Common Agricultural Policy Single Payment and Support Schemes (Cross-compliance) (England) (Amendment) Regulations 2006

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Byford, for introducing the Prayer against the regulations and congratulate her on it. This short debate follows a long debate about reoffending. When it comes to praying against regulations on cross-compliance, the noble Baroness has form, and good for her. These are important matters and it is right that they should be debated. These amendment regulations are not in themselves earth-shattering. The Explanatory Memorandum suggests that their changes are minimal. That is perhaps a little understated but is more or less right. But the 2005 cross-compliance regulations, which they amend, are far from minimal; they are at the very heart of the whole system of the single farm payment and the cross-compliance regime. I shall range a little wider than the noble Baroness, who asked some extremely pertinent and interesting specific questions. I look forward to hearing the answers to those questions. I want to focus on the basic issue raised by the Merits Committee in its fifth report of the 2006-07 Session, to which the noble Baroness referred. Paragraph 14 points out the complexity—and I would say the quantity—of these regulations for the farmers and growers who have to implement them. The Merits Committee, in discussing this, went beyond the specific proposals and matters dealt with in the regulations to talk about the Cross Compliance Handbook for England 2006 edition. It pointed out that there had already been a supplement in 2006 and there is now a 2007 supplement. There were three separate documents relating to cross-compliance and the regulations, and together there are 147 pages. There are two issues here; are the regulations too complex, or is the presentation and the explanation to farmers too complex and too difficult to understand? The Government have a medium-term objective of reducing and abolishing the single farm payment, if we are to believe what we read in the papers. It is interesting to consider the future of cross-compliance if there is no long-term future for the single farm payment. A great deal of the change of emphasis of the payments that go to farmers is away from producer subsidies, towards payments for public benefits and public goods and for better animal welfare and so on. The whole thrust of that depends on the single farm payment continuing to exist. If it does not, a whole new system will have to be developed in the future. It is interesting that these incredibly detailed regulations are all based on the concept that cross-compliance is going to continue because the SFP is going to continue. Another interesting question is how far cross-compliance should apply to things that are legally required anyway. The press statement put out in November by the Rural Payments Agency pointed out that the three new statutory management requirements would not actually make any difference to farmers because they were already the law of the land and farmers already had to carry them out. Yet there is an interesting relationship. How much of the cross-compliance regulations are actually law anyway and have to be carried out anyway, and how many of them are add-ons? I am not saying that all the add-ons are necessarily a bad thing by any means. They include, for example, not removing stone walls and not removing hedges, which are otherwise not illegal in most places. Nevertheless, it is not clear at all to lay people, and I suspect it is not clear to farmers either, how much of what is being imposed through cross-compliance is being imposed because the law is not being adequately enforced anyway. It is what I call the ASBO mentality; if you cannot enforce the law through the law, find other ways of doing it. Nevertheless, there is a great deal of good in the regulations, but the complexity and quantity of the material sent to farmers is extraordinary. I do not know whether they thought it was Christmas in November when this great pack of stuff plopped through their letterboxes or over the farm wall, or wherever it goes. It arrived just after bonfire night, and that is probably a good thing, otherwise it might all have gone on the bonfire. The Merits Committee did not discover the half of it. It discovered the Cross Compliance Handbook for England and the two supplements, which add up to 147 pages, but there is a lot more, all of which is essential under cross-compliance. There are the single payment scheme brochures, as they are called, which is an interesting term for them, of which I believe four are still in existence dating from July 2004 to October 2005. They add up to 126 pages between them. There is the Cross Compliance Guidance for the Management of Habitats and Landscape Features, a very good document in many ways, which was issued in 2005. That is another 51 pages. There is the Cross Compliance Guidance for Soil Management, which is another 40 pages. Then there is the whole question of set-aside. This is not the debate in which to talk about set-aside and the absurdity of set-aside continuing to exist in a situation in which subsidies and payments have been decoupled from production. There is no sense in set-aside in the traditional sense any longer. It may have environmental benefits, but if so it should be incorporated in the normal cross-compliance regime and not have a whole separate regime of its own. The Government have announced that they will try to get rid of set-aside and we wish them the best of luck, although it may not be easy. There is a handbook on set-aside guidance for England 2006 of 44 pages, and another 10 pages of a new set-aside supplement that came as a little extra in the pack that farmers received in November. All of that, if my addition is correct, comes to 500 A4 pages of solid reading. I am not suggesting that farmers nowadays are all role models for Walter Gabriel and are not capable of dealing with this, but this is first-year honours degree-level stuff. It is the sort of thing that you might have to do an essay on in your first year at university. Farmers are being asked to do this on top of everything else that they do. They are also receiving supplements, which were a very good thing and necessary in the days when everything had to be type-set and printed. But computers have been invented, and the Minister might take that message back to her department and say that it is no longer necessary to produce a major document and then produce lots of supplements. You can easily produce an amended version of the main document, because it is all on computer. The handbook on the document that we are discussing states that the supplements can be kept in the flap provided inside the back cover of the handbook. I wonder why we are giving that sort of advice to people. The handbook provides a useful chart of the information available. For example, it states that if you want to discover the regulations on SMR11—food and feed law—you need to look at paragraphs 187 to 194 on pages 45 to 47 of the handbook, paragraphs 5 to 37 on pages 3 to 9 of the 2006 supplement, and paragraph 107 on page 26 of the 2007 supplement. This is nonsense. In this day and age, Defra should be able to get its act together to consolidate all this information, initially to reduce a huge amount of duplication and bring that down to a sensible, manageable level that ordinary farmers and ordinary people like me can understand a bit more easily.