarthy and Huw Irranca-Davies

Wednesday 2nd April 2014 Westminster Hall

[Huw Irranca-Davies (Ogmore) (Lab)]

It is a great pleasure, Dr McCrea, to serve under your stewardship this morning in what has been a good and wide-ranging debate. I will try not to diminish the quality of the contributions. I congratulate the hon. Member for South Thanet (Laura Sandys) not only on securing the debate, but on her introduction to it. She has been a consistent campaigner on this and related issues. Her expertise showed in how she comprehensively went through a range of issues. I will start with some of the comments that she and other colleagues made.

The hon. Lady wisely said that we should have been able to see the problem coming, not least through the disconnect between commodity prices and the retail offer. There were other things that could have been seen, not least the disappearance of horses from Ireland, Northern Ireland and Wales. They ended up in north Wales or elsewhere, but they did not emerge somewhere else. Some connectivity of intelligence would have suggested that something was happening. There were also wider European issues. The hon. Lady made the point exceptionally well that we should have been able to see the problem coming, and that is one of the big lessons in the recommendations in the Elliott report.

My hon. Friend the Member for Bristol East (Kerry McCarthy) is also a long-term campaigner on food and related issues. She raised a vital issue that was picked up in the Elliott report. There are worrying reductions in the capacity for testing, which are linked to the capacity for detection, investigation and early intervention. That is not simply about Europol, it is about what is happening down on the ground at the grass roots, in local authorities and at a co-ordinated UK level. It is worrying if that capacity is diminished, and it is not just my hon. Friend who says that—as she said, the Elliott review also says that clearly.

The hon. Member for Thirsk and Malton (Miss McIntosh), who has great expertise from her constituency background and knowledge, made some good points about the inconsistency in how some meat production is treated at EU and UK level. I strongly agree with her call for definitive action after a series of reports into food fraud and food crime, and an end to the hiatus and vacuum in the FSA chairmanship. That is critical, because if the Elliott report says nothing else about the FSA, it screams out for leadership not only within the Government and internationally, but at the heart of the matter, which includes the FSA. That leadership is needed to drive the issue forward, not least when the full report is produced. Someone—not just the Minister, but the head of the FSA—must take a steer and say how strongly the recommendations will be pushed through.

The hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) brought a different perspective to the issue, and I thank him for talking about the need for consistent application of what eventually comes out of the Elliott review regardless of national borders. That relates to the big issue of long supply chains. We cannot suddenly make them disappear. There will be long global supply chains—that is the reality we now live with, even with the approach that Tesco and Asda are taking of shortening supply chains and so on. We therefore need commensurate transnational measures to deal with supply chains and to ensure that we can give consumers confidence on not only provenance but safety. A year ago, the issue was primarily provenance; the next one may be food safety. We must ensure that good crime analysis is comprehensively pushed out transnationally. We can do a lot about that.

All hon. Members who spoke referred, in various ways, to squaring the circle of cost, and having safe, affordable, nutritious food, while also having fair reward for producers. Those matters are not unconnected. They hang together coherently, or they should. The hon. Member for South Thanet referred to her consistent theme about the need for education and awareness so that people can do a lot with good food affordably. She is right, but that must be balanced against the reality of, for example, a single parent rushing between a couple of jobs and dealing with child duties. They will look for convenience foods, so our frozen, convenience meat products must be safe, nutritious and affordable—not simply cheap, but affordable. I know that she accepts that, and getting it right is important.

The Elliott review is important, and if we look at the scale of the industry, we see why it is critical to get the matter right. It involves not just consumer confidence but jobs and industry. According to the most recent figures from the Library, the food and drinks industry is worth £188 billion. The food and drink manufacturing industry is the single largest manufacturing sector in the UK, with a turnover of £92 billion and gross value added of £24 billion, accounting for 18% of the total manufacturing sector by turnover. It employs just over 400,000 workers, which is 16% of the overall manufacturing work force in the UK.

The latest figures that I have—I admit that they go back to 2012, so I suspect that they are slightly bigger now—suggest that just in the sectors responsible for the processing, production and preservation of meat, poultry, fish, crustaceans and molluscs, as referred to by the hon. Member for Strangford, there were nearly 3,500 enterprises of various size and scale, with more than £32 billion spent, employing more than 176,000 people. We therefore need to get things right—post-horsemeat and post-Elliott review and its final recommendations—not only for consumer confidence but because if we do not, that is what is at risk. Our deserved reputation for good, safe, well provenanced food was shaken last year. We need to get it right back in kilter for the domestic market, consumers, the industry itself and our export potential.

We know that there has been an impact on consumer confidence over the past year, because although frozen meat and poultry sales grew, those of frozen and processed meat products plummeted by as much as 40% for some sellers immediately after what happened, and there has been a slow recovery since. According to Euromonitor, consumer confidence in frozen and processed meat food is still low. As hon. Members have mentioned, the situation has been a boon for butchers, farm shops and the like, but it has also caused re-engineering towards shorter supply chains by organisations such as Asda and Tesco. I recall, as everybody will, Tesco’s “We get it” advert last year, which came, not coincidentally, at the same time as the National Farmers Union conference saying, “We get it. We will change the way we operate”. However, it was not simply Tesco—that was the biggest organisation to be confronted with the problem, but others have also started re-engineering. There is work to be done, and I keep a close eye on that, but they are starting to change how they operate.

[Kerry McCarthy]

I am somewhat baffled about how there can be such long supply chains in the manufacture of food products and yet the price is still so low. It seems common sense that the more travel is involved, and the more countries and the more different elements, the more the price will be bumped up. I suspect that I am putting my hon. Friend on the spot, but I very much welcome the fact that supply chains are being shortened, so that we know where our food is coming from.

[Huw Irranca-Davies]

My hon. Friend makes a very good point, but I think we have to accept that in international food transactions, some food products do not have a UK market. There are some products created in the UK that UK consumers do not consume. For example, if we look at some of the products that are consumed in other nations from the slaughter of chickens, there is currently no UK market for them. They are exported. Conversely and curiously, many of our farmers are finding at the moment that the premium prices for Welsh lamb, pork and so on are not primarily in the UK, so the market is operating in a way that is turning some of the product flows on their heads. Although I welcome a drive towards shorter, more clearly identifiable food supply chains, there will always be an element of longer supply chains, and that is why we need to deal with the issue in both ways.

[Kerry McCarthy]

I want to clarify that I am not really talking about us exporting our products or importing products, but at the time of the horsemeat scandal, when we were looking, for example, at what was in lasagne, about 11 different countries seemed to be involved. Meat might have started out in Ireland, but then it went to Spain, Romania and so on. Surely lasagne can just be made in one or two countries, rather than having to be sent on a tour of Europe before it gets to us.

[Huw Irranca-Davies]

My hon. Friend makes a very good point—I am sorry, I did not realise that she was referring to that specific example. She is right; in fact, in some examples, as many as 20 transaction points were in the food cycle, which is astonishing. Meat was hurtling across Europe for different parts of its processing. I suspect that it went beyond Europe as well, because there was an important, interesting sideshow going on. The US had banned the slaughter of horses for meat production, but most people had accepted that all they had done was exported that to South America—and where was it going from there?

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. One welcome move from some supermarkets and retailers is that the big ones are now following the established practice among others, such as Waitrose, Morrisons and the Co-op, of not only identifying local and UK sourcing—within England, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland and, I have to say, Ireland as well—but being much more specific for consumers. They are saying, “We can tell you where the product comes from and how close it is to market”. That is a welcome innovation.

I turn to the evidence of growth in food fraud and food crime. As hon. Members have mentioned, when the FSA set up the food fraud database in 2007, it received less than 50 reports of food fraud, but by last year it had received more than 1,500. According to the National Audit Office, local authorities reported 1,380 cases of food fraud in 2012, which was up by two thirds since 2010.

Professor Elliott wisely makes the distinction between food fraud and food crime. There have always been elements of food fraud going on; some noticeable ones are currently pending prosecution in different parts of the UK. However, food crime goes beyond the

“few random acts by ‘rogues’”—

they have always been out there operating, unfortunately, and they need to be stamped down on—into what Professor Elliott calls

“an organised activity perpetrated by groups who knowingly set out to deceive and or injure those purchasing a food product.”

It is on a grand scale and it is worrying.

Common Agricultural Policy

Debate between Kerry McCarthy and Huw Irranca-Davies

Thursday 1st November 2012 Westminster Hall

[Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)]

As ever, it is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Chope. I want to focus on the concerns being raised by environmental organisations about this issue, and particularly on the views expressed by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, the Campaign to Protect Rural England, and the Wildlife and Countryside Link. It is important to note that although this matter is immensely important to our farmers, it is not only about them, as everyone should have a stake in the countryside, whether they own land, make money from it, work on it, or not.

[Huw Irranca-Davies]

May I commend my hon. Friend, Mr Chope, on introducing to the debate the concept of a one-nation CAP reform?

[Kerry McCarthy]

I thought for a moment that my hon. Friend was congratulating you, Mr Chope, on introducing that concept, and I wondered whether I had missed something. Yes—a one-nation CAP reform. That is our slogan for today.

If the concerns raised by environmental organisations are not addressed, there is a danger that the CAP, which has demonstrably made some progress over the past 20 years—albeit painfully and slowly at times—could, as part of a process intended to improve its environmental performance, perversely be taken backwards. I am glad to say that there is general agreement on the need to green the CAP, which I regard as absolutely necessary if we are to achieve three objectives: first, to support more long-term sustainable food production; secondly, to address the ever-increasing challenge of global food security; and, thirdly, to meet our environmental goals, which range from halting and reversing biodiversity declines by 2020, to meeting our climate change targets.

Greening of pillar one payments must happen and, at the same time, pillar two must be fully protected or ideally, increased. The added justification for those changes is, in the words of the RSPB’s evidence to the Committee’s inquiry, to

“legitimise expenditure of €300 billion over the next seven years.”

That is a huge sum of money. We know from yesterday’s debate on the EU budget just how much concern there is in this place, and among the wider public, about EU spending, of which the CAP is the largest single component. I agree with the Committee’s conclusion that it is a concern that greening may be seen by the Commission as a way of justifying the significant public expense of its policy on direct payments, rather than a way of delivering environmental improvements across the EU. I hope that the Minister will devote some time to that concern in his response.

There is also concern, as there is in relation to other areas of Government policy, that this could become an exercise in so-called greenwashing—greening in name, but not in outcome. Greening must be designed and implemented in a way that secures genuine environmental improvements at farm level and across all member states. There are worrying signals that the member states want to maintain the status quo but to repackage the status quo as green when it is clearly not. The Luxembourg paper contains some strong examples of that. The measures suggested by 16 member states in that working paper, published in April, are even worse in delivering environmental outcomes. In particular, the section on farmers who are “green by definition” has raised concerns. Arguing that a farm is automatically green just because a certain proportion of it is grass is nonsensical, as there is huge variation.