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Agriculture: Regulation

My Lords, I also declare an interest as a farmer. In my allotted three minutes, I have two points to make. First, there is no doubt that regulation has helped UK consumers to develop greater confidence in the quality of their agricultural products and the way that we, as farmers, produce them. Taken individually, most regulations and audits have the sensible purpose of protecting the environment and reassuring the public, who are our customers. It is right that nothing should be taken for granted. However, my second point is: why does there need to be so much duplication? Just to give some examples: a neighbour of mine starts a chicken business and he has to pay someone to help him get through the Environment Agency’s integrated pollution prevention and control clearance. Nowadays, you have to employ a professional who knows how to prove you are doing the right thing—doing it yourself simply will not work. Anyway, no sooner has my neighbour got the all clear from the Environment Agency than he has to pay for an environmental impact assessment for the planning authority, which asks all the same questions. One has to wonder why the planning authority will not accept the IPPC—which it would not—and why the form is not the same. There must be ways of consolidating them into one. On our farm—and I used it as an example, because I do not think we are atypical—we also have numerous inspections and audits. We have comprehensive audits from our buyers such as Waitrose and Tesco. We have local council hygiene standards checks, national dairy scheme checks, combinable crops assurance scheme checks, Freedom Food checks, health and safety checks, HOPS and Cedex checks for our student employment, assured produce checks, Environment Agency checks on both our abstractions and discharges, and of course the Soil Association checks on almost everything. They are all probably justifiable in their own way but put together they are a complete waste of everyone’s time. In an ideal world there would be one inspector who came on to my farm and really got to know how we work and went through everything everybody wanted to know or to test on the farm. He or she would be under contract to all the government bodies, all the associations and all the supermarkets to impose whatever standards they required on whatever farm. Even if the process took two days on each farm, and involved subsequent random checks, it would be a considerable saving in man-hours all round. I feel sure my approach is oversimplistic, but I do hope that Richard Macdonald’s working party will come up with something along these lines.