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

My Lords, I would like to make a few remarks from the point of view of what this means to the poor old farmer trying to struggle with it all. I agree with everything that has been said so far. The technical points have been highlighted extremely well. When I was thinking about this, I picked up some of my old Hansards and noticed that the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, had made one of his early Statementsin the middle of a debate on work/life balance. I thought, ““How ironic””. If there is one thing that these regulations do not give the farmer, it is work/life balance. When I rang the whole-farm approach helpline, I said that I needed it online at three in the morning so that it could help me. I was asked, ““Why can’t you do it before five?”” I said, ““Because I’m working before five, trying to make some money to try to help to support the place. I’m afraid that paperwork gets done late at night, so you need to reverse the working hours for your helpline””. The man grunted and said, ““Well, we pack up at five””. My poor wife groans when, every month, yet another thick handbook, guidance note, supplement or something hits her desk. I am not up to date with them; I shall have to do it in the next couple of weeks to try to help her with this. One thing that really gets me annoyed is the lack of an index. There is no index at the end of each document. Apparently, there is going to be a cumulative index, but how do you know whether you have the latest one or the latest supplement? In order to try to help with compliance, as it was said that inspections would be minimised if we took part, we decided to enter for the whole-farm approach. I would like to know how many farmers have actually done it, because we have had a lot of trouble with the website. It loses submitted data. Last weekend early in the morning, when I was trying to do the December census, I found on about my fifth attempt that half the details were missing. Two or three of the pages seemed to have been amalgamated into one, so we could not continue. The other problem is that the advice is not kept up to date. It includes a little note saying, ““Use whole-farm approach””, and there is some interesting material on cross-compliance. How do you find what you need without going through every single page on what is a very laborious site? It is fine if you are sitting in an office with a high-speed internet connection, but when you are 6.75 kilometres from the exchange with a dickey ADSL line running at quarter-speed and you are in contention with about 50 other people, you do not get adequate response times. The trouble does not lie entirely with the line; part of the problem comes from the Defra website. It takes about a minute to load each page and, two hours later, you are tearing your hair out. If you try to untick anything, you find that everything has been unticked and you have to go through every single page and resubmit every question. An example of the questions is, ““Have you got animals—yes/no?””. It is a nightmare. Why do we get so upset about all this? It is because we know that the inspectors are out there to find fault. They are there to remove the money. One has heard stories or three, four or five inspectors arriving at estates and sitting there for a week, going through everything. I know of one large estate where one margin was found to be six inches out and the owner was fined 1 per cent of the single farm payment, which is a lot of money. The agent said, ““I don’t think it’s worth complaining about it””, but, to be honest, I think they should take it to Europe on grounds of proportionality. However, the family in question is wealthy and they do not have the time to take the matter up as we would. The trouble is that there is not enough money in the system, and it looks as though the inspectors are there to reduce the amount of money going to farmers. The attitude is completely the opposite of that found in France, and it is very worrying. Things such as the fertiliser recommendations—is it FB209 or RB209?—used to be advisory, but now you have to justify exactly why you have not complied. Because soil nitrogen levels are very variable, you cannot be certain about things, and sometimes calculations have to be made by eye, by experience or by local knowledge. However, you are not allowed to do that any more. Then there is the issue of whether people are co-operating. With regard to the RPA, we did our best to complete the SFP5 forms correctly. We could not do so for 2005 because the maps were not approved by the RLR at that point. In 2006, they were. We got the maps through just in time and I was able to correct various figures on them. I included a note saying, ““You had better put these back into 2005””. Having looked at the entitlement statement, I suspect that they have not done so because we seem to have a floating 0.75 hectare entitlement which I cannot account for. Of course, there is no explanation; nor is any complete information sent by the RPA so that you can reconcile your figures. I transposed two tiny figures—I may have put 0.24 rather than 0.42—relating to the tail-end of a field. I wrote saying that the figure appeared the wrong way round, and back came a very stroppy letter saying, ““You didn’t spot this before we did. You are not in compliance. On the standards, we could prosecute you””—which they cannot, because the level is below the allowed limit. The whole point was to bring matters into line with the RLR maps, but the RPA has now forced us to be out of line for another year. Is that intelligent? I thought that the idea was to co-operate and to try to get the information to tally with the maps. As a result of the RPA’s attitude, we now do not tally with RLR base maps, so how do we proceed? I do not want to rattle on for ever, although I could easily do so. I want to jump back to a previous point. There is a problem in trying to keep the SFP5 form in balance with the census forms and energy crop areas. Different things are deducted and different things have different classifications, so it is very difficult to get things absolutely right. It is not clear where you should be putting things—particularly small things, such as margins around the edges of fields and so on. The RPA needs someone to sort things out. I should be delighted to do it as it might make my life a little easier. Ultimately, a lot of what happens is insulting to the farmer. My wife looked at the soil management material and said, ““For goodness’ sake, I’ve been farming for years and years.””—it is about 30 years—““This could be a child’s handbook””. Some farmers may have been doing things badly but, when you listen to the debate, you would think that Britain had gone to rack and ruin or that the soil was completely destroyed and had no health left in it. But some of the advice is counter-productive. You forget that, when you plough back in and incorporate stubble and so on, which sometimes you have to do, that releases toxins as it decays and you therefore put more nitrogen on. Some of these things have other adverse consequences. I sometimes wonder if a lot of this has not been written by students with environmental studies degrees, taught by professors who have never left their university. They may have done one farm walk in their life. Reality, however, is about the weather, raining at the wrong moment or being sunny for too long. It is about machinery breakdowns at just the wrong moment. It is about people going sick; on farms, you cannot afford to employ lots of people. It is about contractors letting you down despite the contract and not fitting the right equipment to do the monitoring. What do you do? Tell them they cannot harvest the fields so that they lose their crop? The reality is that sometimes you must get on with the job. I am not talking about things that are dangerous or will do any long-term damage. On the whole, nature heals itself relatively well if you do not abuse it badly. There is no acknowledgement of that in the attitude of any of this stuff currently coming out of the Government. I shall finish in half a second but, on the SMRs and cross-compliance, I understand that fewer farmers are now putting in for single farm payments, because they think they will not have to cross-comply. They do not realise that they are still subject to statutory management requirements, but there is a huge difference. A statutory management requirement must be prosecuted in the courts, and the department will have to extract money from the farmer. With the single farm payment, they just remove the money up front and the farmer must somehow appeal. The burden of proof is the other way around; the ministry suddenly has the whip hand. That is the big difference. I am worried that there is not enough money to do any of this. We are supposed to do all these things. My wife put a huge amount of money, effort and time into doing an entry-level scheme. We managed to get there just in time, but, hang on, it is blocked. Where is all the money going? I suppose that the department has now got so large and bloated, with all the various agencies spawned by Defra, that there is no spare money to go out to the environment and the farmer at the end of the day. It has been totally absorbed by all the employees, civil servants, agency workers and consultants. That worries me. That is not what the purpose of the money was or what the purposes of this move were. I hope that they can get their act together and change things. Perhaps we will get some money out to where it is needed, on the front line.