It is a great pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Edinburgh South (Ian Murray). I should like to congratulate the Under-Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, my hon. Friend the Member for East Dunbartonshire (Jo Swinson), on starting this Second Reading debate so eloquently. I want to make some comments as the representative of growers and farmers in Thirsk, Malton and Filey, and I want to share with the House the evidence that the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Select Committee has heard on these matters.
I welcome the Bill’s Second Reading. I have some common ground with the hon. Member for Edinburgh South on these issues, but probably more with my hon. Friend the Minister. I also have common ground and differences with the hon. Member for West Bromwich West (Mr Bailey), who chairs the Business, Innovation and Skills Select Committee.
We should perhaps pause for a moment to consider the marketplace in which some of the growers we hope will benefit from the Bill are operating. They tend to be very small producers of each vegetable or form of produce, and they are often small in number. There is absolutely no comparison with the size, volume and financial weight of supermarkets.
I welcome the fact that we have reached Second Reading and I welcome the useful amendments made in the other place, but there has been a long gestation period from the Competition Commission report of 2008. I would like to record the thanks of the DEFRA Committee to those who gave written evidence and, more specifically, oral evidence in the context of our brief inquiry. We shared our conclusions with the Business, Innovation and Skills Committee. Some of the points we made have been adopted, but it is worth repeating them today.
We welcome the fact that an adjudicator is going to be established, and we believe that the adjudicator should have the power to accept complaints from indirect as well as direct suppliers. Will the Minister confirm that suppliers will have the ability to make anonymous complaints, which we believe will be fundamental to the success of the groceries code adjudicator?
In a limited market—in Lincolnshire, for example, and other parts of the country—where there are very few leek growers, if one of them wished to make a complaint against a particular supermarket, it would be too easy for the supermarket to identify that particular grower. It is therefore vital that the grower has the safety of knowing that an anonymous complaint can be made to the adjudicator—either directly or, as forcefully expressed by our Committee, through an indirect route via the National Farmers Union, the Country Land and Business Association or the Tenant Farmers Association. They are membership organisations that will represent the individual grower, who will then be able to make a case, safe from persecution and safe from the possibility of having the contract terminated at an early stage.