Kerry McCarthy
MP for Bristol East · Labour · United Kingdom
“We see that in four main ways: physical risks, including floods, wildfires, droughts and storms; transition risks as economies move away from high-carbon industries; nature-related risks affecting food production and natural resources; and systemic risks, where shocks spread rapidly across sectors and markets.”
“The glaciers of the third pole function as Asia’s water tower, feeding major river systems that support nearly 2 billion people. When rising temperatures accelerate glacial melt, the consequences extend far beyond the mountains.”
“Following the heatwaves and wildfires across Europe this summer and the destruction caused by the glacier collapse and catastrophic flooding in Nepal and Tibet, the message is becoming impossible to ignore: the consequences of climate change and environmental degradation are real, not some distant future threat.”
“Personally, I cannot see that Rosebank is compatible with meeting our climate objectives, but I recognise that the process should be followed. Green Alliance has reported that the gas being wasted in the North sea would be enough to heat 570,000 homes.”
“I too worked in the financial markets, although I think I have done a better job of hiding it in my 21 years in Parliament. I was more on the debt market side. In fact, I am so old that I was part of the salvage operation for Barings bank when it went under. That brings me to the right hon. Gentleman’s point about regulation.”
“My hon. Friend will not be surprised to hear that I very much agree with the point that he just made. We have some excellent, innovative businesses in Bristol that came up through the Science Creates innovation hubs and attracted private capital.”
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“We have already discussed the fact that the Bill contains powers and not very much on duties, which means that it is vulnerable to change or being dropped entirely by a future Secretary of State. As I understand the Bill, there would be nothing to stop him or her from implementing payments for productivity only, without any reference to the public good. There is no indication as to how the pot of money would be divided up between the two, so there is concern, and Greener UK and the pesky environmentalists that people have talked about have been working on the amendment.”
“The Minister will be delighted to know that I am going to be very brief on this one. There is concern that it is not very clear in the Bill whether the public goods that are identified in clause 1(1) will be the primary focus for any payments, as we have already said that there is a limited pot of funding available. The Bill needs to reflect the fact that the Government have made a commitment that future policies will be underpinned by payment of public money for the provision of public goods. The public goods are listed in the Bill, but it does not actually indicate whether they will be a funding priority—it just says that these are things that money can be spent on. It does not specify that any payments for productivity should contribute to the delivery of public goods. The two things could be entirely separate.”
“I should begin by declaring that I am chair of the all-party parliamentary group on agroecology for sustainable food and farming and have been for some time. In amendment 72, we call for soil health to be mentioned specifically in the list of public goods. I hope the Minister will be receptive to that—he has made noises that suggest he might be. We know that soil fertility has collapsed in this country. There have been a couple of inquiries in recent years, including a very good one by the Environmental Audit Committee, which looked into soil degradation and the impact on, for example, food productivity and flooding due to run-off.”
“In some places, there is fertile soil. There are measures that one can take—we heard evidence from Helen Browning, I think. I apologise that I am slightly confused about whether I heard evidence in this Bill Committee last week or as a member of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Select Committee, because the same people have been giving evidence to both. There is a lot that we can do to increase biodiversity in fields; for instance, we can take some land out of production, which adds to soil fertility and yield. We heard evidence from Helen Browning of the Soil Association about that.”
“Before Conservative Back Benchers try to suggest that I am not talking sense, let me say that the Secretary of State has estimated that the UK is just 30 to 40 harvests away from the fundamental eradication of soil fertility in parts of the country.”
“The explanatory notes state that “Subsection (1)(e) will enable the Secretary of State to provide financial assistance for activities…to prevent…hazards to…the environment,.” It could therefore “be used to reduce flood risk by incentivising good soil management.” I was shadow Secretary of State at the time of the devastating floods a few years ago. The people responsible for land management in any of those farming communities will say that soil mismanagement contributed to the scale of the problem.”
“I am saying that it is such an important issue that it should be specifically mentioned, rather than it just being assumed that it comes under public goods. The amendment was drafted by the farming organisation Linking Environment and Farming and has support from the Soil Association, Innovation for Agriculture, and the Royal Agricultural Society of England. During our first oral evidence session, witnesses such as Caroline Drummond, chief executive of LEAF, and Vicki Hird from Sustain, agreed on the need for soil health to be separately listed as a public good. The importance of soil health is mentioned in the documents accompanying the Bill.”
“No, I do not believe that. The hon. Gentleman is a member of the Environmental Audit Committee, but I do not think he was a member during its inquiry into soil health. I suggest that he goes back and reads that report, which is quite devastating. The APPG held a three-part session and produced another report. I think that there is consensus on this and am surprised that Conservative MPs are challenging it. As I said, the Secretary of State has acknowledged the impact of soil degradation. We can always point to examples where that is not the case, but in general this is an issue across the country. During the evidence sessions last week, the Minister indicated that he might be prepared to look at this. His view was that soil health is already covered in the Bill, although not specifically.”
“116, Q160.] The Minister was encouraging about that, saying that the Government are considering empowering agro-ecology under clause 1. Such farming methods ought to become far more mainstream. Since the Secretary of State first came up with the “public money for public goods” approach, I have said that I think he is on the right page and is doing the right thing. I just think he could go a bit further to ensure the Bill is about restoring resistant services, safeguarding our long-term food security and protecting the environment.”
“It has a triple performance: it achieves environmental objectives; it achieves economic objectives by improving yield and efficiency, especially for small and medium-sized family farms; and it has a societal impact, including health and nutritional benefits. In evidence to the Committee, Ed Hamer of the Landworkers’ Alliance gave an example of how an amendment along such lines would work. He said: “the integration of whole farm agriculture and agri-ecological principles would incentivise farmers to produce food on the field in addition to introducing ecological focus areas or diversity around field edges.” He concluded that, with such an amendment, “it is the farming system itself that delivers the public good.” –– [ Official Report, Agriculture Public Bill Committee, 25 October 2018; c.”
“The “Ten years for agroecology” project in Europe, which was led by top scientific experts, shows that agro-ecology can address the apparent dilemma of producing adequate quantities of food while protecting biodiversity and natural resources and mitigating climate change. Although it is seen as a bit niche, France has become one of the first industrialised nations to make agro-ecology a central plank of its agriculture policy. In 2014, a law was passed to promote agro-ecological approaches actively. It set a target of implementing such approaches on 200,000 French farms by 2025. If the French can do it, I dare say there is absolutely no reason why the British cannot. The law also added agro-ecology to the curriculum in agricultural colleges across the country.”
“In Committee, Helen Browning said: “That is why I have been an organic farmer all my life: I do not want to be farming intensively in one place and trying to produce public goods in another… We will still need to do special things in special places so that we can preserve species, manage floods and so on, but the agro-ecological approach should be at the core of our farming system.” –– [ Official Report, Agriculture Public Bill Committee, 25 October 2018; c. 91.] Agro-ecology is not just about organic farming. That is one method, but there are also things such as agroforestry, pasture-based livestock systems, integrated pest management, low-input mixed farming and biodynamic agriculture. Agroforestry is a prime example of an innovative approach to farming that produces benefits across several categories of public goods.”
“For example, without a reduction in the use of pesticides and without maintaining soil health, water and air quality will suffer. Without output diversification, there will be no improvement to local biodiversity or crop resilience. The worry is that a limited pot of funding could be focused on edge-of-field nature restoration within an unsustainable wider system. The system should be targeting what happens in the middle of a field, not just around the edges. Approaches to farming such as agro-ecology offer bigger picture approaches that would provide the largest amount of public goods. A whole-farm approach may also be easier to monitor, because the metrics of working out what is going on with individual public goods could be incredibly complicated.”
“It was drafted with the help of the Soil Association and Sustain, and is also supported by the Landworkers’ Alliance. Last week, the Minister suggested that he was fairly receptive to the amendment, which suggests that instead of a focus on individual public goods, allowing cherry-picking and just pursuing one or two, there should be a focus on a whole-farm approach, which is by far the best way of delivering many public goods at the same time as producing food. The “Health and Harmony” consultation paper asked respondents to prioritise a list of public goods. I thought that was the wrong approach, because to prioritise public goods fails to recognise that intersect and that pursuing one public good will help to achieve public goods in another sense.”
“There is so much good that is there, but it is underpinned by delivering on actually improving the soil and the huge environmental benefits that flow from that.” As Vicki Hird from Sustain rightly said, there is also a risk that farmers are getting paid for doing things on one part of the farm or on the edge of a field, but are not protecting the soil elsewhere. That is part of the regulatory process, and bringing it into the fold would make sense to ensure that it is part of the picture. I think we are on the same page, but I would like those three words to be added to the Bill to make clear how important soil is. I tabled amendment 41 with two other officers from the APPG, the hon. Members for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas) and for Richmond Park (Zac Goldsmith)—again, the amendment has cross-party support.”
“I think there is a consensus, at least on the Conservative Front Bench, that soil health is incredibly important and under threat. It should be specifically added to the list of public goods because it is critical to biodiversity, productivity, and mitigating and adapting to climate change—we have not mentioned that yet. The carbon sequestration function of soil is incredibly important. The hon. Member for York Outer (Julian Sturdy) said in the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee: “I just cannot understand why it is not specifically defined in the Bill.”
“That all sounds tremendous stuff. We are talking about a limited pot of money, and I am concerned that we will get people with huge stakes who cherry-pick the public goods, doing bits and pieces and getting their hands on quite a lot of that pot of money, with the result that the share for people who farm sustainably across the whole farm and adopt some of the approaches the Minister has mentioned is reduced. Does he agree that we ought to be rewarding those people? I always make an anology with a big company that has a fair trade coffee brand, but 95% of their coffee is not fair trade. However, does it really deserve credit for that 5%?”
“Question put, That the amendment be made.”
“I thank the Minister for his response. There was a lot in there with which I agreed. I do not intend to press the amendment to a vote, not least because—as he rightly said—the “and”, rather than “or”, is problematic. I shall press amendment 41, however, because as we have ascertained, we are very susceptible to the whims of a future Government or any change in leadership. I would like to see whole farm systems recognised specifically in the Bill. I beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment. Amendment, by leave, withdrawn. Amendment proposed : 49, in clause 1, page 1, line 10, after second “heritage”, insert “, including farming systems where they underpin delivery”.— (Dr Drew.) This amendment would include farming systems in the land or water management activities for which financial assistance can be given in Clause 1(1)( c ).”
“I am slightly disturbed by something the Minister said almost in passing. He seemed to be saying that the only problematic issue relating to the importing of soya is the shipping miles. I hope he has read the evidence, including the UN report “Livestock’s Long Shadow”, work by Chatham House and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s report last week, that shows that the carbon footprint of the industry goes way beyond shipping miles.”
“I appreciate the concerns that we cannot necessarily deal with what the finished product would look like, but we could look at measures such as grants for marketing, infrastructure for on-farm processing, creating local farm supply chains and what the Minister mentioned earlier about having food production around cities, so that it would be easier to get healthy food into cities. We could also look at an equivalent to the EU fruit and vegetable aid scheme. Public procurement is incredibly important as well. There is a lot more I could say on the subject. There is a chance in the Bill to ensure that people have healthier diets. It is crisis that we cannot just ignore.”
“We need to take serious steps to reduce their routine use in farming. The amendment also refers to reducing the use of chemicals and pesticides on farms, and the associated health risks have been mentioned. I very much look forward to the Government’s food strategy document. I was originally told that the outline document would come forward just before Christmas, but I have heard rumours that is has been put back further and may even have been shelved. I do not want to rely on reassurances that all this will be dealt with in a food strategy document.”
“They would not be able to afford to eat in line with what the Government recommend as a healthy diet. My amendment also mentions the overuse of antibiotics in farming. That is not the use of antibiotics to treat illness; it is usually the result of intensive farming, with the routine over-prescription of antibiotics to compensate for the fact that animal husbandry is not as good as it could be. That is causing a public health crisis. The former Chancellor, now editor of the Evening Standard, went to the States and made a big speech to highlight that this is a public health crisis for anybody who is reliant on antibiotics. We have seen the rise of superbugs in the NHS. I have a niece with cystic fibrosis. Cystic fibrosis patients rely on periodic applications of antibiotics, which are fast becoming ineffective.”
“Recent research by Kellogg’s described food deserts in our most deprived areas, where it is really difficult for families to get their hands on affordable fresh fruit and vegetables. I think two of the top five areas are in south Bristol. I am vice-chair of the all-party parliamentary group on school food and a member of its children’s future food inquiry, which recently published data. Members might know that the Government have an “Eat Well” guide, which is meant to indicate what a healthy diet looks like. It is not used as it should be, in that it does not inform public procurement in the way that it should, but it is out there. The inquiry’s report found that almost 4 million children in the UK live in households that would struggle to meet the official nutritional guidelines.”
“I entirely support my hon. Friend and his amendment 51, but my amendment 70 is a bit more detailed. I will talk first about the public health, food-related issues. As has been said, the White Paper is called “Health and Harmony” yet there is a conspicuous lack of information about what the Government want to do to improve public health. Almost 4 million people in the UK have been diagnosed with diabetes, 90% of those type 2, which is very much associated with diet. That costs the NHS £12 billion a year, which is a good enough argument to try to do something about it. Childhood obesity has been mentioned. We now have more children classified obese at the age of 11 than in the US, which is definitely cause for alarm.”
“Within the industry, there is certainly a lot of interest in how to extend the message about health and vegetable consumption.”
“It also talks about pesticide use and antimicrobial resistance—the overuse of antibiotics. Some environmental organisations have said that they do not support the public health goal. I wonder whether we could do more, other than putting it in as a public good, particularly around procurement. In France, for example, there is a rule that 50% of public procurement should be locally sourced or organic produce. Could we do more on that front in the Bill? Jack Ward: There is a fairly urgent need to promote the consumption of fresh fruit and vegetables—that is a given. It would be incredibly helpful to have something in the Bill that enabled us to do that, although I am not quite sure where responsibility ends for DEFRA and begins for the Department of Health and Social Care.”
“Q (Bristol East) (Lab): It is good to see the British Growers Association here, because yesterday, in the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee, which is also taking evidence on the Bill, we had representatives from the dairy sector, the red meat sector and the ornamental horticulture sector, which was slightly odd, because the answer to whether they should be covered by the Groceries Code Adjudicator was mostly, “No, we don’t care about that”—well, of course they do not, because they are not grocers. There was an obvious gap with you not there. I have tabled an amendment on public health, which I hope that you will welcome. It talks about measures to increase the availability, affordability, diversity, quality and marketing of fruit and vegetables.”
“We need to ensure that food is not being ultra-processed. Otherwise, however good it was at the start, it will not be very good by the time it gets to our plates. I want us to look at the whole picture, because at the moment we are only looking at part of it. We want to see health addressed in the Bill, because we are not seeing it being addressed anywhere else. If we had an absolute assurance that it would be dealt with in other places, and that we were looking at a farming future based on public health, we would not be lobbying quite so hard for it in this place.”
“Q It has been said that since anything can happen to food during processing, why reward it at the produce stage? That is what I am trying to get to grips with. Fruit and veg are incredibly healthy, but how do we ensure that they reach the consumer in a healthy form without being adulterated or turned into something with very little nutritional value? Helen Browning: That is why we need to look at this alongside the food plan, if that is coming through. The two things need to work together. We need to grow a much wider diversity of fruits, nuts, vegetables and other crops on our farms; we can expand the diversity of what we do; dietary diversity is a big factor, because we eat far too much of far too few things. However, it needs to be married with the market pull end, which is achieved through things like public procurement.”
“A drive towards using the new technology coming through, as well as traditional techniques, would feel really exciting.”
“The integrated approach gives us a balance of food production with environmental care. We will still need to do special things in special places so that we can preserve species, manage floods and so on, but the agro-ecological approach should be at the core of our farming system. We know that we need to start moving away from pesticides and antibiotic use, and towards encouraging rotations and using less manufactured nitrogen. I welcome the steer on climate change, which is incredibly important. We need to soak up more carbon in our soils and in our trees. We need farming systems that deliver those things, but at the moment that is not coming through strongly enough. It will be financially and physically the most practical way to do it, and it will give people a vision of the future that we can all sign up to.”
“Q May I also ask about whole farm systems? I have an amendment that relates particularly to agro-ecological and organic farming, which I am sure the Soil Association would support. You mentioned the concern that the approach might be piecemeal, with people doing things round the edges. How important is it to support a whole farming system, as opposed to focusing on individual public goods? Helen Browning: In my view, whole farming systems such as organic farming or agroforestry are probably the most efficient way to support the public goods that we want, because they actually deliver them as an inherent part of the food production system. That is why I have been an organic farmer all my life: I do not want to be farming intensively in one place and trying to produce public goods in another.”
“So there are a number of economic and environmental justifications for the agro-ecological farming system. Those are just a few of them; I can come back to you with more afterwards.”
“Examples from our membership demonstrate how mixed farms used cereals for livestock bedding and then manure to fertilise the cereals. They used waste from the horticultural enterprise to feed a pig or poultry enterprise alongside. So by being sensible with food waste, in particular, on the farm, you can recycle those inputs and then essentially cut your losses through that margin. On food waste, it is also worth bearing in mind that small farms tend to be much more concerned about and aware of what food is being wasted. Again, going back to local marketing, consumers are much more willing to accept food of a slightly lesser cosmetic appearance when dealing with local markets, compared with what you can sell through to the supermarkets.”
“We heard some evidence—I cannot remember if it was in this Committee or in the EFRA Committee, which is also looking at the Bill—about how taking some of the land out of production and using it to increase biodiversity, through pollinators and that sort of thing, can increase food yields. Is that just nice to have or could it make farming more productive? Ed Hamer: The agro-ecological principle is a whole-farm approach; it does not take fields one at a time in individual focus areas, but looks at the inputs to the farm as a whole, as you say. Anything you can do to reduce dependence on external inputs will have not only a beneficial environmental impact but a beneficial economic impact on the farming system.”
“Q I should say that I am the chair of the all-party parliamentary group on agro-ecology and I tabled the amendment on moving to a more agro-ecological approach that Ed mentioned. The briefing from the Landworkers Alliance was very useful, particularly the paragraph stating what France has done to move towards a more agro-ecological approach, but I want to ask about the economics. I think agro-ecology is sometimes perceived as being just about caring about the environment, and not about improving farming productivity. Could you say something about the fact that there may be fewer inputs?”
“This morning, a family-owned business in my constituency, FreestyleXtreme, announced that it is moving some of its jobs to Bucharest because of uncertainty about Brexit, and particularly the fact that it might be hit by tariffs after exit day. It warned me several months ago that that move would have to be on the cards. What reassurance can the Secretary of State give to small companies? I can see further businesses taking the same option if they do not get more clarity.”
“Martin Lines: There are a number of farms with productive land, especially with the silts in the fens. They may concentrate and be more productive in the middle and just have the stewardship round the outside, but that is fine. There are other areas where it is more about the whole of the landscape. If each farmer has to do an ELM scheme to receive some money, it is about a whole-farm approach—all your soils and all your assets—not just the non-productive and productive bits.”
“Q I have a couple of questions. They are a little complicated but I will try and make them brief. It is difficult to get your head round the economics of it when we do not know how each public good will be rewarded. I know some people have expressed concern that some farmers might cherry-pick one or two of the public goods and do that around the margins of their land, but compensate for the loss of direct payment by becoming more intense and more industrialised—a bit like what happened in New Zealand, where they did not have the compensatory public goods regime. What are your thoughts on that? How would the economics of that work out for farmers and will most of them be persuaded to go down the public goods route and do more on that front?”
“They have reconfigured the whole farm to make the movement of machinery more sensible, so that fuel costs are massively down. In that way, they reduce input costs in order to be able to do that kind of farming.”
“It is encouraging to see the mechanisms for this emerging around land management plans, as the underpinning for delivering finance through the environmental land management scheme. Integrating it feels like the right way to go, as long as the land management plan is not just about the public goods but also about the productivity. They need to sit within that one mechanism in order for them to gear properly against each other. On whether it will be more intensive in the middle of some farms or fields, it might be but that is okay. This brings to mind my recent visit to the Raveningham estate in Suffolk, which is doing some extraordinarily good stuff delivering the public goods in this Bill brilliantly, with huge dripping hedgerows weeping into the fields, and right in the middle, 12 tonnes a hectare of high quality wheat being produced.”
“At the moment, it is individual public goods. There is nothing that deals with whole- farm systems, such as organic, pasture-led livestock. Do you think that should be in the Bill? Martin Lines: It should be a whole-farm approach and a whole-farm plan and it should connect soils, environment, health and everything else with where we get food production. It is not joined up. We have stewardship and production. They have been two separate payments—two separate deals. We need that linked back together and we need to say that from a good environment and from good soils, we will have food security for the lifetimes of generations to come. Patrick Begg: On that point from Martin about integration, you are right. Dovetailing production and environment is what we are all after; it is at the heart of this.”
“What is important is that productivity needs to go up. We need to be more productive. We need to do a lot more with a lot less, but we need innovation for that. For me as a farmer, that is very important. I might be a little scared about it as well. If there is no innovation and we are not going forward and there is no balance in the short and long term, you will lose out on a lot of things. Innovation should be central in everything we are doing to increase yields. Building fertility and soil fertility will help with certain things. Innovation is very important.”
“What we are increasingly seeing from the top of the hill right down to the bottom of the valley is that it is not either/or. The economics of a farm operation can be massively improved by engaging in and going down the route of focusing on public goods, as well as on good quality food production. Gilles Deprez: It is not that farmers are cherry-picking just to take the best advantage out of it. In certain areas, it is just not possible. To use the example again of Cornwall, field margins do not make sense for our operation if we are talking about fields of one acre or less. We have a lot of hedges, so we already have a very strong natural environment. Sometimes it does not make sense for a certain environment or a certain type of business to do certain things. That is why you get cherry-picking in certain areas, I assume.”
“There is a system there but we have not been able to use it. It can be done. Thomas Lancaster: Even in the uplands, we have been doing some work recently to look at the economics of those systems, and similar work has been done by others. What that is increasingly showing us is that in an inherently uneconomic farming system, where you are losing money per head of livestock, often what you would do through a stewardship scheme is to reduce the number of livestock. You would not remove them—it is still noticeably and obviously a farm—but if you reduce the number of livestock, and maybe look at adding value and supplying into local markets and short supply chains, the profitability of that underlying agricultural operation can be transformed.”
“In turn, the evidence increasingly tells us that they can improve yield and further improve profitability by creating habitats for pollinators and crop pest predators. A study in 2015 by Pywell et al from the Natural Environment Research Council’s Centre for Ecology and Hydrology highlighted that even when you took 8% of land out of production in an arable system, there was no net loss of yield for cereals such as barley and wheat because you had a lot of crop pest predators in the system, and there was a 25% increase in yield for field beans—a flowering crop—because of the sheer abundance of pollinators. Martin Lines: We have done the same. We have seen the benefit. We took 12% out of production into environmental measures and squared fields off where the pollinating margins are to see a 20% yield increase.”
“What was the name of the farm? Patrick Begg: The Raveningham estate, which is the Bacon family. There is a fantastic estate manager there called Jake Fiennes, who has been doing this for 15 years and has produced amazing results. If you want to see an example of what productive farming plus public goods looks like in the lowlands, that is a great example. Thomas Lancaster: That example points to the idea that you can improve your profitability in some respects by going down the direction of travel the Bill has set out: by removing or reducing spray and drill overlaps, by taking out awkward and unprofitable corners, and receiving public payments on those areas for delivering public goods by creating habitats such as wildflower margins.”
“It is good for the farmer, good for the people using the drinking water downstream, and certainly good for Nestlé.”
“Someone said to me the other day, “Remember when the car industry was faced with having to put catalytic converters into everything?” There was a huge outcry: “We cannot possibly do that. It is going to put thousands on the cost of cars.” Within five or 10 years, it cost about £20 to put a catalytic converter into a car, and there was an industry around it, so jobs and growth came on the back of it. There is a comparator with what can be done in agriculture. I see firms such as Nestlé investing premiums in their dairy farmers in Cumbria to meet regulatory baselines around water. There are already upstream supply chain businesses that recognise long-term resilience, but need that nudge of the regulatory baseline for that investment to be freed up.”