Nitrate Vulnerable Zones

I welcome you to the Chair to oversee this welcome debate, Mr. Hancock, and I congratulate the hon. Member for Ludlow (Mr. Dunne) on securing it. It is incredibly important, and it ought to have taken place elsewhere, as has been said. I notice that the Minister looks relatively relaxed; perhaps his football team, like mine—Burnley and Blackburn Rovers are normally hostile rivals—has benefited from the stress-free existence of willingly having gone out of the FA cup at the weekend, and is now settling down to a mid-table position. That is a contrived link—I hope that the Minister is not relaxed about the serious implications of the NVZ proposals for British farming, the tourism industry and the environment. People outside Parliament might consider that this is not the first time that Members of Parliament have talked poop, but it is right that we should do so on this occasion. The Government's proposals for the implementation of the NVZ directive are outrageously disproportionate. They will place a huge cost on the industry, yet DEFRA admits that the resulting reduction in nitrate leaching will be less than 1 per cent. They come at an incredibly difficult time, as we have heard, with foot and mouth disease placing a cost of at least £200 million on the farming industry. I imagine that we are having a slight respite from the impact of bluetongue and other damaging attacks on the industry, both natural and unnatural, but to add at least a £250 million price tag to increase storage capacity is unbearable considering the pitifully low compensation that the Government have provided to farming for foot and mouth. Almost none of that compensation has gone to lowland farms, yet the cost will have the greatest impact on them. I was talking to a farmer who lives just up the road from me, Gordon Capstick of Heversham. He reckons that it will cost him, a relatively small dairy farmer, about £30,000 to improve his storage facilities. At a time when we are contemplating our navels about what we get paid, we are discussing a directive that, if imposed as planned, will create enormous cost increases for people, some of whom subsist on incomes below the national minimum wage. Despite all that, the Government appear not to have planned any grant support to enable farmers to improve storage facilities. I hope that the Minister will tell us otherwise. Elsewhere in the UK, for example in Northern Ireland, farmers are given up to 60 per cent. grant aid, and elsewhere in the EU, close at hand in the Republic of Ireland, young farmers receive up to 80 per cent. grant aid in certain cases. We must also bear in mind the economic impact, given that storage requirements will undoubtedly reduce livestock numbers, as there will be pressure to maintain a lid on the amount of muck in tanks. Costs go up, and income goes down, so the measure is not wise, given the current situation in farming. The impact on the countryside will be huge. Not only will there be a significant cost to farming, but there will be a massive impact on tourism. As we have heard, there will be a day, probably in March when, to coin a phrase, there will be a big stink. The tanks will be emptied on the first dry day, at just about the time when the tourists arrive in our part of the world. That will be terribly helpful! Hon. Members may know that we occasionally get a bit of rain in Cumbria, and there is every chance that the day following the first dry day will not be dry, and that it will chuck it down. Not only will the result be antisocial and unpleasant, there will be massive leaching into water courses. Ironically, the measure threatens to be ecologically counter-productive. Members will have seen DEFRA's own figures showing that it is likely to cause an increase of in the region of 9 per cent. in emissions of ammonia, which is a serious pollutant in its own right. I wonder whether the Government have considered the impact of the regulation in breaching other EU directives, particularly fresh water directives. The proposals appear to have been ill thought out, with precious little preparation time built in. As we have heard, the imposed building of new tanks will not happen overnight. They will be costly, and raising the finance will not be as straightforward as the Government think. In addition, planning permission will not be secured overnight, particularly in areas such as the Yorkshire dales and Lake District national parks, part of which I represent. Will there be a guarantee that farmers who cannot complete the installation of the new tanks in time, through no fault of their own, will be exempt from penalties? There are clear examples of gold-plating in the NVZ proposals. We have heard two such examples: the first is the requirement for land that does not carry crops in the winter to be sown with cover crops. We have heard about the impact that that will have on farmland birds and, ecologically, on soil quality. It will be a massive drain on farm resources and extremely damaging to wildlife.