conservativerural action

As ever the farming and countryside organisations were strongly represented at the Conservative Party Conference and the various meetings and debates they held were inevitably both well attended and lively.

The only thing that flowed faster than the centenary beer at the NFU fringe meeting were the questions.

Having spent the vast majority of my life involved in agriculture, and with two sons in the industry, I understand the challenges farmers are facing.

The Conservatives recognise British farming’s crucial importance to our food security and to the vibrancy of our natural environment and rural communities. We want to help farmers raise production as we look to a future in which very rapidly there will be billions more mouths to feed. But as pressures on our natural resources grow we do not believe in production at any cost.

There can be no return to the days of the past, when Government encouraged intensive farming practices and the clearance of hedgerows and woodland. As I said in Manchester, the environment and food production is not an ‘either/or’. We need both. It is clean water, healthy soils and thriving biodiversity upon which our food security ultimately depends, and it is the job of Government to ensure that farmers are provided with the right kind of incentives to do what they do best: produce high quality food in harmony with the environment.

I don’t usually go to the pub at 10am in the morning, but Monday was an exception.  We were gathered at an event for the Honest Food campaign at the Coach and Horses, a terrific gastropub in Clerkenwell, London.

While guests sampled a delicious brunch from the pub’s kitchen, as well as oysters from Essex, mutton from Wales, apple juice from Kent and cheese from Worcestershire – all organised by the Slow Food movement – there was a serious purpose to the meeting.

I was able to announce that Tesco has decided to support the Honest Food campaign and change some 1,000 of its food labels.  This is a hugely significant step forward for the campaign, which I launched earlier this year in an attempt to end the misleading labelling of meat and to empower consumers to make informed choices about the food they buy.

The simple premise is that people have a right to know where their food comes from, and that the current system, which allows a pork pie made in this country from foreign pork to be labelled as British, is wrong.  It is also damaging.  Misleading labelling has undermined the improvements in farm animal welfare which we have made in this country, disadvantaging our farmers as well as deceiving consumers.

I would not want to see restraints on free trade even if they were legal – after all, Britain has important food export markets of our own.  I believe that the consumer should be king, free to choose food from this country or any other.  But real choice requires real information.  As Jamie Oliver and others have demonstrated so effectively, consumers can find it difficult to back British producers if they want to because of inadequate labelling.

The Honest Food campaign is supported by animal welfare and farming organisations alike.  We have signed up thousands of supporters and we know from surveys that the public strongly support our aims.  The Government have admitted that there’s a problem, but they’ve been feeble in response.  While we made it clear that we would legislate to enforce honest labelling if necessary, the Government dithered.  They promised a voluntary agreement with the supermarkets, but nothing happened.

Of course, as Conservatives, we would prefer the retailers to accept their social responsibility to label food honestly, rather than Parliament having to pass new laws.  So I am delighted that, following a series of meetings which I and my team have had with the major supermarkets, we have made real progress towards a voluntary agreement.

Both Tesco – the UK’s largest retailer – and Morrisons have now committed to introducing clear statements on all products with a 10 per cent meat content or higher, and the replacement of the sole term ‘produced in the UK’ when a product is manufactured in the UK but contains non-British meat.

Sainsbury’s, M&S and Waitrose are also backing the campaign, and ASDA is currently reviewing its labelling to ensure their customers have accurate information about where their products are made and come from.

Better labelling will benefit consumers and our producers alike.  At the start of British Food Fortnight, Conservatives are demonstrating our determination to promote sustainable food production and a successful agricultural industry.  The Honest Food campaign is succeeding where the Government has failed.

This blog was originally posted on conservative home: http://conservativehome.blogs.com/platform/

Rural England has suffered a decade of disrespect by Labour.  Quiet communities have become angered by a Government which won’t even listen, still less give them a say.  Local services have been withdrawn, rural communities have been denied a voice, and power has been taken away from local people.

Yesterday, Jim Paice MP – the Shadow Minister for Agriculture and Rural Affairs – and I launched Rural Action, the Conservative agenda to revitalise our rural communities.  We are setting out solid proposals to empower rural communities, protect rural services, respect rural people and revive the rural economy.  And we are also launching a grassroots campaign, Conservative Rural Action, to promote our ideas throughout the countryside.

Many of the challenges people face in the countryside are currently ignored because they are masked by an appearance of prosperity.  But 1.6 million people are living in rural poverty.  Motoring costs in rural areas are higher and public transport is thin on the ground.  And there is a serious shortage of affordable housing.

Labour has exacerbated these problems by failing to appreciate the social value of rural institutions such as post offices, village pubs and small shops.  1,400 rural post offices have disappeared since the year 2000.  There are now 200 fewer rural schools than when Labour came to power.  384 police stations closed in the shires in Labour’s first two terms.

The gap in public funding between urban and rural areas has widened dramatically since 1997.  We will ensure fair funding for rural areas by removing the political element from the allocation of grant for individual local authorities.  But tough decisions will have to be made about overall spending over the next few years.  So we need to ensure that services are made more efficient and bureaucracy is reduced.  I am taking a long, hard look at the quangos which fall under Defra.  There are too many officials with clipboards marching around the countryside.

We also need to ensure that the social value of rural services is taken into account, so that short-sighted decisions aren’t taken which damage the economic viability of villages and rural towns.  We will facilitate new business opportunities for post offices and pilot the successful demand responsive public transport schemes which operate in rural parts of mainland Europe.  And we’ll devolve funding to rural communities, enabling localised and innovative approaches to deliver services.  As Conservative local authorities like Essex County Council have shown, new solutions can be found to protect rural services within existing budgets.

We will reverse Labour’s centralisation, ending the years of insensitive dictat from Whitehall, and set about restoring the voice of rural areas in decision making.   We will make police forces more accountable to local communities.  We will scrap limits on surplus places so that good small schools can prosper and new ones can open where parents want them.  And we will give rural communities the power to expand and build the homes they need, subject to the agreement of local people.

We should respect rural life by regulating only where self-regulation fails.  We’ll let councils cut the red tape that makes it unnecessarily difficult for charities and sports clubs to put on events such as fetes.  And we will encourage school trips to farms and the countryside by allowing teachers more discretion to organise visits and sweeping away absurd health and safety regulations.

Marginalising rural communities isn’t just unfair.  It’s also a massive waste of potential.  The countryside cannot be a dormitory or a museum.  It is a place where millions of people work and which could be home to vibrant businesses and sustainable jobs growth of the future.  So we will reduce the barriers to rural business growth through reforms to the tax and planning system, and by supporting community broadband schemes to bridge the ‘digital divide’.

Rural England is a place of outstanding natural beauty, rich cultural heritage and enduring traditions, yet too often it is undervalued as an economic, social and environmental asset.  We know that rural communities are crying out to be heard.  They should no longer be ignored.

This is the season of agricultural shows so I am all over England visiting many of them.

Last week I was near Malvern for the Three Counties Show but wherever it is the story is similar: farmers who want to produce food for our tables but don’t believe the Government wants them to.

They point to mountains of red-tape, bovine TB out of control and prices which don’t leave much profit if any.

At the same shows there are impressive food halls where our own farmers and processors have developed superb products which show that British food is of the highest quality produced to some of the highest animal welfare standards in the world. The sad fact is that consumers can be deceived into believing they are buying British food when in fact they are not. A good British sausage may in fact contain imported pork.

Everyone I speak to, farmers and consumers, want that to change. Meat and meat products labelled as British must mean that the animal was born, reared and slaughtered here.

At Malvern I was asked to present some of the prizes for livestock, something I love doing. I learned stock-judging as a teenager but how today’s judges distinguish between really high grade cattle, sheep and pigs beats me.

Next week I am off to the Royal Norfolk Show and then the last ever Royal Show the following week. I know what they will all tell me, but I still need to hear it first hand.

When I am not in Westminster I try to get to as many farms as possible and speak to those at the muddy end of food production.

I cannot remember the last time I met a group of farmers who didn’t mention the problem of bovine TB, even in places many miles from the so-called ‘hotspot’ areas. This is hardly surprising.

The disease is having a devastating impact on the cattle industry and shows absolutely no sign of abating. Recent figures slipped out by the Government reveal a 40% increase in the number of infected cows slaughtered in the last year alone, now up to a staggering 40,000.

In fact, since Labour came to power over 200,000 animals have been culled at a cost to the taxpayer of over £600 million – and the problem is getting worse not better. More and more counties across the country are affected and worryingly domestic pets are increasingly falling victim to the disease.

For many farmers this is the last straw. Over 100 dairy farmers a month have left the industry under the current Labour Government and there is no doubt that the failure to get a grip of this terrible disease has been one of the drivers.

So what can be done? Vaccination is an important long-term tool to develop but there will be no vaccine available for widespread use for some years yet.

Beating TB requires addressing the vectors of disease and that means not only cattle but wildlife, particularly badgers, which are responsible for the majority of breakdowns in cattle. Without removing sick badgers (who let us not forget suffer dreadfully with TB) we can never hope to eradicate this disease.

The Conservatives want to see healthy wildlife living alongside healthy cattle. In many areas of the country we have neither.

On Monday morning I went to Policy Exchange to speak at the launch of a new report on the problem of litter. 

‘Litterbugs’ was launched by the President of the Campaign to Protect Rural England, Bill Bryson, who is leading their ‘Stop the Drop‘ campaign and recently made a passionate documentary on the issue, ‘Notes from a Dirty Island‘.

We were joined by a Government Minister, Lord Hunt, who wasn’t even sure that litter is a growing problem.  Just about everyone else knows that it is.  There is five times as much litter dropped now than there was in the 1960s, and it’s costing councils a staggering £500 million a year to clean it up.

So what’s the solution?  Tougher enforcement can’t be the only answer, particularly when – as Bill Bryson has pointed out – there is about a 1 in 500,000 chance of detection.  As a general rule, I think a better approach in environmental policy is, wherever possible, to give people incentives to do the right thing.  For instance, the Policy Exchange report points to international examples where bottle deposit schemes have been introduced and littering has reduced as a result.

And instead of automatically reaching for a regulatory solution, we should be looking at encouraging responsibility at all levels – individual, civic, governmental and corporate.  So we should look at producer agreements to help deal with litter and change behaviour.  The businesses which make a profit from products like gum have a shared responsibility to help stop their waste product from disfiguring our streets and being picked up on our shoes.

Successful campaigns to change behaviour need another element – leadership.  The Policy Exchange report pointed out that there used to be high profile campaigns to clean up Britain, but we don’t see much of them now.  A cleaner Britain would make a huge difference to people’s quality of life, but we need a government which cares about the issue and is willing to show a lead.

I’ve just come back from Birmingham where I addressed the National Farmers’ Union conference and launched our ‘Honest Food’ campaign for clear country of origin labelling.  We want to change the current rules that allow a pork pie made in Britain from Danish pork to be labelled as British.

It’s not difficult to come across examples of food labels which are at best ambiguous and at worst misleading.  Last week my team had an amusing day filming with Clarissa Dickson Wright, one of the two fat ladies, who is supporting our campaign.

We found a Tesco pre-prepared chicken meal for children labelled as ‘Produced in the UK’. When we inquired, Tesco admitted that the chicken came from Thailand.  Clarissa was unimpressed.  You’ll be able to see her short film at www.honestfoodcampaign.com later this week.

The Honest Food campaign has a simple message – people have a right to know where their food comes from.  Meat labelled ‘British’ should be born and bred in Britain, raised to our high welfare standards.

Speaking before me, my opposite number, Hilary Benn, said he wanted to see misleading labels “stamped out”.  What he meant was that he’s still hoping for a voluntary agreement with the supermarkets.  But you won’t be surprised to know that the Government first announced an agreement ten years ago.

As I told the conference, the food retailers will talk about voluntary agreements until the cows don’t come home.  The time for talking is over.  So Conservatives will be introducing a Parliamentary Bill requiring honest labelling, to restore trust in food and provide the transparency which people rightly expect.

We’ve made a great short animated video to promote the campaign.  It’s funny and it gets the point across.  Take a look at www.honestfoodcampaign.com – and pass the link on to your friends.