It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Ms Nokes. I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Eastbourne (Caroline Ansell) for calling this debate.
Before I continue, let me refer to some of the comments made by the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Cambridge (Daniel Zeichner). Today is an unusual day. My right hon. Friend the Member for North East Hampshire (Mr Jayawardena) has left his position as Secretary of State, so I think I am currently stood here as the most senior Minister in the Department. I may seize this moment and take the power. I am sure there will be more clarity on some of the shadow Minister’s questions as the reshuffle continues.
My hon. Friend the Member for Eastbourne started by giving us a tour of Sussex and talking about how much food Eastbourne consumes. That is an important place to start, because food producers should be thinking about consumers. It is an interesting twist on the whole thing, because consumers are interested in not only how much their food costs but how it is produced and whether that is environmentally friendly, as well as its impact on the environment and the landscape that they see. The view of the beautiful, rolling hills in Sussex, which she and other colleagues described, is there because of the food producers in Sussex who have created that landscape over the 4,000 years for which it has been farmed. It is important for us to remember that when we bring forward new schemes to help food producers and farmers. We should think about the impact that will have on the environment.
My hon. Friend went on to talk about food security. Never in my farming or political lifetime has food security been as important or as high on the political agenda as it is today. That is a huge opportunity for the industry, the sector and the Department to shape and influence the direction of travel. There are lots of opportunities; she referred to the ELM scheme, which is going to be a flagship moment for the Department once we have finished its short review. I hesitate slightly because a new Secretary of State will come in, but I expect that any new Secretary of State or Minister in the Department will have a close eye on the fact that we need to improve our food security. We need to grow the amount of food that we produce in the UK. However, that is not a barrier to improving our biodiversity and environmental benefits; we can do both at the same time. For decades, UK agriculture has demonstrated that it can improve efficiency and increase productivity while protecting the environment, but we need to do better.
We need to do more on biodiversity and on improving our environmental output, but of course that works only if farmers engage in the schemes and get involved. The previous iteration was quite a complicated system—there was a bit of bureaucracy in there. The shadow
Minister referred to the number of people who were applying for those schemes, which is not as many as we would like. If we are to have the environmental benefit and biodiversity output, we must engage with all the food producers, ensure that they want to get involved in the schemes, make the schemes simple to apply for and make the first rung on the ladder easy to access. Once the new schemes are released, farmers will have an easy opportunity to get involved and to benefit the landscape as we want them to.
Abattoirs have featured a lot in the debate, and they are a passion of mine. Nottinghamshire, which is my home county, does not now have an abattoir within the county boundary. That is a huge disadvantage to livestock producers in Nottinghamshire. We need to do better than that, but—it is quite a big “but”—we have engaged a lot with the Food Standards Agency to ensure that we get the balance right. If we loosen regulation and make it easier for abattoirs to operate, I emphasise that we must not do so at the price of the credibility of the food sector and meat industry.
The meat industry works only because of consumers’ high level of confidence that the system will ensure that the food they consume is safe. There have been a number of occasions through history when that confidence has been rocked, such as when horse meat entered the food chain, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy, which happened early in my agricultural life. Confidence was rocked and that had huge implications. We must ensure that our system maintains the safety of our food and gives credibility to the meat industry.