Agriculture Bill — House of Lords, 2020-07-07
Topic: Agriculture
Lucy Neville-Rolfe (Conservative, Centre-right): My Lords, it is a great pleasure to be here today and to contribute to a debate on this wide-ranging group. I was quite taken aback to be balloted out of speaking at Second Reading. I could barely be more steeped in agriculture. I was brought up on a family farm in Wiltshire and used to stand in gateways from an early age to help my father keep the cows in order; I even knew their names. My Civil Service career was mainly at the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, where I was responsible for the farm woodland scheme and the Food Safety Act. I spent more than 15 years as a director at Tesco and devoted a lot of energy to farming matters and green issues. I was a director at 2 Sisters Food Group before joining the Government. Now, to declare my current interest entered in the register, I am chairman of Assured Food Standards—Red Tractor, as we call it—which is responsible for assuring some £15 billion-worth of British food a year from all four nations of the UK In my view, anyone should be able to speak at Second Reading, and I hope the powers that be have learned from the unjustifiable exclusion of several of us. I also express my concern that my noble friend Lord Dobbs was excluded from proceedings in Committee today owing to the loss of an email and the deadlines laid down by the House under Covid. All this underlines the need to get back to normal working, as Peers on all sides of the House are beginning to say. However, I put on record my thanks to my noble friend Lord Gardiner for the courtesy of a meeting to discuss my thoughts I turn to my Amendment 82 on impact assessment. This Bill, especially Clause 1, represents a huge change in farming and countryside management in the UK; just look at its extraordinarily long title. This needs to be quantified. We need to look at the economic costs, benefits and risks that the new framework will entail, so it is a perfect candidate for an impact assessment at the Bill stage, when the parameters are being settled Interestingly, the Regulatory Policy Committee, which has the important responsibility of independently—I emphasise that word—vetting the quality of government departments’ impact assessments, agrees. From its relatively narrow perspective, it advised on 20 February that the Bill will have "significant impacts on businesses". I cite the radical changes to financial assistance and its tiers and conditions, and the shift in marketing standards and carcass classification, which we will discuss next week The fact is that impact assessments should have been submitted to the RPC for independent scrutiny, seen by Ministers and provided to Parliament. I know how valuable this can be to us. For example, DWP did a high-class job on the Pension Schemes Bill, which eased its passage. The RPC added value to an MHCLG assessment on plans to exempt extra floors on housing developments, pointing out the need to provide for the cost and risk of moving telephone masts—vital to HMG’s important plans for digital connectivity. Data, cost and risk assessment are essential to good government—allegedly one of the reasons why the Prime Minister and his consigliere Dominic Cummings are reforming the Civil Service Although the subject of my amendment is the framing of the financial assistance scheme itself, that stage would be far too late. I believe the Government could help themselves and Parliament by submitting an impact assessment for this scheme—and, indeed, for this whole Bill—now, and promising to act similarly for future Bills on the environment and trade. They might even adapt the assessment framework to encourage the sort of data analysis favoured by Mr Cummings. I hope the Minister will seriously consider my request before I return to the matter on Report.