Agriculture

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Vinson, for the opportunity to discuss this matter, although I am afraid I am extremely unprepared because I am in the middle of wrestling with my wife’s SP5 forms, and it has taken much longer than even I expected when I was working out stuff on the spreadsheet. It would be easier if I could simply send my spreadsheet off; the figures would be accurate. The problem is getting the right things in the right boxes, but that is another subject. I return to the sorry tale of ordinary farmers in the field. There are two brief points to make. I congratulate the Minister on taking over at a very dangerous moment. I think he is a very brave person indeed. I felt very sorry for the noble Lord, Lord Bach, who I think tried very hard but who unfortunately was misled. I think there are problems with the structure of agencies reporting to departments and to Parliament, but that is another subject for another day. I also thank the Minister for the 80 per cent cheque that we received the other day. As I shall discuss later, I wonder whether we will receive the other 20 per cent later. I shall continue my little story of where we will get to with this thing, and why I thought we were getting somewhere but why I am beginning to wonder whether we are not descending back into chaos. I do not understand how Defra will sort out and reconcile the parcels that I am now putting into the new SP5 forms with the ones I entered last year because, since then, we have had a set of maps from the RLR. Defra will reconcile them with the 2005 ones to establish the entitlements, against which it will recheck my 2006 form. I can help Defra with the form, but I doubt whether it will be able to sort it out itself because everything has changed since the base for the Ordnance Survey mapping was changed to make positions of the parcels more accurate, so some of the parcels have moved by up to half a hectare. So although I agree that the position of 590 parcels overall is to within 0.04 of a hectare, some parcels vary by up to half a hectare, plus or minus, individually. That cannot be reconciled entirely because the base maps have changed and there is a real problem with it. The attitude is, ““If you want some consultancy, I will help you; I have offered it before””. The real problem will arise later this year when the inspectors come round and try to remove the money. They start by saying, ““You have not complied here, and this and that is out. We are going to dock this money and that money from you””. I am very worried, as are several other people, that that is exactly what will happen to the last 20 per cent, because how do you repeal the decision? If the inspectors can find enough little non-compliance issues, they can unilaterally remove your last 20 per cent and keep it for the Government or whatever. I do not know what happens to it, but I can tell the House that there is a lot of suspicion out there. It is a lot of money. I am in despair. We agreed our maps with the Rural Land Registry on 21 April; there was one tiny boundary change to make, and that was all. On 17 May—yesterday—we received a new print-out of some SP5 forms. I thought, ““Oh great. These will be up to date and accurate, because the last ones were not””. I was not waiting for them; I did not expect them. Were they accurate? No. Thirty-two of the fields—exactly half of them—have discrepancies and have to be redone. It does not matter; I am rewriting them. Indeed, that is what I have been doing today, instead of getting on and preparing my speech. I rang up the registry’s customer service centre at Newcastle to ask what was going on. We checked one of them and found that it was right; it had been updated. So where do we lie? Even more confusing this morning was a big packet from the Rural Development Service. We have been trying to get into an entry-level scheme since last August. What has it done? It has lost 80 to 90 hectares. I have not had time to add it up, but it has lost several major parcels. As those parcels are woodland and so on, they earn you the money for the points you earn by setting aside land in the fields, so you cannot go into a partial ELS. What frightened me when I talked to one of the assistant consultants we have working on this for the RDS is that they did not understand it. They wondered why we were not getting our payments. I said that it was because I did not have the maps. Even people working at senior consultant level do not understand the problems, so now I understand why there is a problem. The assistant consultant is a very nice chap who knows what he is talking about in some ways, but he does not understand the complexity. Another ELS problem arises which I shall not even tackle because I do not have enough time. As I said in my last speech, the real cost of the ELS is all about farmers having problems and struggling. Isabelle set aside the land, paid for the seed, applied and did all the work for the ELS last year. Can she get the money? No. That is the real cost to farmers, quite apart from the lost interest and all that sort of stuff. I now understand the rather depressing A5 booklet we received about two years ago, which basically said, ““There are four things you can do under the new scheme. We suggest you retire, diversify, try to continue to farm, or sell. We suspect that none of these options will actually see you through the future””. I thought it was one of the most depressing things I had ever read. How true it is becoming. The banks, as the noble Lord, Lord Bach, said, are happy with the situation. Of course they are; they are lending us assets. What will happen? This is the interesting thing about it; is it the nationalisation of land through the back door? The farmers go bust, and the banks take the assets and sell them to new City money or yuppie money that has come from somewhere. Those people will not know how to manage the farms, so they will get land agents in who will charge them a lot of money for doing it, but it does not matter whether they are profitable or not. Then, of course, the academics at Defra will tell the agents what they have to do, and the agents will be compliant because it is not in their interests not to be so. We peasants who survive—idiotic or otherwise; those few of us who try to continue to farm—will carry out their bidding. But that is about all we are doing—we are not farming any more; we are just following a rule book. What if the rules are wrong or idiotic? The other night, reading the latest huge thing from Defra about derogation that she had to go through, Isabelle said, ““Oh! We are not going to be allowed to drive across some of the fields without getting written derogation first from Defra””. What happens if there is a water or gas leak on the other side of the field? Are you going to lose your cross-compliance money because you will not be cross-complying, or can you respond to the emergency? It says nothing about it in the handbook. It is just another way of getting rid of that final 20 per cent, is it not? Defra can just hope for some water leaks around the place. Then there are the mowing dates and being worried about your set-aside. Have you got it exactly right, down to the nearest 0.01 of a hectare? You may have some reserves. The trouble is that the rules for mowing fallow are different from the rules for mowing set-aside. There is a window of about two weeks in which you can comply with both. What happens if it rains? Do you think you will get your derogation from Defra to go and do the field in time? My wife is still waiting for a derogation to use a particular spray. She applied for the derogation last harvest, but has still not had a reply from Defra. I am afraid that you are not going to get it. What do we do? We have more regulations, all of which are well meant and a good idea. They look good on paper. I read a Defra booklet yesterday in the National Liberal Club. It said that Defra was protecting the watercourse. It is, and it is quite right that we should protect watercourses and all sorts of other things. But these things carry a cost, and we will not survive at all as farmers unless money is put into trying to comply with these higher standards, which the rest of the world does not comply with. The regulations are well meaning, but it is very difficult to comply with some of them. Then there are the nitrate-vulnerable zones. The RB209 guidelines are supposed to be guidelines, but I can tell the House from experience that the inspectors are adhering to them and will fine you if you do not adhere to them, because they have tried it on Isabelle. She passed them on to her agronomist, who said, ““Oh, don’t worry. We won’t have a problem””. He came back to her and said that it was difficult; this year, everything was being marked down. As she is growing energy crops, she has to hit a representative yield, but we do not know whether the RB209 guidelines will allow her to do that, so she may lose her money one way or the other. What happens if the weather changes? With new crops, there are new nitrogen uptake requirements, and things like that. There are all sorts of matters of opinion in the guidelines. Noble Lords should try reading and understanding them—it took me a long time. I am sorry to talk so much about the everyday toil of farming folk in this country, but it illustrates a little the parlous state that we are in.