Agriculture Bill

Lord Empey Excerpts

Committee stage & Committee: 1st sitting (Hansarad) & Committee: 1st sitting (Hansarad): House of Lords
Tuesday 7th July 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Empey (UUP) [V]]

My Lords, I wish to add to the remarks made by one or two participants about being balloted out of the Second Reading. That was most unfortunate. With other major Bills in the pipeline, I hope it will be possible to ensure that alternative mechanisms are found to enable people to fully participate.

I will speak specifically to Amendment 7, in the name of my noble friend Lord Caithness, which refers to growing crops for biofuel. Biofuels are something that we in Northern Ireland know a little about, because we have had one of the greatest financial scandals ever on the back of them. The renewable heating scheme was designed to replace the use of carbon-based fuels with more natural products, but of course it collapsed. Nevertheless, the point made in the amendment is important, and we need to ensure that it is included. If we are to meet our environmental targets over the years, we need to include not only fuels that are currently available but fuels that may subsequently become available—otherwise a great opportunity will be lost.

A number of Members have referred to hill farms, and that is a huge issue for us in this part of the country. But there is a wider point I want to make to the Minister—one which is perhaps not fully understood. Whatever is in the Bill, the fact remains that, to all intents and purposes, we remain, in very large measure, within the European Union as far as agriculture is concerned. Therefore, amendments that we will come to later in the Bill, including one of my own on standards, become progressively more important.

In many respects, the Government have refused to concede or acknowledge the reality of what they have agreed with the European Union in the protocol that deals with Northern Ireland. Even this week, as we are having this debate, people here are talking about building border control posts and asking how many acres need to be set aside to provide for suitable inspections.

In many respects this Bill is taking place in a vacuum, in that some of us are still bound, as far as state aid is concerned, and will have to comply fully with all that. Perhaps the Minister will address this in his winding-up speech, but I wonder whether he and his colleagues fully appreciate the downstream consequences of this as we go forward. If trade deals are done with other countries and cheap food emerges, we in Northern Ireland will still be bound by European Union standards; our farmers will have to ensure that welfare and other matters are fully adhered to. So if imports are not protected and we do not get the adequate standards in the Bill, our farmers will be at a huge disadvantage.

The noble Lord, Lord Wigley, referred to a framework, but the framework we already have is the CAP and the standards that flow from it. In other words, we will end up with a two-track agriculture system in the United Kingdom—and we should bear in mind that agriculture is a much more significant part of our economy in Northern Ireland than it is in the UK economy as a whole.

I hope that the Minister, in winding up on this group, will be kind enough to address this issue and tell us how it is proposed to ensure that we have at least a parallel process in the United Kingdom, given that one part of it will be governed by the European Union, into which we will have no input, and yet the rest of the country will not. That is the dilemma that we face here.

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[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Baroness Garden of Frognal) (LD)]

I understand that the noble Baroness, Lady Mallalieu, has scratched, so I now call the noble Lord, Lord Empey.

[Lord Empey [V]]

My Lords, one theme that has come up today has been the theme of definition. In the last group, the amendments of the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, led to a discussion of the differences between “conserve” and “enhance”. In this group, the noble Earl, Lord Devon, has drawn our attention to the difference between “enjoyment” and “health and wellbeing”. I am inclined to agree with him on that, and the noble Viscount, Lord Trenchard, did so as well. When we look at access to the countryside, clearly a balance has to be struck: where large amounts of taxpayers’ money are being invested in the countryside, then quite clearly many people wish to seek access to it. I understand that, in certain cases, people who seek access to the countryside under certain circumstances can cause harm in so far as they can spread diseases and so on. Lots of people feel that, as part of the country, they need to have access and have a right to have access, so it is a question of getting the balance right. The point that the noble Earl, Lord Devon, was making was that by making health and well-being a public good, it categorises something. Enjoyment is such a broadly based point that it lacks any kind of clarity. Those terms should be revisited.

On the general point about access to the countryside, we encourage people for health and well-being purposes to go there if they are resident in cities. However, we have to remember that many people live in the countryside who are not farmers, and there are many parts of the agricultural sector that are not farms. Some people have this idea that it is the job of people who work in the countryside to make sure that the hedges are well trimmed so that when the city dwellers come out at the weekend, it all looks very pretty. That is not what it is—it is not a museum. It cannot be maintained in aspic. The rural areas are living, working workplaces in many cases, and we want to ensure that that continues. However, I say to the Minister that the question of balance requires some consistency in how we define these matters, particularly when we are establishing public good. The general thrust of the Bill is good, but we must put more effort into consistency of definition.

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees]

I call the noble Lord, Lord Naseby. We cannot hear him so we will move on to the noble Lord, Lord De Mauley, and will try to get the noble Lord, Lord Naseby, back later.