Welcome to the proceedings, Mr Chope. It is a great honour and a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship. On behalf of the Select Committee on Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, I am delighted to have secured this timely debate. Before I go any further, I draw colleagues’ attention to my modest entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests, which is pertinent to this debate.
We are discussing our first report of this Session, which I commend to the House, on greening the common agricultural policy, and the Government response. Our debate is timely for a number of reasons. The next round of CAP reforms will build on those achieved by Commissioner MacSharry and Commissioner Fischler, and now on the proposals launched by Commissioner Ciolos. The European Commission package introduces numerous greening measures with which farmers will be asked to comply. One of the first conclusions of the Committee was that there is insufficient detail for us to do an in-depth analysis, although we managed as best we could. Some of the problems that I will discuss include potential problems of cross-compliance, the possibility that the proposals might overcomplicate rather than simplify the common agricultural policy, and our main concern that it should not be a one-size-fits-all policy.
The backdrop includes the unprecedented weather conditions faced by UK farmers this year. We started with a drought that then became the wettest drought, followed by a late harvest in which many crops rotted in the ground, and our current potato crop is virtually impossible to harvest. I recognise that not only the farmers in my community but those across Britain and the whole of Europe have suffered. That will affect falling farm incomes.
I am delighted to see the Minister of State, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, the hon. Member for Somerton and Frome (Mr Heath), in his place, and I welcome him to his new position. The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs will not publish farm incomes until January. I shall certainly watch them closely to see what the impact has been. One study on the area of northern England in which I grew up—I am sure that it is not dissimilar to the area that I now live in and represent—shows that hill farmers’ incomes have fallen to £8,000, which is unsustainable.
Two challenges form the backdrop for the next round of CAP reform: food security and climate change. Those twin challenges were identified by the outgoing Labour Administration. The Committee conclusions state that we believe that the Commission should allow member states to tailor environmental measures to their local environmental and agricultural conditions. I commend successive British Governments’ approach; we have a raft of agri-environmental measures that place our farmers ahead of many other European farmers. I believe that our agri-environmental schemes, among the best in Europe, deliver meaningful year-on-year environmental benefits. The Committee concluded that those benefits must not be watered down or diminished by the Commission’s greening proposals.