Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs

I beg to move,"That this House deplores the performance of the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs; regrets that it has been responsible for huge and avoidable costs to farmers and taxpayers; notes with concern the significant cost overruns in the Department's programme and administration budgets; and believes that planned budget cuts of £270 million will further undermine efforts to deliver policies which tackle climate change, promote the farming industry and enhance the natural environment." Recent weeks have witnessed a series of events that have raised fundamental questions about the competence of the present Government—the handling of the Northern Rock crisis, the loss by Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs of the personal details of millions of families, and now allegations of illegal fundraising. All those seem to be stark evidence that Labour has lost the plot. As anyone who has had half an eye open to issues affecting rural areas, farming and the environment will tell you, Mr. Deputy Speaker, one Government Department has for several years jostled with the Home Office for the honour of setting the pace in the incompetence stakes. The fact that others are catching up is no reason to let the present Secretary of State off the hook. Throughout its relatively short and undistinguished life, the performance of the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has been, frankly, abysmal. In fact, the list of DEFRA failures is so extensive that this could end up being a very long speech. However, I am aware that a large number of hon. Members wish to contribute, so I will restrain myself. DEFRA was cobbled together following the terrible mismanagement of the foot and mouth crisis in 2001. It was rumoured at the time that, as well as the political necessity of culling the old Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, one of the reasons for setting up the new Department was to give the right hon. Member for Derby, South (Margaret Beckett) a job that met her aspirations. Almost immediately, it acquired two alternative nicknames—““Deafear”” and ““Deathrow””, both of which turned out to be strangely appropriate! Since its early days, beset by a catalogue of failures, the Department has lurched from one crisis to the next. At the heart of our agricultural industry and as custodians of our landscape, farmers should feel that DEFRA is fighting their corner, not letting them down. The Department's initial response to a growing awareness that something was wrong with the Rural Payments Agency was characteristic: it denied that there was a problem at all. I say it was characteristic because this is a Department that lives in a permanent state of denial about its own inadequacies. Let us take today's amendment by the Prime Minister to our motion. It"““commends the Government on its swift and effective action to deal with…disease outbreaks…in 2007””," without, of course, mentioning that the foot and mouth outbreak was started because of faulty drains at a laboratory site licensed by DEFRA. It also omits to mention that the foot and mouth outbreak was declared over before it was. As we shall no doubt hear later in the debate, there were plenty of individual occasions when the Government's response to animal diseases this year was neither swift nor effective.