I thank my hon. Friend for his intervention, as he makes a point that I was intending to deal with. I was going to raise it with the Minister to seek his opinion and perhaps his assurance on that very matter.
Processors in this deregulated, unbalanced market are behaving as though they are a cartel; they are imposing across-the-board cuts and there seems to be some agreement between them. That is outrageous behaviour. We know that across the world dairying is a volatile market—prices fluctuate. We all understand that; it is why there must be some order, which is why we have contracts. However, the current order is for the processors and the retailers, with catastrophic chaos for the producers. I shall now deal with the point that my hon. Friend raised. We need a code, preferably a voluntary one, and more balanced contracts. We had hoped that there would have been an announcement of a voluntary code already, and I know that the Minister had, too. Unless we can have an agreement on a voluntary code, the Government and the Minister have to consider going forward with a statutory code. Only with that hanging over people’s heads are we likely to achieve the voluntary code we want.
In the longer term, the Government need to encourage progress on lots of other issues. We need to encourage farmers to come together to form producer organisations. The big problem we have with individual farm businesses and micro-businesses is that they are incredibly small and do not carry any power. We know that there is now an agreement from the European Union in the dairy package that we can encourage up to 30% of farm producers to deliver producer organisations. I am hoping that the Minister will reassure us that he wants to do that.
We also need to move forward on the grocery adjudicator, although that might well have a limited impact on this particular problem, as for markets to operate we have to have a degree of fairness. When there is bullying and unfairness, the Government have to deal with it. That is why we have a Competition Commission, the Office of Fair Trading and other such organisations. The Government have to step in when the market is not working, and all of us know that this market is currently simply not
working. It is working in favour of big bullying retailers and processors, and it is causing huge damage and driving into bankruptcy the dairy farmers that have sustained our countryside for so long.
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