Agriculture Bill — House of Lords, 2020-09-17
Topic: Agriculture
Malcolm Sinclair (Conservative, Centre-right): My Lords, I too had the privilege of sitting on the committee chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Krebs—the Food, Poverty, Health and Environment Committee—and I am grateful to the Government for their response to our report. I would classify it in English as "disappointing," in Scottish as "peely-wally," and I think the amendment before us goes a long way towards implementing what was unanimously agreed in the report. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, that to have it in the Bill now is the right way forward to help Defra in the future. The quality of the food we eat is costing us all billions—costing this country a great deal of money, and unnecessarily. We are the processed food capital of Europe, and that is a number one spot that we should not be holding. It was the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, who said that we want to encourage the production of good, healthy food. I argue that the farmers do produce good, healthy food now: it is the industry, as the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, said on the previous group of amendments, that turns decent, good food into the poison that we are fed by supermarkets—all this ghastly processed food. Some of it is absolutely delicious, and you have to go for a second helping, but it is poison: it is doing us no good and it is costing the NHS, in due course, one heck of a lot of money So it is the industry. I remember that on one occasion we were interviewing Judith Batchelar of Sainsbury’s and then the British Retail Consortium. I pressed hard and it took a long time to get a final answer from Judith Batchelar, but she did finally say that Sainsbury’s would not sell chlorinated chicken. The British Retail Consortium, on the other hand, said, "Oh, no, we have no control over our members". In other words, "We are not going to say anything, and we are certainly going to produce the cheapest food that we can find on the market." The industry will be called to the table kicking and screaming against any change As so much of the food we eat is either fast food or from restaurants, we have absolutely no idea what we are being served. It is one thing to buy something with a label on it in a supermarket or a shop, but it is quite another when we eat outside our home and have absolutely no idea where the food comes from On a point of nitpicking detail with the amendment, I would have liked in subsection (4)(d), on food labelling, to have included the effects of climate change. I mentioned this quite a lot in Committee, and I hope my noble friend has read the book by Professor Bridle that I recommended to him, or at least his officials have and given him a precis of it Another point we raised in Committee which is hugely important to the whole of our national food strategy is what I would term Whitehall governance. It is not just Defra; there are numerous departments within government that are all involved in the food we eat, whether it is education—through schools—or the National Health Service, or whoever it is. Whitehall governance has also got to improve. It was quite clear from the number of Ministers we had to interview to get any sort of idea of what the Government were trying to do that it is not a joined-up process I believe this amendment would go a long way to push that in the right direction. I do not think my noble friend Lady McIntosh is right in saying that it will pre-empt part 2; it will strengthen the Government’s hand when part 2 is published. By that stage, the Government will be a little bit more ahead of the game than they are at the moment.