draft Common Organisation of the Markets in Agricultural Products Framework (miscellaneous amendments, etc.) (eu exit) Regulations 2019 Draft Common organisation of the markets in agricultural products and common agricultural policy (miscellaneous amendments) (eu exit) regulations 2019 Draft Agriculture (Legislative Fuctions) (EU Exit) (No. 2) Regulations 2019

Luke Pollard Excerpts

Tuesday 26th March 2019 General Committees

[Luke Pollard (Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport) (Lab/Co-op)]

As the Minister is double acting with his former Minister, he will excuse me if the shadow team does the same. I have only a few technical questions.

In the draft Agriculture (Legislative Functions) (EU Exit) (No. 2) Regulations 2019, explanatory note 7.5 on page 4 states:

“The Secretary of State may also exercise the functions on behalf of a devolved administration, but only with their consent.”

Can the Minister provide clarification with regard to the concerns he raised earlier about the functions being used in relation to powers in Wales? What type of consent does the Minister need to seek? For the sake of clarity, can the Minister set out whether he can exercise those powers in Wales without the consent of the Welsh Assembly due to the devolution settlement being confused?

The Minister, and certainly his predecessor, will know that I have been critical about the wording of impact assessments throughout this entire process and the phraseology that said there is no or no significant impact was used in earlier statutory instruments. As we are coming to the end of these DEFRA SIs, I wish to put on record that impact assessment paragraph 12.3 on page 5 is significantly better than the wording when we started the process. I am grateful to officials for beefing that up. I am also especially grateful for the addition of the understanding about the financial threshold and the impact the instrument suggests. In this case, it states that

“the change in regulation falls below the £5m p.a. threshold for net direct costs to business.”

In my mind, £5 million seems to be a significant impact for businesses. I believe that threshold level is still too broad, but it is good to see that a threshold level is being inserted at all.

On the draft Common Organisation of the Markets in Agricultural Products Framework (Miscellaneous Amendments, etc.) (EU Exit) Regulations 2019, can the Minister explain the revocations in part 4? My understanding is that this SI revokes geographical indication protection for a series of incredibly posh wines that I have not been fortunate enough to try, including Bürgstadter Berg and Monzinger Niederberg, which according to my friends at Google is a wonderful Riesling. I would be grateful if the Minister set out whether those protections are replicated elsewhere, or whether what we are doing here is removing geographical indication protections. As the Minister will know, and the former Minister will certainly know, I am a big fan of keeping geographical indication protections so that the GI status of, for example, Cornish pasties can be protected after whatever form of Brexit we have. I am concerned that revoking protections on certain types of wine will be the start of a reduction in GI protections that could encourage our European friends to further remove protections on UK products.

Finally, in the explanatory memorandum for the draft Common Organisation of the Markets in Agricultural Products Framework (Miscellaneous Amendments, etc.) (EU Exit) Regulations 2019, paragraph 7.3 on page 4 states:

“With exit day less than one year away, and in the continued absence of a Northern Ireland Executive”.

That is technically correct—three days is certainly less than one year away—but I wonder how long this SI has been sitting on the books. There is a point here about how late we are looking at so many of these SIs, ahead of what was previously exit day on 29 March. That sentence suggests to me that this SI has been sitting around for a long time.

[George Eustice]

Perhaps officials in the Department could foresee that Parliament would baulk at the idea of leaving without a deal. “One year” might be a reference to the extension.

[Luke Pollard]

I am grateful to the former Minister, who is again backseat driving the Minister’s role. I would like to think that officials are that prescient about the Government’s inability to bring forward a deal that they can get a parliamentary majority for, but I suspect the answer is that this SI has been sitting on a desk in DEFRA for some considerable time, and we are waiting until the last moment for these SIs to be given the scrutiny they deserve. As my hon. Friend the Member for Stroud said, driving through so many SIs means that the level of scrutiny that stakeholders and the Opposition can give them is more limited than if we had been given more time. However, I would be grateful if the Minister set out answers, particularly about the geographical indications and what they mean for the read-across of UK protections.