Food, Farming and the Environment

I am not quite sure that I follow the hon. Gentleman. If he is saying that the Government should impose the ombudsman quickly, I have a lot of sympathy with that point of view. We certainly cannot let the current arrangements go on ad nauseam. Several Members referred to research and development, and my right hon. Friend the Member for Fylde referred to the fact that DEFRA now spends less on R and D than Barcelona spent on Ronaldo. That puts the matter into some context. What is equally worrying is the fact that the amount has gone down dramatically. In one of DEFRA's own parliamentary answers, it said that its spend on agriculture R and D was down from £82 million in 2001-02 to £63 million last year. The Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council has partly compensated for that, but the amount is certainly going in completely the wrong direction. Wherever I go, and wherever the Minister goes, as he will find as he gets into his job, he will find the industry saying that we have to invest more if we are to increase production from what, after all, is a limited and shrinking area of farmland in this country. Several Members have referred to electronic identification. The Secretary of State said that he had written to other Ministers and that he is successful in persuading the European Commission to put the issue on the agenda. However, little has been said, except by the Secretary of State, on the issue of cost sharing. I agree with him that last year's bluetongue exercise was a significant step forward in co-operation, but that does not have much to do with the Government's consultation on cost sharing, which does exactly what most of the industry feared it would do—provide justification for getting the industry to pay half the costs of the Government's current disease control system. That is the wrong way round, and it does not even take into account the possibility of delivering the strategy more cheaply. The industry must be involved in developing the strategy. The nitrate vulnerable zone issue has also been raised by a number of hon. Members. I cannot think of a more ridiculous piece of legislation. Of course it is true that it goes back to a directive that is itself long outdated; some of the science is hugely dubious. The Government should have gone back to the European Commission and said, "Come on, let's review the directive on which this thing is based." The Secretary of State will go down in history as the politician who put national muck-spreading day into statute—four national muck-spreading days, to be precise. Laid down in the statute of the United Kingdom are four specific days on which farmers can start spreading their muck. It does not matter what the weather is, whether the farms are on flat or hilly ground, whether it is pouring with rain or there is bright sunshine or whether the county is in Cambridgeshire, Cumbria or Cornwall—those days are laid down in statute. What a ridiculous situation! The hon. Member for Brecon and Radnorshire (Mr. Williams) rightly raised the issue of fallen stock and the fact that sheep and scrapie have been taken out of the whole BSE equation. Why do we still require sheep to be removed? Why can we not return to the on-farm burial of sheep? Above all that hangs the whole issue of regulation. I do not suggest that the Secretary of State does not genuinely desire to lift the burden of regulation, but it is clear that it is not happening. One of the reasons is that the Government are still obsessed with process—with how one complies with a regulation, not with whether the necessary outcome has been achieved. That approach has to change; farmers have to be trusted. That is what we are trying to achieve, whether the issue is a lower nitrate level in ditches or higher standards of animal welfare. By all means, give farmers the target and tell them what they have to do; yes, jump on them if they do not achieve the objective. But do not lumber them with books and books of guidance, and inspectors to check whether the right boxes have been ticked. That is where the cost burden on business falls. Several Members have referred to our uplands, and nowhere could the plight of agriculture be clearer. There has been a huge flight of stock from the uplands. I want to stress how important it is that we keep an adequate level of stock in such areas. We need to keep farmers in the uplands, for socio-economic reasons—they are important, and often the main part of the rural community. Furthermore, if the stock is not on the hills, there will not be the right vegetation; if that happens, the wildlife will go. Incidentally, gamekeepers are also important for the preservation of wildlife. If the wildlife is not there, the tourists do not come and the cycle continues in decline. All those issues are interlinked. We need to put more resources, even if from elsewhere, into the rural development programme for England and into the uplands. It would be lovely to have a debate on forestry, which applies to the uplands but also to the whole of Britain. The hon. Member for Somerton and Frome touched on that issue, which falls within the broad subject area for this debate. Time, however, prevents me from addressing it. Members have referred to the Rural Payments Agency. I share the view of those who think that we are rapidly going back to the shambles that we faced at the beginning. Only this morning, I had a letter from a constituent who has still not received much money, and the payment window closes next week. In April I was promised a full reply from the RPA about what the problems are—and there are many others—but I still have not got it. All the indications are that it does not reply to letters from us, and it certainly does not deal with communications from our farmers; indeed, they regularly report that every time they phone up they get someone different. That was supposed to have been resolved years ago. There is also slowness of action in other spheres. As regards speciality produce, where the Government recently lost a legal case, the RPA is digging its heels in about implementing the legal decision. The rural development programme for England is hugely important. It involves a lot of money and, as I said on Monday, there are big question marks about how effectively it is being spent—most importantly, about how axis 1 is being spent. Axis 1 of the RDPE is about equipping our farmers for the future. It is about farm modernisation, improving their competitiveness, and enabling them to meet a future where there will be a declining single farm payment, which we would all see in our crystal balls as being inevitable. I hope that when the Minister has got his feet under the desk he will have a look at how ineffectively that money is being used in equipping farmers for a future where, as Mariann Fischer Boel has said, there will be a shift of resources from pillar 1 to pillar 2, and other major problems will need to be faced up to in the next couple of years. Our farming industry has, in one way or another, provided the food for the population of this country for thousands of years, and it is only right and proper that we expect it to do so for the future. It is not just an industry of some ancient, quaint past, but one with a massive part to play in the long-term future of our country. It will not always be as it has been—it will change. Farmers are learning to look after their soils better—to conserve organic matter because of its water retention properties, and to reduce erosion. If we look back using today's standards and values, we see that some practices of the past have proved to be wrong. There are huge challenges about fertility, with the decline in the supply of phosphates as well as nitrogen from fossil fuels. These are all big challenges. All the industry expects, if it is to play such a huge role in the food security of this country, is that wherever possible the Government get off its back and create a better environment with more research and a more understanding means of dealing with competition from abroad as regards regulation and cheaper, lower-standard imports. Given those opportunities, I am certain that our industry has a great and profitable future—but, by goodness, things need to change to enable that to happen.