Queen’s Speech

My Lords, I am honoured to be a new boy in your Lordships’ House. I begin by thanking noble Lords for their generous and warm welcomes, and I am grateful to the staff of the House for all their help to me in the induction process. The diocese of Lichfield, where I serve, contains some of the most deprived urban areas in the country, including Wolverhampton, West Bromwich, Walsall, Burton, Tamworth and Stoke-on-Trent, as well as some of England’s most beautiful rural areas: the Peak District, the Staffordshire moorlands and the hills and rolling plains of north Shropshire. When I was a boy, you could still sometimes see horses ploughing fields alongside tractors. Rapid mechanisation in our lifetime has meant that fewer people live on the land, fewer earn their livings from it and fewer still are acquainted with the routines and rewards of farming the land. As many of your Lordships will have done, I decided to test my little granddaughter on her agricultural knowledge recently. She got milk right—she knew that it came from cows—but she could not agree with me that potatoes came up through the soil. She knew that they came from the supermarket on the Camden high road. "Give us this day our daily bread" is not an abstract prayer for most people in the world, and while the effects of climate change will impact hardest on the poorest, the fierce weather of the past weeks reminds us that none of us, even here, will be exempt from the need to cope with a rapidly changing climate. While the last few decades have been tough on most farmers, the agricultural sector has been relatively resilient to the shocks of the recession. Total income from farming rose by 36 per cent in real terms last year; so did income from farming per person. And—whisper it not in Gath—I have even known farmers admit, with some embarrassment, that because of the weaker pound they have done rather well out of the EU recently. New technologies, as we have heard, are revolutionising agricultural yields. The Government have been keen to champion the role of choice in driving up standards in public services. I am pleased, therefore, to be able to report to the Minister that in Shropshire the principle has been extended also to its bovine inhabitants. The latest carousel for cows, where the cows themselves choose when they want to be milked, has led to a very successful increase in milk yield. Elsewhere, I have started to understand the new biomass generator technology being piloted at the Harper Adams University in Shropshire, and I am proud that JCB, which started in 1945 in a lockup garage in Uttoxeter in Staffordshire, is now the world’s third largest manufacturer of construction equipment. These success stories have brought companies such as Dairy Crest and Müller to my patch. Müller proudly claims that the milk used in its products comes from within a 30-mile radius of its factory at Market Drayton. So the next time you pick up a Müller Light yoghurt, you might remember that it originated in a cow grazing peacefully somewhere in my diocese. The dairy sector, though, has been pretty hard hit. Staffordshire and Shropshire are leading dairy counties, and dairy farmers face another decline in UK wholesale milk deliveries in the year ending this August. Dairy farmers continue to suffer from unpredictable swings in milk prices, exacerbated by the large chains undercutting local dairies. Bovine TB continues to take its toll, with the loss of milk sales and the compensation for slaughtered stock lagging well behind stock prices. I also mention with concern the collapse of Dairy Farmers of Britain, the co-op that went into administration in June and took with it the closure of a dairy near Uttoxeter with the loss of 250 jobs. As those of us who listen to "The Archers" know, there are five local facilities that are most highly rated by village people: the pub, the village hall, the post office or shop, the school and the church. Many of your Lordships will have seen the research sponsored by Defra that says that the churches, as the largest voluntary bodies in our country, play a vital role in community vibrancy. Indeed, for farmers facing the kind of difficulties that I have described, the churches’ rural stress network has been an invaluable support. However, there is some feeling in our villages that lawmakers need to give wider recognition to the contribution of churches and faith-based organisations in providing the social glue that holds communities together. In that spirit, all of us on these Benches are grateful that the Flood and Water Management Bill will contain measures to enable water companies to charge lower tariffs for surface water drainage to churches as well as to scout huts and community halls, which were otherwise facing crippling increases in their water bills. This will enable them to focus on worship and work in the community, rather than fundraising to meet increasing bills. I thank the Minister for the fact that the Government have listened and acted. We hope that the Bill will make it into law in the time available. None of these issues is without its complexity, and many of them have important moral and spiritual dimensions. In the UK and worldwide, it is essential that farmers respond to the issues of climate change and population expansion. In the UK, we are fortunate, as the noble Lord, Lord Mandelson, recently affirmed, to have the knowledge and research bases necessary to meet these new challenges. I look forward to playing my part in the work of your Lordships' House.