Member News
By Lord Plumb of Coleshill - 14th July 2010
Lord Plumb writes for ePolitix.com ahead of his oral question on Defra's task force on farming regulations.
Every citizen in the land is affected by regulations and red tape through education, health and safety, food and transport, sport, housing, living and breathing. The solution is to reduce the number of directives and bureaucracy from Brussels and the tendency of UK civil servants to 'gold-plate' and complicate those directives. The scrutiny of European measures as they pass into British law must be checked more thoroughly. The British Chamber of Commerce estimates that the cost of these burdens on British businesses over a ten-year period was around £66bn.
In an era of economic uncertainty we have to be vigilant against economic nationalism creeping back, creating unfair competition, but we need more simplification of Single Market rules. When we last reformed the Common Agricultural Policy, moving away from subsidising food products and introducing an acreage payment, Defra complicated the whole procedure by adopting a different payment system to any other country in Europe, and indeed four different systems within the devolved UK, causing chaos and shambles and high cost to all concerned. It is estimated that the overall cost of procedure and payment in England was £1743 per farm last year against £285 in Scotland where they applied a different system. That is more than some farmers receive.
This has resulted in us now being in the absurd situation of all cattle needing a passport, every sheep being electronically tagged, and every livestock movement being recorded, not once, nor twice or three times, but in quadruplet! Livestock movements have to be registered within three days, or else receive a fine, despite the forms being supplied with a second class envelope, whilst the electronic registration option is not available to livestock farmers in remote areas without access to broadband. Every animal has a passport; every field, hedge and pond is registered; every sheep electronically tagged, and plenty more! I hope the future provides more common sense.
Article Comments
Lord Plumb has traditionally been an EU enthusiast, please read his auto biography 'The Plumb Line'.
I wonder if he foresaw thirty years ago the nightmare of rules and regulations that are now submerging the farming sector. Whilst we are in the EU, this will only get worse. As the EU steadily expands, so, pro-rata will the problems it generates.
The ongoing issues of GMO cultivation and the battery cage ban are two good examples of the EU complicating matters rather than simplifying them. The best people to run British agriculture are the British people themselves, through an elected government at Westminster, that stands or falls on the success of its policies.
Stuart Agnew MEP
15th Jul 2010 at 10:41 am
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