Contribution
My Lords, listening to this debate, it becomes apparent just how diverse our nation’s agriculture is. For every remark by one speaker, there is probably someone who knows about agriculture in a different part of the country, in a different sector, where it is not directly relevant. But the message that comes across—and I declare my interests in agriculture in Cumbria, which the Minister knows about—has the same effect: what ought to be a profitable activity, providing public goods, which is not merely food but a whole range of other things, becomes unsustainable quite simply because it does not pay. It does not matter how you look at this; at the end of the year, if income and expenditure do not balance, then that enterprise cannot survive for all that long.
I think that government has an important role to play in every advanced western society. The Government provide a framework around which farming, agriculture and land use functions, not least because the consequences of what is done are so important in widely varying ways to other parts of the economy. What worries me about the debates on agriculture in this country is that, if agriculture is not sustainable and if the businesses, be they big or small, become unsustainable and cannot survive on their own commercial terms, either because they cannot generate enough revenue from husbandry or other land use activities that they carry out, or, equally important, because of the incidence of tax that they will have to pay—it is no good thinking that an inheritance tax is a kind of one-off thing; the reality is that you have to put aside money year on year in order to build up a reserve or, alternatively, borrow money which then has to be paid off over a long period to pay off the debt that is owed to the state—we will continue in a world where many of those who are operating in a smaller way in the agricultural sector are on standards of living below those promised to the employed sector by the minimum wage.
That is not the basis for a long-term, sustainable, rural, agricultural food sector. I believe that we will end up, if we are not careful, in those kinds of circumstances, because the analysis that is necessary behind working out what the policy needs to be is not the kind of thing that is simply learned in an economics course or an agricultural economics course at a university. It depends on an understanding of the realities of what carrying out this business entails. My concern about the context of the debate this evening is that policy is not being made with sufficient understanding and recognition of the realities of what is underlying this whole part of the economy. If you do that, it will not work. Already in agriculture, the rate of return that people expect is probably 2% or 3%. Who in the commercial world—I have chaired some commercial companies—will invest getting the rates of return that you get from agriculture?
I listened carefully to what the Minister said. It was fine; they are good words. But good words are not enough here. As the noble Lord, Lord McNally, who normally sits across the Chamber, said on a number of occasions, “Fine words butter no parsnips”. The litmus test for agricultural policy, like every other policy, is: is it engendering a sector of the economy that is working in the public interest? I am deeply concerned that the way in which it is being approached by the present Administration is not going to bring that about.
Finally, as somebody who is also about to leave, I would like to add my sentiments to what a number of others have said about the way in which the whole infrastructure of the House has supported my work here. I make a particular reference to the nurse, whose name I never knew, who identified that I got sepsis and sent me straightaway to hospital.