Exiting the European Union (Plant Health)

Susan Elan Jones Excerpts

Tuesday 8th October 2019 Commons Chamber

[Rebecca Pow]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention. As he will know, I have an interest in this area, and I wish to give assurances that this Government are taking alien species extremely seriously. We do not want invasive species coming into this country, and we will give assurances that we will have the highest level of protections and standards as we go forward, as this example today on plant biosecurity will demonstrate. This is a belt and braces step we are taking today.

[Susan Elan Jones (Clwyd South) (Lab)]

I have a quick question for the Minister. Many of us are very concerned about regulated plant material coming in from third countries via the EU. What will happen with the checking? Many of us are very concerned about what this could mean in terms of pests and diseases.

Sheep Farming: No-deal EU Exit

Susan Elan Jones Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd September 2019 Commons Chamber

[Jenny Chapman (Darlington) (Lab)]

When I was first elected to this place in 2010, I never thought I would find myself standing up to challenge the Government about the decimation of the UK’s sheep industry. The ancient practice of shepherding is as old as the hills, but it is now facing an unprecedented challenge brought by the threat of a no-deal Brexit. The threat of no deal brings with it a man-made, Boris-built disaster that could harm so many sectors from chemicals to cars, food to pharmaceuticals, and steel to services—virtually every area of economic activity in this country would be hit, and that includes the sheep industry. The idea that the rearing of lambs could be so comprehensively, cruelly and deliberately threatened by our own Government’s decision is beyond belief.

Keeping sheep is already a vulnerable business and a no-deal Brexit will just add to the problems. The unprecedented loss of markets and the imposition of tariffs and barriers will severely harm this industry.

[Susan Elan Jones (Clwyd South) (Lab)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that this is yet another example of privileged, idle old Etonians who could not care less about the lives and livelihoods of our working hill farmers in Wales and across the UK?

[Jenny Chapman]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. I represent an urban constituency, but even in urban Darlington there are agricultural workers whose jobs would be affected by the effect of a no-deal Brexit on the sheep industry.

Oral Answers to Questions

Susan Elan Jones Excerpts

Thursday 20th June 2019 Commons Chamber

[Dr Coffey]

That is absolutely the case. My right hon. Friend spoke to me this morning about this issue. I will follow up on it, because when major infrastructure projects go ahead, it is important that people should have confidence, and while some vegetation might need to be removed, HS2 is supposed to be planting at least 5 million trees. We will make sure that it does so.

[Susan Elan Jones (Clwyd South) (Lab)]

7. If he will hold discussions with the Home Secretary on increasing the limit on workers in the seasonal agricultural workers pilot scheme.

[The Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (Mr Robert Goodwill)]

The Government have introduced a new immigration pilot scheme for 2019 and 2020 to enable up to 2,500 non-European economic area migrant workers to come to the UK to undertake seasonal employment in the edible horticultural sector. DEFRA and the Home Office will evaluate the outcome before taking any decisions on future arrangements.

[Susan Elan Jones]

Government Members seem to be obsessed with 31 October. That is a pity, because harvest is coming rather sooner, and I wish they would show a similar interest in that. The National Farmers Union has made it absolutely clear that we need a permanent, fully functioning system and that at least 10,000 new workers are required in this area. Why will the Government not act, and why will the Home Office not take proper action?

[Mr Goodwill]

It is important that we evaluate the pilot before moving further. From my point of view, we are meeting the requirements. We had 700 workers here already by the end of May and we expect to reach the peak in the middle of the summer picking season, although the Home Office might look at how many of those workers go back to the Russian Federation, Ukraine and Moldova at the end. We will need to evaluate that after the pilot before going further.

Oral Answers to Questions

Susan Elan Jones Excerpts

Thursday 9th May 2019 Commons Chamber

[Dr Coffey]

The landfill tax has been important in reducing landfill. As I have just said, we are consulting on measures that build on the resources and waste strategy that we published a few months ago. We have been quite clear that we must ensure that we increase recycling, and we will take further measures if incineration is still proving part of the problem.

[Susan Elan Jones (Clwyd South) (Lab)]

7. What steps his Department is taking to speed up subsidy payments to farmers.

[The Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (Mr Robert Goodwill)]

We have delivered significant improvements to the basic payments scheme in England this year, with 99.7% of the 2018 payments now complete. I am, however, acutely aware that we have much more to do to deliver the stewardship schemes to the same high standards.

[Susan Elan Jones]

My constituency borders rural communities in Cheshire and Shropshire, and I know there is immense concern in the farming community on this point. In view of the pretty damning report in 2017 from the Public Accounts Committee and the fact that a third of all UK farmers are now aged 65 or over, will the Government act and do something urgently?

[Mr Goodwill]

The hon. Lady makes a valid point and I do not underestimate the importance of getting this right. That is one of the reasons why we took responsibility for these stewardship schemes away from Natural England and gave it to the Rural Payments Agency, which is performing much better. But we do need to do better, not least because, if we want to incentivise more farmers to participate in these schemes, we need to make sure that we keep our part of the bargain and give them the money they deserve.

UK’s Withdrawal from the European Union

Susan Elan Jones Excerpts

Wednesday 13th March 2019 Commons Chamber

[Keir Starmer]

I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention. That is a real cause for concern. In all my discussions with businesses in the past two years, but particularly in the past three to six months, I have detected that while some of the bigger businesses have had the resource to do some planning for no deal, most of the small and medium-sized businesses have not. They have said to me, “We simply do not have the resource to do it, and therefore we haven’t done it.” That is among the reasons why I have always said that a no-deal Brexit is not a viable option.

[Susan Elan Jones (Clwyd South) (Lab)]

My right hon. and learned Friend has said that he is not a gambling man, but it seems that the Secretary of State for Wales might be, because he is refusing to rule out supporting no deal. If one considers Wales’s agriculture, manufacturing industry and so much more, that is absolute madness, in my view. Does the Secretary of State—not quite the Secretary of State yet, but the shadow Secretary of State—agree?

[Keir Starmer]

I do, and it is a real cause for concern.

Fur Trade

Susan Elan Jones Excerpts

Monday 4th June 2018 Westminster Hall

[Daniel Zeichner]

I absolutely concur with my hon. Friend’s comments, and commend her for the work she did all those years ago. Now we have the opportunity to build on that and go further.

Going back to the awful conditions faced by animals, sometimes they are overfed to become much larger than their frames are suited to. Apparently that yields more fur but, unsurprisingly, it can give the animals terrible health problems. As some hon. Members have already mentioned, while fur farms in the UK were at least regulated, we have no control over those fur farms abroad.

[Susan Elan Jones (Clwyd South) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend is being very generous in the time he is giving people. Does he agree that, 20 years or so ago when the ban was brought in, absolutely nobody would have thought there would be such a market for the import of animal fur, and it is vital we toughen the legislation on that?

[Daniel Zeichner]

Once again, I agree with my hon. Friend.

Going back to those fur farms abroad, the evidence is somewhat contested and there are different conditions in different countries, but it seems to me that the straightforward answer to that is to stop the outsourcing in general. It is not a case of it being out of sight, out of mind; while we are still allowing imports and the sale of fur in this country, I fear we are still complicit, culpable—call it what you like, but we are responsible. Turning to public opinion, it is clear that there is overwhelming public support for a fur ban.

Plastic Bottles and Coffee Cups

Susan Elan Jones Excerpts

Thursday 17th May 2018 Commons Chamber

[Susan Elan Jones (Clwyd South) (Lab)]

It is a great pleasure to take part in this debate and to follow the hon. Member for Mid Derbyshire (Mrs Latham) and other colleagues.

It was an email from a constituent that I received in either the latter part of 2010 or the early part of 2011 that first made me think about this issue. It came just in advance of the Welsh Government’s introduction of a 5p levy on plastic bags. For many of us, that was a pioneering step, and quite a novel one. To be honest, we did not know quite how it would go. However, my constituent had no doubts: in his view, it was going to be an absolute disaster. He thought it would deprive him of all his liberty. Moreover, he made the point that if the Welsh Government went ahead with the charge, he would start his own boycott and do all his shopping across the border in England. I did not want too long a discussion with him, but we did end up with an interesting exchange of emails. I told him about the four cloth bags that I keep in the back of my car and always take shopping with me. He responded by saying that as a true Briton—as he described himself—and a passionate believer in the liberty of the individual, he thought that the plastic bag charge was an absolute outrage.

That exchange made me think at the time, and I have thought subsequently, that if people want to introduce changes to protect the environment, there will inevitably be people with whom those changes will not be popular. Many of these sorts of changes involve changes in our everyday lifestyles. At the time of the introduction of the 5p levy, I met someone—I do not know whether he was related to the person who wrote to me—who had another view on the subject. He thought that it was obvious—was it not?—that the people of Wales were going to resort to carrying all their shopping in black bin bags. I confess that I never did see 2.8 million to 3 million people walking around with their shopping in black bin bags thereafter, but it is interesting to think about what happens when changes such as these are introduced.

As was mentioned earlier, those of a younger generation pick up on these issues more quickly than those of us of a slightly older generation, because with their school eco-councils, they are probably much more instinctively aware of this issue than we are. Of course, plastic bottles are a particular case in point. Historically, campaigning radicals have often taken up the issue of the land—I think “God gave the land to the people” was Michael Foot’s favourite campaigning song—but there have been very few references in the English language to water. As we wax lyrical about water companies and whether they should be privately owned, publicly owned and all the rest of it, we forget the fundamental point: water is totally natural. It comes from the ground and we can get it from a tap. I do wonder why we do not make more effort to make water fountains more available. They should be much more common in our country. I really welcome the fact that the Welsh Government are looking into ways to increase the supply of water fountains and similar outlets so that we can access water that way. There is no earthly need for us to have to buy our water in plastic bottles and carry them around with us.

We should also look at examples from other countries. When I worked in Japan in the early 1990s, there was a great debate there about disposable chopsticks—or waribashi, as they are called in Japanese. The schoolchildren of Japan basically took matters into their own hands, and pretty much every school then decided that the young of Japan would bring to school permanent chopsticks, which they carried in little cases, to use every day. The idea caught on in companies and more widely. I wonder whether it is time that we acted similarly and bought bottles that we can refill with water.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Sir Lindsay Hoyle)]

I think we will carry on using glasses, which are absolutely environmentally friendly.

[Susan Elan Jones]

Glasses and glass carafes are very environmentally friendly, but my hon. Friend’s comments are of course very interesting, as ever.

I wish to make a serious plea. The hon. Member for Windsor (Adam Afriyie) referred to the glass bottle scheme of the 1970s and 1980s, and how we all enjoyed collecting extra pennies by returning glass bottles. Around that time, probably in the 1970s, it was the Wombles generation and there was a great deal of interest in all these issues. It sometimes seems to me that we really have not gone a lot further down that road. I hope that we can redouble our efforts and look into more options, whether for plastic bottles or other things, because if we do not, as a society and as a world we will have far, far greater problems.

Oral Answers to Questions

Susan Elan Jones Excerpts

Thursday 13th October 2016 Commons Chamber

[Susan Elan Jones (Clwyd South) (Lab)]

7. What discussions the Church Commissioners have had with the Church of England on the pastoral care of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Christians.

[Dame Caroline Spelman]

I am unable to answer on the work of the Church in Wales, but the chaplaincy there recently launched in the diocese of St Asaph. It is true that the Church of England is operating a similar number of smaller scale projects. The best example I can think of is in Manchester, where a monthly communion service operates in some parishes specifically for the LGBT community.

[Susan Elan Jones]

I am delighted that, although the Church Commissioners’ writ does not run in the Church in Wales—we are not seeking to change that—the right hon. Lady has already noticed the excellent work of the diocese of St Asaph LGBT chaplaincy. Does she agree that now is the time for those of us who are Christian but not of the LGBT community to give more careful consideration to these issues?

[Dame Caroline Spelman]

Yes, absolutely. It is completely in line with the policy of the Church of England. The House of Bishops has consistently encouraged the clergy to offer appropriate pastoral support, including informal prayer with LGBT people, Christians and others. I think that that injunction is on us all.

Badger Cull

Susan Elan Jones Excerpts

Thursday 13th March 2014 Commons Chamber

[Andrew George]

I am on the record as having cautioned the Government about the roll-out of the two pilot cull projects.

I want to ground my comments on the evidence from the randomised badger culling trial. Some 15 years ago my constituency was selected as one of the triplets, so we had a proactive cull in part of the Penwith moors. I backed the cull because it was on the basis of evidence-based policy making. I followed with great interest the outcome of that research and its conclusions, which found that reactive culling had no part to play in the management of bovine TB in the livestock industry, and that proactive culling could have a meaningful impact only if carried out in a thorough manner that achieved a high level of cull consistently over a long period, which meant that it had to achieve a 70% cull rate within the hot spot areas and across a wide enough area. If the Government chose to adopt this policy, it was important that they did so in such a robust manner that it would have a real and demonstrable impact. My concern about their approach is that they wanted to do it in a manner that would not be at great expense to the public purse and therefore at the cost of the farmer, although of course the state had to step in to provide the support with policing costs, at great expense in the case of both the pilot culls. The outcome of this work ran the high risk of making the situation significantly worse.

That is why, as a result of looking at the Government’s proposal, I proposed in my constituency the introduction of a community-led badger vaccination programme across a wide area—200 sq km. We are going to roll this out significantly later this year on the Penwith peninsula, working closely with the Zoological Society of London, which has now decided to take on a management role in it. Professor Rosie Woodroffe, who has been mentioned several times already, will be taking the lead on the project having originally been involved in the independent scientific group overseeing the randomised badger culling trials.

[Susan Elan Jones (Clwyd South) (Lab)]

Whatever our views on this subject, one need only remember what the Secretary of State himself said in this Chamber in October 2012:

“It would have been quite wrong to go ahead when it was not confident of reaching the 70% target and could have made the position worse.”—[Official Report, 23 October 2012; Vol. 551, c. 847.]

Those are the Secretary of State’s own words. I wonder whether we are now getting from certain Government Members mere bluster to defend an absolutely abhorrent policy that is not helping the farming industry and certainly not doing anything for animal welfare either.

[Andrew George]

I think those who called for this debate were anticipating, or hoping, that the IEP report would be out by now, as it should have been. That would at least have ensured that the information was already in the public domain and had not been disputed by the many people who will have seen it. I think we can make a number of reasonable assumptions about the figures in the report regarding the lack of effectiveness of the two pilot culls. We have a significant amount of evidence to go on—and it will be found to be sound—that those projects failed to achieve even a 50% cull of badgers, even in the Somerset area where it is considered to have gone slightly better than in Gloucestershire. In these unfortunate circumstances, we have to move forward on the basis of the information that is currently in the public domain.

I wish to conclude my remarks with a couple of straightforward points. First, a number of people have alighted on a report from DEFRA this week that has highlighted the fairly significant fall in TB reactors in the herd across the country—down from 37,734 in the period until December 2012 to 32,620 last year. That has happened before the impact of the pilot culls or anything else can be taken into account, which might mean that a lot of the other measures that this Government and the previous Government have engaged in are beginning to show some effects. That cannot be ignored.

Secondly, I want to refer to the collective research that was brought together by Professor James Wood at Cambridge about a year ago. I do not have the document with me, but it showed that even in the herds that had been given the all-clear after a reactor, up to 25% continued to have latent TB within them. In this debate we are concentrating significantly on vaccinating rather than killing the badger population, but we should be concentrating a great deal more on biosecurity measures and ways in which we can bear down on the latent disease that still remains in the United Kingdom livestock industry. Even though it has been given the all-clear—

Oral Answers to Questions

Susan Elan Jones Excerpts

Thursday 13th February 2014 Commons Chamber

[George Eustice]

I hope that we will be able to reform the European Union and make it fit for purpose in the 21st century and campaign to stay in. On the point my hon. Friend makes, the European Commission set out the steps that would be needed to be taken in order for it to make proposals for new EU rules allowing trade in vaccinated cattle. Its tentative time line suggests that that would not be before 2023. We may be in a position to commence field trials next year. The trials will take between two to five years, and there will be a further two to three years to agree for trade in cattle to take place in the European Union. In reality, it will most likely be 2023, which underlines the importance in the meantime of our using every tool open to us to bear down on this terrible disease.

[Susan Elan Jones (Clwyd South) (Lab)]

With so many developments on this issue, an increasing number of us are of the view that the problem is not so much to do with the badgers as with the Government who are moving the goalposts. In a not very heavy parliamentary schedule, will the Government commit to time for debates on the vaccination and the badger cull on the Floor of the House?

[George Eustice]

I regularly debate the issue—a debate was held in Westminster Hall before the Christmas recess—and we are now waiting for the independent expert panel to produce its report. When that report is concluded, we will make further proposals and announcements about the next step.