Food, Farming and the Environment

I endorse that comment entirely. DEFRA is always chanting the mantra to farmers that diversification is the way ahead and they must move with the times and look for new ideas, but they cannot cross the River Jordan instantly, and I think there should always be support for farmers who are trying to do the best for their companies and trying to keep farming going in their communities. I hope my hon. Friend the Minister might be able to respond to that later. The dairy farmers in the Isle of Axholme are annoyed that they have so far been unsuccessful in their attempts to get placed with other contracts. The Isle of Axholme is quite remote, and there are only three dairy farms there, none of which is a large concerns, so the problems are clear—except that the tanker that currently comes to collect their milk every day is collecting on behalf of the other companies, and there is therefore a slight frustration that it is the tanker of the same companies that will not take their milk that is coming to their farms. That seems absurd. Also, Dairy Crest has contracts placed in Gainsborough and Retford, neither of which is very much further away. I hope that my hon. Friend the Minister might speak to the receiver about this. I understand that attempts are being made to try to get contracts for the farmers who are left, but might these companies, who are picking up milk now and who have already placed new contracts for farmers who are not far away, be encouraged to go that bit further? I hope that that might be achieved even if it is only for a period of time so that, as the hon. Member for Brecon and Radnorshire (Mr. Williams) said, people can consider their options. That would be better than the situation they are in now—one in which they face a very bleak future and could be forced out of the industry very quickly. I hope my hon. Friend the Minister will respond to this point in his reply. For these 200 farmers, including the three in my constituency on the Isle of Axholme, it is no consolation that so much progress has been made for everybody else. They face a very bleak future, and DEFRA should do something to help them. Of course, like most representatives of a rural area, I have meetings with my local farming representatives. I had a good meeting at West Butterwick recently with the local members of the National Farmers Union, at which I was heartened to learn that many of them are doing quite well at the moment—much of my area is arable—despite all the problems facing other farming sectors and the British economy generally. A lot of that has to do with exchange rates, subsidy and so on, and before we get too carried away it should be borne in mind that those farmers have been through a pretty rough time too, so if they are having a window of opportunity now, where things are a bit better, I say "More power to their elbow." "Farming" is not a generic term. One sector may be doing well while others are struggling—and not just dairy farmers; the hon. Member for Arundel and South Downs (Nick Herbert) mentioned pig farmers and I cannot help but agree with everything that he said. That is an unsubsidised part of farming that does a really good job producing an excellent product and it genuinely does have much better animal welfare standards than are found in other countries across the world—I say that as someone who has a passionate interest in animal welfare—yet the magic premium that we all seek for it never seems to come through, certainly not at the level it should. We must support the sector because if, as I do, hon. Members believe animal welfare is not an add-on for people involved in agriculture but should be an integral part of what they do, we should back British people who take that view and deliver it. There are a number of ways to back them. We know that pig farming is an unsubsidised industry, but we can change things through procurement. It is a disgrace that the pork procurement rates of national and local government are as low as they are. I am sick to the back teeth of having this discussion with people who say, "We have to put things out to tender and we must have the same specification and so on." I see no reason, and never have done, why an animal welfare standard should not be part of the specification. Let other people meet it and compete on it, but for goodness' sake let us not ignore it. We must ensure that it is part of everything we do. I am certain that if the Minister could get Departments to add that to their procurement specifications, it would make a real difference and British pig farmers would rightly be the beneficiaries. This debate on food, farming and the environment is wide-ranging, and I welcome that because about six months ago—I am not claiming any glory for the fact that we are having this debate—I asked at business questions whether we could have such a debate. I did not quite use the phrase "food, farming and the environment"; I think I was more interested in having a debate on land use. However, what I was asking for could almost be fitted into that title, because we are in a quandary over land use in rural areas, and the Government, across all Departments, have to start thinking through what their response is going to be. I am sure that my area is not that different from everywhere else and, as I have mentioned before, people have concerns about food security, so they want to ensure that we keep good agricultural land, we keep Britain's farmers farming and we keep a high level of ability to feed ourselves. Alongside that, there are pressures from people who want more rural housing—in particular, affordable rural housing. I have seen the effect of that housing need in my constituency. I feel helplessness, as much as anything else, when, as happens time and again at my surgeries in one of the villages, I meet a young couple or their parents who want to be able to say that they have lived as a family for generations in the same village, but they cannot afford to pay the current house prices—these are very nice places to live and the market is king—and there is hardly any social housing for them to move into. I have no problem with the policy, but when it was decided that council houses could be sold off under the right to buy, it was inevitable that tenants in very nice rural parts of the country who could get a big discount on their houses did so—they would be fools not to. Nothing came after those houses and, as a result, there is a real shortage now and we need to do more about that. We need to encourage local authorities to invest more in the social housing in their rural areas and we need to have a sensible—I plead for no more than common sense—approach to sustainability. There was a planning application in my constituency—it was in the East Riding of Yorkshire—a few months ago by somebody who wanted to build a new house for a family who had lived in the village for years. There had been a house on the site previously, but it had been demolished and they had been living in a mobile home, admittedly for some years. They simply wanted to replace that mobile home with a house again, but the application was turned down because it was an "unsustainable development". It was simply the same people wanting to live in the same village. While we are making decisions like that, we are getting into a quandary about our use of rural land, and that needs to be addressed. Flood defence is another key issue. My constituency is split by several rivers—the Trent, the Humber and the Ouse—and the Environment Agency is trying to draw up flood defence risk strategies and plans for the future. That is difficult for everybody, because people are concerned about the extent to which they will be defended in the future. It is clear that the Environment Agency's thinking, given the pressures that it is under—and the fact that climate change is making such planning difficult for the next 50 to 100 years and beyond—increasingly includes the use of wash land. My hon. Friend the Minister will recall the DEFRA document "Making Space for Water", and it is driving much of the consideration. We have three competing pressures for land—the need for more rural affordable housing, the aim of food security in the future and the need to ensure that rural areas remain dry. The Government need to think carefully about a land use policy for the future. The farmers in my community accept that they are potentially part of the solution to flooding, but they do not want to lose good agricultural land. If it is to be used only occasionally during extreme weather conditions, they want reassurances that they will receive adequate compensation for anything that they lose, such as crops on flooded land. I plead for common sense. The Government need to ensure that the different Departments and agencies that are considering how land should be used talk to each other and come to sensible conclusions. It may sound as though my whole speech is about the Isle of Axholme, but that area has had terrible problems. It is reclaimed land below sea level, and is no longer an island—although it used to be. For those hon. Members of a Methodist bent—as I am—it is where John Wesley was born. It was reclaimed by Vermuyden, who was brought over from Holland to drain it. Drainage in the area is already complex, but as pressures grow—on surface water drainage because of increased building, and from the Trent, which flows through the Isle—there are real fears about protecting the area for the future. The Environment Agency started its review of the Trent strategy, which includes the Isle, by saying that it probably did not need to be as well defended in the future as it has been in the past. That is not a great message to send to people who live on land that is below sea level. It took an enormous effort, but in the end we managed to get all the agencies together and the Environment Agency is now spending £1 million on a specific Axholme strategy to try to work out who will do what in the future. The problem is that the agency was looking only at what it did, and was not talking to the internal drainage boards—the people with the real local knowledge of the area. They know where every drain goes, which pump is on its way out and which pump will last for a bit longer. We have solved the problem now, and everyone is sitting around the same table—I have the great honour of chairing our flood strategy—but that was not the direction that the agency was taking in the beginning, and I am worried that it is working in isolation in other areas. The other problem with the agency is that all the river defence strategies cover particular rivers and particular areas, stopping at county boundaries, but water does not stop at the boundaries. For my area, there are several different strategies affecting the East Riding of Yorkshire, west Yorkshire and north Lincolnshire, but—as I have told my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State before—there is not enough co-ordination by the different teams in the Environment Agency that are working on those strategies. I am sure that they are doing a good job on each individual strategy, but where they meet is crucial. The East Riding of Yorkshire council shares my concerns and has been in very difficult correspondence with me. In fact, I think it is still subject to a judicial review of the way in which the Environment Agency has done its work. We want to avoid that. We do not want to get into litigation about it; we want to get people to sit round a table, sorting it out. The Secretary of State has told me before that he is reinforcing that message to the Environment Agency and that that is what will happen in the future. I can only wish him more power to his elbow and I look forward to seeing the results. May I finish on one other point that I think is important? It is certainly important in my area. It is the whole issue of composting and landfill. Composting is growing, and I represent several farmers who have moved into it as a way of diversifying. We need to ensure that there are good standards throughout. The example that I am going to give involves a farmer but the local council. North Lincolnshire council is now doing all sorts of things about collecting garden waste, and its recycling rates have increased enormously as a result. The council is using open air windrow composting, however, which is causing concerns. There are two reasons. One is obvious: it is not nice for people near it, because it smells. I do not care how many times I have sat around a table with all sorts of experts—I willingly admit that I am not an expert—who tell me all the things they do to take the smell away and that it does not have to be a smelly process. That is bunkum; it smells. Sometimes it smells worse than others, but it always smells. In some respects, that is almost the least of our worries. The other reason is the health risks posed by spores that spread from the site. The risks are well known, but the controversial point is the extent to which they spread in a concentration that could genuinely pose a health risk to an area. In the United Kingdom, we have gone for a minimum distance that is quite far compared with that in many other European countries. Germany, for example, is coming to the view that it should be only half the distance that we allow. I went with a delegation of hon. Members to see the Secretary of State about the matter—we all have the sites in our constituencies—and I understand that the Department has commissioned research, which is being peer-reviewed. I accept that it is a job in hand, but all I would say is that while that job is in hand people are living near the sites. They know that there is a health concern and they know that the sites smell. They want to be reassured and they want the Government to move quickly. The compost should be covered, because that would help with the spores and with the smell. We all know why it is not done that way: it is cheaper not to. It is cheaper to do it the way it is being done, but finance is not everything. The environment that people live in is important. I have several landfill sites in my constituency, and one of the great ironies is that every one who has a landfill site in their constituency wants it to be filled as quickly as possible, capped as quickly as possible and finished with as quickly as possible, but as councils increasingly hit their recycling targets, less and less goes to landfill. The date until which the sites might still be around moves further away. In terms of the greater good, that is not a bad thing, but we must be tighter and tighter on the operators, because they are going to be there for longer and longer. In Roxby in my constituency, where Biffa runs a landfill site, there have been horrendous problems with smell over the past year, so much so that the company is undergoing a prosecution from the Environment Agency. Biffa is a very experienced company in this regard, but—although this is not true now because of the action that the Environment Agency took—on visits to the site, we found it uncovered and there was no apparatus to extract the gas. From the company's point of view that was plain daft, because on other parts of the site it was extracting the gas, generating electricity and making some money. On the part of the site I am talking about, the company was just letting us smell it and it was not very good. Perhaps I should declare an interest. I live in Winterton, next to Roxby, and Mrs. Cawsey would want me to say that it is pretty bad where we live, too. That is not the key reason why the situation needs to be sorted out, however. It needs to be sorted because, thanks to recycling, such sites will be around for a lot longer than we thought. People who live near them need to know that they are safe, and that the smell can be taken care of. I welcome today's debate. There is so much going on in rural areas at the moment, and people are looking for the Government to plot a way through it. People know that flood defences and housing have to be dealt with. Food security is rattling up the agenda at a rate of knots in a way that it was not only a year or two ago. We are looking for a comprehensive, cohesive way forward from the Government. I hope that when the Minister replies, he will be able to give some reassurance on that.