My Lords, I should begin by declaring the interests I declared earlier during the passage of the Bill. I shall speak to Amendments 89ZA and 93 and to the gist of the arguments behind others. It is important that UK agriculture and the UK public should be confident about the marketplace for food in this country.
UK farming—using those words in a wide sense—is operating in a global marketplace and needs to be sure that it will be playing on a level playing field not only because of the food implications of its activities, but because of the implications the revenues from food production will have on the delivery of all other public goods, using that word in a general sense, that we have been discussing during the currency of the Bill. That differentiates the debates that we are having from the arguments that pertained at the time of the repeal of the corn laws. I am afraid that as an individual I think that it is invariably the case that reassurances from any Government today are no guarantor of government actions tomorrow. Under our constitutional system, the best guarantor of such things is a specific provision in an Act of Parliament.
From the food perspective, for the entire population the problem is summarised as what has come to be known as the chlorinated chicken issue. It seems to me that chlorinated chicken, which may or may not be disagreeable, is not the issue. The problem is that the place where that chicken originates is so rife with damaging disease and practices that it is necessary to apply those techniques to it. That being the case, it is surely better not to have food from those sorts of places in the first instance. Finally, environment, welfare and other land use factors are important for the globe as well as for the United Kingdom. Encouraging and promoting bad practices elsewhere is something we should be ashamed of doing and we should not do it.