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10.7 am
Sir John Stanley (Tonbridge and Malling): I thankmy hon. Friend the Member for Weston-super-Mare(Sir J. Wiggin) and his Committee and congratulate them on an extremely well-researched and valuable report. I am glad that our new procedures give us the opportunity to debate it. I wholly endorse what my hon. Friend said about the imperative need for radical steps to be taken to stop the grotesque wastage of European Union taxpayers' money in horticulture, and indeed the wider agriculture sector.
Like other hon. Members, I have had the good fortune to be able to travel fairly extensively during the years that I have had the privilege to serve in the House. In doing so, I have found that one place only in my constituency is known around the world. It is known in the deep recesses of the African bush and, as I found out only last month, in the huge terraced hill sides of the cultivatable parts of Nepal. Unhappily, that one place is not either the town of Tonbridge or the village of West Malling, from which my constituency takes its name, but the East Malling research station, as it was called until a few years ago. The East Malling research station is Britain's premier research establishment in the fruit sector--both soft and tree-borne fruit. Over many decades throughout the century, it has built up an unrivalled reputation for excellence that extends around the world.
It was, I suppose, inevitable that when the Government came to office in 1979--committed, in my view rightly, to examining the public sector across the board and to asking what functions that had been carried out by the public sector should continue to be done in that way in the future--an establishment like the East Malling research station should come under scrutiny. That scrutiny took place during the 1980s, a time of considerable difficulty and near trauma for the research station and its staff.
At the end of the period of uncertainty, there emerged Horticulture Research International, resulting in a great deal of reorganisation, restructuring, staff changes, and changes in the research programme at East Malling. The outcome was generally regarded as satisfactory, as it produced the continuation of the research establishment with a new focus on the requirements of the horticulture industry. The decision was strongly supported by the industry--a fact that emerged in the Select Committee's report--and the establishment continued under the sponsorship of the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food.
Having been through that long and difficult period of uncertainty in the 1980s, the staff at East Malling not unreasonably hoped and expected that there would then ensue a period of stability and certainty, during which they could continue to build on their remarkable reputation for research and excellence. Sadly, that hope has not been realised so far in the 1990s.
A report on the matter was produced by the Cabinet Office's efficiency unit. I have no doubt that that unit has made many recommendations in the interests of efficiency, but that was not the case in 1994, when it recommended that the research establishment be treated as a branch primarily focused not on agriculture and horticulture, but on pure science. The unit recommended that the sponsorship of the establishment be transferred from MAFF to the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council.
I was delighted that the Select Committee report threw out that recommendation, and I was equally delighted when the Government--in responding to the Committee's report--also threw out that recommendation. Having disposed of the uncertainty engendered by the Cabinet Office, further uncertainty has now been created by the Government's exercise called the prior options review, which extends to some 40 or 50 Government or Government-sponsored research establishments in different sectors.
News of that further review--not surprisingly--was greeted with great dismay by those who work at East Malling. We all know that a premium is attached to the continuity of personnel in research establishments, because they are all "people places" where the people involved are fundamental to the value that can be obtained from the establishment's activities. Continuity and certainty are of primary importance. I am not a great horticultural expert, but I believe that if one picks up a plant by its roots, shakes it around and puts it back in the soil, and then redoes that several times, it will not be wholly conducive to the plant's growth. I would suggest to MAFF that that is true also in the case of horticulture research establishments.
Mr. Paul Tyler (North Cornwall):
I do not intend to follow the right hon. Member for Tonbridge and Malling (Sir J. Stanley) on the specific point that he makes,
I share the view of other hon. Members about the value of the report from the Select Committee. We are all grateful to the Chairman of the Committee, the hon. Member for Weston-super-Mare (Sir J. Wiggin), and his colleagues not just for the succinct and effective way in which the Committee covered the subject, but for the succinct and effective way in which the Committee Chairman introduced the report, which will enable a number of hon. Members to speak in what would otherwise have been a short debate.
I do not know, Mr. Deputy Speaker, whether you share my nostalgia for the days when one knew when a particular product came on the market--for example, the first asparagus, the first strawberries, the first Cornish early potatoes or daffodils from the Isles of Scilly. Sadly, those days have to some extent gone. I think that we have lost something, as we now get very little seasonal, or even regional, variety. We can have almost anything at any time of the year.
One of the lessons that I hope that we take from the Select Committee report is that careful sourcing of local and regional products by major buyers could reintroduce an element of the previous system to good effect, with an element of freshness, variety and speciality that many of us would relish. It is not just old 'uns like me with my nostalgia who would enjoy that.
The whole issue of sourcing in horticulture is complicated. Clearly the Select Committee has taken great care to obtain the best possible advice on the matter, and we should listen to the recommendations. I saw some figures recently giving the distance travelled by the average vegetable to arrive at a supermarket in the midlands. It is literally hundreds--sometimes thousands--of miles, depending on the particular vegetable and the time of year. The traditional market down the road actually sells fresh fruit and vegetables that have usually travelled less than five miles. The contrast between the sourcing policies of independent traders and big multiples is very stark, and that discrepancy needs to be attended to if we are to deal with the question of import substitution that I believe is rightly at the heart of the Committee's report. I shall come back to that matter in a moment.
We all know that horticulture is exceptionally sensitive to the time of day or year and to climate. Today, somewhere out in the snow, someone will be reckoning on whether it is worth pulling up or picking vegetables. At any time of year--despite the weather--people are having to think carefully by the hour, and even by the minute. Therefore, pressure on the growers is intense.I echo the point that has been made about the ingenuity, enterprise and sheer hard work that those involved in the industry must put in to make a reasonable living against difficult competition.
In those circumstances, we must also be sensitive to the continuity and security of a contract that a grower may get by supplying to a big supermarket chain. The other side of the coin is that that security may lock the grower
into a long-term relationship that he may find extremely difficult to break if it becomes necessary to do so. The most secure contract of all was the slave contract. Some growers regret very much the extent to which they are locked into particular organisations.
The report refers, as did the chairman of the Select Committee today, to the need to make sure that our producer organisations are not mistreated, ill treated or unfairly treated by the rules and regulations that may emerge from the European Union and the Council of Ministers. I agree, but we also have much to learn from our competitor countries in the EU in respect of the co-operative principle. As the hon. Member for St. Ives (Mr. Harris) said before he left the Chamber, we in Cornwall have moved in a small way towards some effective co-operatives. That is also true in other parts of the country.
The core of the Committee's report is the contrast between its advice and the advice of the Government on import substitution. It is apparent from the report that the Committee took most careful evidence from a huge range of extremely well-informed organisations. After exhaustive inquiries, the recommendation of the Select Committee is specific. It is that the reorientation of Food From Britain towards export promotion is misguided and that the organisation should be much more concerned with import substitution. I believe that to be true, and I believe that the industry does, too. Many of us are disappointed that the Government in their, albeit short, reply to the report have not dealt with that specific and well-based recommendation. I hope that the Minister will expand on that matter.
Of course import substitution and export promotion are not mutually exclusive. That is acknowledged in the report, but paragraphs 88 and 89 make a good case for the issue to be most thoroughly reviewed in the light of the most recent advice. The report states that we should not simply rely on previous views, evidence and data. I hope that the Minister will at least tell us today that Food From Britain is to be commissioned to carry out an appraisal of the advantages of reorientation along the lines suggested in the Committee's recommendation. Such an appraisal should, of course, take into account what would be cost-effective. If reorientation in the longer term necessitates some increase in resources to make the organisation more effective, I hope that that will also be possible.
One issue is not touched on at any length in the Committee's report, but it is extremely important in many parts of the country. The amount of casual labour used in the industry has been referred to briefly. A substantial proportion of the labour is casual. The treatment of casual labour for the purposes of social security benefits causes a considerable problem in many parts of the country. It is one of the difficulties that face many vegetable growers in Lincolnshire. It has been a long tradition in Kent that casual labour provides the hop growers with their main source of assistance. In Cornwall we have had major problems in recent years, especially in the flower fields.
One must bear it in mind that in many of the areas to which I refer not only does horticulture provide great employment potential but there is high joblessness and women in particular find it extremely difficult to find part-time work. It is important that we try to find a way out of an absurd mare's nest of red tape. I am sure that that concern is shared throughout the House.
We must also arrive at a simple system that prevents fraud as far as humanly possible. We all know that there has been fraud. My experience and that of the National Farmers Union is that the complexity of the present rules encourages rather than reduces fraud. Therefore, we must find a simpler system. At present, if a picker in Lincolnshire, Kent or Cornwall does some short-term picking because the time of year or the daylight hours or the nature of the crop--as in the case of early daffodils--make that possible, just one day's picking may exclude that individual from days and days of not only direct unemployment benefit but everything else that goes with it, such as housing benefit or council tax benefit.
The result is that a young woman, for example, whose only employment may be picking finds it impossible to take up that employment. The regulations have forced local labour out of many pickers' fields. As a result, many growers have perforce had to rely on gangmasters from other parts of the country or even other parts of Europe to provide gangs of pickers. That cannot be a sensible solution. It is damaging to local employment prospects.
I have made representations to the Department of Social Security, the Department of Employment, as it then was, and the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food. I note from the report of the horticulture committee to the annual meeting of the NFU yesterday that negotiations between the union and the Department for Education and Employment have continued for months and months, but small progress is now being made. I hope that the Minister might be able to give us some examples of what is intended.
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