Mr Alistair Carmichael

It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Dr Allin-Khan. I congratulate the right hon. Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Sir John Hayes) on securing time for this debate from the Backbench Business Committee. I find myself in the curious position of being in violent agreement not only with him, but with the hon. Member for Salford (Rebecca Long Bailey). That is a moment worth reflecting on. In advance of this debate, we have received some very useful briefings from the National Farmers Union and the Bakers, Food and Allied Workers’ Union about food insecurity and workers’ rights; the hon. Lady has just touched on those issues. Curiously, the one organisation from which we have not heard a peep is the Groceries Code Adjudicator itself. That is quite significant, because this is not the first time that the House has debated the work of the adjudicator: my hon. Friend the Member for Brecon, Radnor and Cwm Tawe (David Chadwick) secured a debate on it in February, I myself presented a ten-minute rule Bill on it in March, and now we have this debate today. If the adjudicator had a good story to tell, we would expect to have heard something from it by now, given the criticism that has been levelled at it. But not a peep: it has maintained an omertà that would put the Mafia to shame. I do feel slightly conflicted. The adjudicator has a tiny office and, I think, a staff of seven or eight. Given its inability to process complaints at the moment, I do not know that I want it to spend that much time talking to MPs and policymakers. But if it has a story to tell, it needs to come out and tell it. Otherwise, we will be entitled to assume that there is not much that it can say. The right hon. Member for South Holland and The Deepings spoke about the need for reform and the way in which that reform might take shape. I disagree with very little of what he said. What we need, as the hon. Member for Salford says, is a single regulator from the farm gate to the supermarket shelves. At the moment, too many unfairnesses are hardwired into the system, there are too many players in the market and it is just too easy for outcomes to fall between the gaps. Those who suffer are always the consumers, who are left with higher food prices, or the primary producers. At the moment, it is principally the primary producers who are losing out. The supermarkets are entering into a price war as they try to push down food price inflation. As a primary food producer myself, I declare a registered interest. There are wider issues around the behaviour of supermarkets. There has been widespread and justifiable outrage in the past few days about Asda selling Uruguayan beef. The way it is often done is instructive. The labelling on the top looks lovely. It says that the beef is 30-day matured rib-eye steak of “heritage breed origin”, whatever that means. A shopper has to turn it over and see the small print on the back or underside of the tray to find out that it is beef produced in Uruguay from cattle slaughtered in Uruguay. Even if we park for a moment the concern about animal welfare standards, the carbon consequences of shipping beef around the world in this way are utter madness, even though ironically it would help us to meet the targets set for us by the Climate Change Committee. That example illustrates that amid growing competition among supermarkets on price, if we continue to reduce our levels of livestock in this country the resulting gap will be filled by cheaper imports. That surely renders any definition of food security utterly meaningless. Once we lose our own producers, we will not get them back.