Agriculture Bill — House of Lords, 2020-07-07
Topic: Agriculture
Margaret Beryl Jones (Labour, Centre-left): I am grateful to all noble Lords who have spoken on their amendments today. We have indeed had a very wide-ranging debate, and many of those amendments have set the scene for more detailed discussions that we will have elsewhere in the Bill as we journey through it. However, we do not get the opportunity to reshape the future of agriculture in the UK very often, so it is right that we debate and test the boundaries of what is possible within the constraints of a public subsidy as far as it can go. The fact that so many amendments have been tabled is a measure of a real enthusiasm among noble Lords to shape the legislation for the next generation into something that we can be proud of, but also something with which we can learn the lessons of the past As many noble Lords have said, their amendments are probing amendments, which do just that. As such, we welcome many of the intentions behind those amendments. I will come back to some of the specifics shortly, but I will make a couple of general points first First, we believe that the Bill is broadly on the right track and we welcome the improvements that have already been made since it was introduced. The underlying principle of public money for public goods is important and it is right that we should incentivise those who work on our land to restore and improve the natural environment Secondly, however we look at it, we are dealing with a limited pot of money. It would be a brave person who thought that we would get more than the £3 billion a year which the Government have already promise and— who knows—the economic crisis might even put that promise on the line. We will deal with the detail of how that money is to be divided up and allocated when we discuss amendments to later clauses, but we need to be wary of spreading too widely the purposes for which that money can be allocated. This point was well made by a number of noble Lords, and I liked my noble friend Lady Young of Old Scone’s analogy of a Christmas tree, with its baubles crashing down, overweighed with good intentions. What we do not want is for existing active farmers, with the good will and enthusiasm to embrace good environmental practices, to find that they cannot access sufficient financial assistance to make their farm pay. I agree with my noble friend Lord Whitty that there is a danger of creating a very complex system of payments and tiers of regulations which is no better than the system that we had in the past. We do not want farmers to find that that very bureaucracy prevents them accessing the money to which they are entitled. We cannot make light of this, because the impact of the Covid pandemic has illustrated all too starkly that many farm incomes are indeed in a perilous position. We cannot replace one bureaucracy with another, and we need to make sure that the income of our farming communities, when they agree with the new ambitions that we have, is secure. As I have said before, this is a delicate balance between the environment and agriculture, and it is our responsibility to make sure that we get that balance right as we work our way through the Bill Thirdly, the one fundamental area in the Bill where I do not think the Government have got it right is food policy—the importance of farmers producing healthy food and contributing to greater UK food stability. We will return to this in later groups, but it is flagged up in this group in Amendment 234 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, which talks about better advice for farmers in order to deliver improved food security and nutrition. I agree with all of that, but the advice should be expert advice. We have some later amendments about the need to put some limits on the number of advisers and consultants who will try to move into this space, when really what we need is for the money to go to its core purpose I turn to some of the amendments. The noble Earls, Lord Devon and Lord Dundee, and other noble Lords referred to the need for farming to play its part in mitigating climate change. We agree, and that the management and protection of soils and peatlands can play a huge role in good agricultural practice, as well as mitigating climate change. The noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, raised the important issue of the impact of agriculture on air pollution. We agree with those points. Our Amendment 272, which we will deal with separately, sets out in more detail what we believe to be the Government’s responsibilities to ensure that agriculture meets all the Paris Agreement targets on climate change The noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh, the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, the noble Earl, Lord Devon, and other noble Lords sought to spell out in more detail what good environmental policy should look like. They referenced pasture-fed livestock, the protection of soil and the link with natural recovery strategies. They rightly raised the need for those policies to have a synergy across other Bills, such as the Environment Bill, and environment policies. We agree with these points and feel that there ought to be a way of embedding those principles in the Bill but also making sure that we have a common approach on these issues. We also agree with the noble Lord, Lord Bruce, and the many other noble Lords who have spoken on this issue that hill farmers and upland farmers have a particular need and desire for reassurance about and support for their future. I hope that the Minister will be able to provide some of that reassurance in his response.