Brexit: Agriculture and Farm Animal Welfare (European Union Committee Report)

Lord Jopling Excerpts

Tuesday 17th October 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Jopling (Con)]

My Lords, I am delighted to follow the noble Lord, Lord Teverson. I congratulate him and his committee on producing a most interesting report, which takes us on to new ground. I particularly want to follow up the latter part of his remarks. I draw the attention of the House to my farming interests, as shown in the register.

Close attention is at last being paid to agriculture and the implications of Brexit. Twice in the last year I have spoken in this House about the fundamental problems and solutions: I am still waiting for a response from the Government. When I read the Minister’s evidence to the committee I did not get much further. We now have a position where the NFU and the Select Committee are beginning to address these crucial matters. Until now, apart from promises to continue the current support for five years, most of the comments from Ministers have related to environmental matters and animal welfare. These are important but they are not central to the challenges which we face in agriculture.

People are at last talking about trade and tariffs. I am very alarmed indeed when I hear former and current Ministers speaking about free trade and illustrating their point with New Zealand’s experience some decades ago. It had a ready, untapped market nearby which we do not. In the years after the Second World War, British agriculture was supported by a near-free-trade policy, but this was underwritten by a system of agricultural support through guaranteed prices and efficiency payments, which cost the United Kingdom Treasury huge amounts of money. A review of agricultural policy was set up after the 1964 Conservative defeat, led by my old friend Jim Prior—I am sorry that our noble friend Lord Prior is no longer in the Chamber. I was a member of that study, and we concluded that a better system of supporting agriculture was not through guaranteed prices and efficiency payments but through import levies. This became the policy of my party in both the 1966 and 1970 elections, before we joined the European Community. Some people criticised it because of its effect on the cost of living and the price of food, but this had no political impact because we were able to demonstrate that the effect was absolutely marginal. This is partly because food was a much decreasing part of the cost of living and partly because farm-gate prices are a small fraction of shop-shelf prices.

As the Select Committee report demonstrates, we still have support for agriculture in the United Kingdom through the common external tariff of the common agricultural policy. If we were foolish enough to move to a free trade philosophy, the agriculture industry would be challenged by a flood of cheap imports, produced under standards which are far below our own, which would depress prices. Not only that but our exports to the European Union—which as the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, said are very substantial—would have to jump over the common external tariff unless we were inside it. We face a great dilemma. First, we must realise that the neatest way to support agriculture is through tariff protection. The effect on the cost of living was marginal in the 1960s; it is even less now. The report suggests that in 2015 the tariff was 10.7% over all agricultural goods. We should seek to negotiate that so that we remain, as far as possible, within the current tariff regime of the European Union. Secondly, arguments in favour of free trade in agricultural products are, in a way, a repeat of the great debates on repealing the Corn Laws in the 19th century. It was wrong then and it remains wrong now.