My Lords, I wish to add to the remarks made by one or two participants about being balloted out of the Second Reading. That was most unfortunate. With other major Bills in the pipeline, I hope it will be possible to ensure that alternative mechanisms are found to enable people to fully participate.
I will speak specifically to Amendment 7, in the name of my noble friend Lord Caithness, which refers to growing crops for biofuel. Biofuels are something that we in Northern Ireland know a little about, because we have had one of the greatest financial scandals ever on the back of them. The renewable heating scheme was designed to replace the use of carbon-based fuels with more natural products, but of course it collapsed. Nevertheless, the point made in the amendment is important, and we need to ensure that it is included. If we are to meet our environmental targets over the years, we need to include not only fuels that are currently available but fuels that may subsequently become available—otherwise a great opportunity will be lost.
A number of Members have referred to hill farms, and that is a huge issue for us in this part of the country. But there is a wider point I want to make to the Minister—one which is perhaps not fully understood. Whatever is in the Bill, the fact remains that, to all intents and purposes, we remain, in very large measure, within the European Union as far as agriculture is concerned. Therefore, amendments that we will come to later in the Bill, including one of my own on standards, become progressively more important.
In many respects, the Government have refused to concede or acknowledge the reality of what they have agreed with the European Union in the protocol that deals with Northern Ireland. Even this week, as we are having this debate, people here are talking about building border control posts and asking how many acres need to be set aside to provide for suitable inspections.
In many respects this Bill is taking place in a vacuum, in that some of us are still bound, as far as state aid is concerned, and will have to comply fully with all that. Perhaps the Minister will address this in his winding-up speech, but I wonder whether he and his colleagues fully appreciate the downstream consequences of this as we go forward. If trade deals are done with other countries and cheap food emerges, we in Northern Ireland will still be bound by European Union standards; our farmers will have to ensure that welfare and other matters are fully adhered to. So if imports are not protected and we do not get the adequate standards in the Bill, our farmers will be at a huge disadvantage.
The noble Lord, Lord Wigley, referred to a framework, but the framework we already have is the CAP and the standards that flow from it. In other words, we will end up with a two-track agriculture system in the United Kingdom—and we should bear in mind that agriculture is a much more significant part of our economy in Northern Ireland than it is in the UK economy as a whole.
I hope that the Minister, in winding up on this group, will be kind enough to address this issue and tell us how it is proposed to ensure that we have at least a parallel process in the United Kingdom, given
that one part of it will be governed by the European Union, into which we will have no input, and yet the rest of the country will not. That is the dilemma that we face here.
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