Agriculture Bill — House of Lords, 2020-07-09
Topic: Agriculture
Anthony Robert Greaves (Liberal Democrats, Centre to centre-left): I got a bit diverted by that. I thank the noble Lord for his intervention from a sedentary position, which under our present rules is not allowed In order to comment on the amendments from the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, I need to mention what they say. The first seeks include the words: "supporting the development of strategies to assist in the distribution of agri-food products which are locally produced and sold by microenterprises and community enterprises" and "developing a supply chain infrastructure for the purpose of assisting in the supply, processing and sale of" such things. The second amendment consists of definitions. This is something that the Government really ought to take seriously. We live at a time of big supermarkets that are highly centralised and operate on the basis of just-in-time deliveries. If a shelf becomes empty one evening, it will be filled again by the morning; certainly where I live, a truck will have hauled the goods up the M1 and the M6 overnight I understand that system. I understand why it operates and why it helps to produce cheap food. For many people, it is very convenient to be able to go to the supermarket and buy food. That is not going to go away, but we ought to move away from it a bit and get a bit more balance; there was a lot of talk about balance on Tuesday in this Committee. There needs to be a lot more involvement of, for example, people in Lancashire, where I live, growing produce of the right kind for sale in Lancashire to people in Lancashire. I very much support these amendments There has been a lot of talk recently about parts of the country being left behind, and the way in which left-behind places, particularly small and medium-sized towns such as former mining communities and industrial areas in the north of England, have even changed their politics as a result, and that something has to be done about it. The role of those towns will be crucial to the recovery of this country following the present coronavirus crisis. The Government’s approach to that, which I do not disagree with per se, is to put a lot of money into what they call infrastructure. However, building lots of new fast railway lines and roads going through places—or, and this is a key point, past places—will not do very much at all for the places concerned. Even providing more education and training is not going to do a lot. What is essential for those areas is the rejuvenation of towns, from small towns to medium-sized towns, and even those that pretend to be cities. I am not talking about Manchester, Leeds, Newcastle and Liverpool and the like; the big regional centres are going to do okay anyway, and by and large they are. It is the areas in between: the places on the edge, the places that used to depend upon one or two basic industries that have disappeared, and the places that are increasingly rootless and increasingly lacking a future. I believe that developing local agriculture and local farming, and local markets for that local farming, can contribute to the future of those areas. That is why I think that this idea, among others, is so important The other amendment that I support, in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Whitchurch, has not yet been moved. It hints at discussions that we will have later in Committee about the potential conflicts between productivity in agriculture and all the environmental and social improvements—the public goods—that we want to see on the other side. There is a conflict and we really need to discuss it, but this is probably not the time.