Common Agricultural Policy

I congratulate the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee and its Chair on the report and their important work in scrutinising the CAP reform process. I want to pick up on a few key issues in the Commission's proposals that will be of great significance to farmers in Scotland, not least in the parts of Banffshire and Buchan that I represent, where farming has been a way of life for many generations and where food production is still absolutely the mainstay of the local economy. I suspect that there is a good deal of consensus across the House on a couple of critical issues in today's debate, the first of which is the need to cut red tape and reduce the administrative burden on farmers. In many respects, that is about fixing a major problem with the current CAP regime and is linked to the need for effective regionalisation and flexibility for member states. I hope that the Minister will consider in his comments at the end how we can start making decisions much closer to home and in the interests of our farming communities.