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England Rural Development Programme (Closure of Project-Based Schemes) Regulations 2006

I apologise to the House if my voice conks out on me. I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Miller of Chilthorne Domer, for raising this important short debate on the order. I think that we are all very disappointed to find ourselves in this situation, and I am sure the Minister himself will reflect that as well. The noble Baroness, Lady Miller, has set out seven issues. I do not propose to repeat them, because she so clearly stated her reasons why she was raising them. I remind the House of my family farming interest. I also have a close interest in what goes on in the rural countryside. I shall pick up where the noble Baroness left off. It was indeed last December, I think, when Tony Blair tried to put forward the proposition to EU member states and made the move that we would go down this route ourselves anyway, only to find that the other member states were not going to follow us. That is why we are in this predicament today. I have one or two specific questions to ask the Minister. I follow the noble Baroness: my calculation is that we would be lucky to have anything before the autumn of next year at the earliest, and that is probably being a little ambitious. In the little notes I made, I was querying why the EU had to be further involved in the receipts from voluntary modulation when our country had, rightly or wrongly, decided to go down that route. Are there implications that the UK may have to negotiate over how much money it keeps, or is the amount of money agreed and settled and so will not be challenged? I pick up on the noble Baroness’s comment about the RDAs being the delivery body. She will remember well that as a party we continue to question the view of the noble Lord, Lord Haskins, that delivery should go through the RDAs. I still have great concerns about that. The RDAs themselves will have priorities within their own areas about how they will spend their funding. My worry was then, and still is now, that in the East Midlands area, for example—thearea I come from—very rural Lincolnshire may well lose out to the bigger conurbations of Derby, Nottingham, Leicester and Northampton. If we go down that route, we need to ensure that they are not jeopardised just because there are fewer voices having a say on the things that are important to that area. It is an old chestnut, but it is still with us. Does the Minister anticipate further delays in addition to those we already know about? Are there ongoing discussions between the UK Government and the EU on voluntary modulation? To pick up on the noble Baroness’s point, could the Minister tell us more about what has been agreed on domestic matched funding? The Merits Committee’s excellent report mentions the figure of £1.3 billion for the United Kingdom. The order is only England-based, so I would be grateful if the Minister would break down that figure and tell me how much money is relevant only to England rather than the whole of the United Kingdom. On the specific and detailed points, what happens to the farms that are cross-border with Wales or Scotland? There have been implications for the single farm payment with regard to cross-border payments. What would happen in those circumstances and how would the Government deal with that? I know that this point is a little further from the noble Baroness’s direct contribution, but it is about the uplands areas. Will this affect the hill-farming payments which are already either late or have not been paid? The Minister will correct me if I am wrong about that. Will any people who might have looked to some of these schemes find themselves doubly hard done by? That is dreadfully bad English, but I think the Minister will get my drift. Can we have further clarification with regard to anybody who has proposed a scheme which is not yet in being but which has been accepted into the thinking part of that scheme? Will that definitely not be considered as a possible scheme? I understand that the Government have undertaken to fulfil the agreements that are already in being—from where I am not sure and would be glad of clarification—but that no new schemes will be considered. Existing schemes will be able to go ahead, but in the mean time, will other schemes in the process of going forward be considered or will they have to wait another full year before anything happens? I hope that I am not being too wide of the mark, because I am trying to keep my comments within the restrictions of the order, but will that affect higher-level and entry-level schemes or are they further from what we are considering tonight? I hope that I have added a little to our discussion. We are grateful to the Minister, as always, for the conscientious way in which he responds to our queries. As he will be aware, however, one thing that has suffered enormously, looking at it purely from the farming side, has been the lack of hope for farmers who are looking to diversify, as some of them know that they have to do, to succeed in going forward. That uncertainty has caused so much distress. Any clarification that we can receive tonight will only be good; even if people fear the worst, at least they know whence they are starting. Lastly, I move away from agriculture per se, and ask the Minister how he sees the effect of these new orders and the gap—it looks like we may have a gap year—on the actual expansion or diversification of rural businesses which might wish to diversify, outside the pure farming businesses. We sometimes try to raise the issue but it falls within rural affairs, which are not always easy to cover. I suspect that some of them will fall within these orders. Again, I seek clarification of some of the questions that I and the noble Baroness have raised this afternoon.