Dairy Industry

Indeed. Obviously, the dairy sector is far more important than Anglo-Russian relations. I should like to inform the Minister that more than 170 MPs have joined the all-party dairy farmers group, which makes us one of the largest all-party groups in the House of Commons. We have a very large number of Labour MPs, Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, as well as Welsh nationalists of course and Members from Northern Ireland. The group has been very active: we have published a report, which has been widely circulated. I, together with my hon. Friend the Member for Preseli Pembrokeshire (Mr. Crabb), took it to the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, and we hope that he will consider some of the recommendations that we put together in the report. However, the Secretary of State left me with the impression that the view is that it is not the Government’s role to intervene with supermarkets and that the matter will have to be sorted out by the industry. I very much regret that, because I feel passionately about the issue, even as a Conservative. We always think that we cannot buck the market and we have to let the market look after itself, but as a Conservative I can say that I feel passionately that, for certain industries, there has to be some form of intervention and regulation. The industry that we are discussing is of such fundamental importance to our country that it deserves to have a spotlight shone on it by the Government. The Government should at least be scrutinising far more effectively what the supermarkets and processors are doing. For the report, the all-party group interviewed many people over the past 12 months, including the Office of Fair Trading, chief executives of various supermarkets, the NFU and many other outside bodies. I pay tribute to the RABDF, which has acted as an excellent secretariat for the group and has been a tremendous help to me in sorting out a great number of interviews and other exercises. A delegation even went to Brussels recently. I see the hon. Member for Brecon and Radnorshire (Mr. Williams) and my hon. Friend the Member for Preseli Pembrokeshire here. The three of us, with other MPs, went to Brussels to lobby the Agriculture Commissioner, Mrs. Fischer Boel. For an arch-Eurosceptic such as myself, it was quite a difficult experience to go to Brussels to interact with commissioners. Nevertheless, I had to do it, because I feel that the Government of my own country are not doing enough on the matter. I had to go to Brussels to lobby the Agriculture Commissioner to intervene in our country. It hurts me to say this, but I had to ask her to intervene in our country. Mrs. Fischer Boel was extremely encouraging. I hope that my colleagues will concur with that. She said that she would look at the situation of the dairy sector in Britain and would have negotiations with our Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs to see what could be done. She also said that, in her native Denmark, Arla has 80 per cent. of the processing capacity. That was one of the most interesting things that I took away from that meeting. We are in a common market, and Denmark allows a processor to have an 80 per cent. market share, so why cannot we do something similar in the United Kingdom?