WEDNESDAY 5 DECEMBER 2007

Mr Neil Parish

  Q620  Lord Cameron of Dillington: Co-capping!

  Mr Parish: Exactly.

  Q621  Viscount Ullswater: If I might add a supplementary to this. Because your committee is obviously looking at the Health Check and the situation of where you have got to after a couple of years of the reform, and you say it is a very conservative committee, are they still wholly behind decoupling?

  Mr Parish: Mainly, yes.

  Q622  Viscount Ullswater: Mainly.

  Mr Parish: Do not forget France has only decoupled this year anyway. Just as an aside, a year ago Dan said to me, "Some French Ministry of Agriculture officials want to see you" and I thought, "What have I done now?" and they wanted to come and see what problems we had had with the Single Farm Payment in the UK to make sure they did not fall into some of the same traps. I wonder if it would have worked the other way around. That is just an aside. France is moving forward now. France has still got suckler cow premiums 75% coupled so there is still a little bit more decoupling to do. There is an argument to have a grassland payment linked to suckler cows or sheep perhaps, but it has got to be a grassland environmental payment, not a suckler cow or sheep payment. Do not forget, one of the ideas of the reform from a WTO point of view is to take it out of the production box. The Irish are coming up with some interesting plans on this. I am a quarter Irish, so I declare an interest. I am interested in what the Irish do because they are very good at that sort of thing. If we are going to move an agricultural policy towards the environment we have got to remember that agriculture is very much part of the environment and if there are environmental schemes which are good for agriculture and good for the environment we must not rule them out, we have just got to find ways. The Commissioner is keen to get all Member States decoupled and then move the whole thing forward into the modulation of 2010, 2011, 2012 and 2013. That is her role. As far as the committee is concerned, they are reasonably keen on the Single Farm Payment and decoupling, they are not very keen on modulation at all in a nutshell. That is where the committee is.

  Chairman: Let us move to modulation and particularly voluntary modulation.

  Q623  Lord Plumb: May I say I was interested to hear you say the committee is conservative with a small "c". You did not have Barbara Castle to deal with or else it would not have been conservative. She was on my committee a long time ago.

  Mr Parish: We have New Labour now. I must not be political here.

  Q624  Lord Plumb: They were happy days. One thing you said was not payment on all land and that was an interesting comment. Is that not capping? Do not answer me at the moment, wait a minute. You have made your position quite clear as far as voluntary modulation is concerned and you know, of course, the British Government favours voluntary modulation. They favour everything that is voluntary, of course. I am more interested in your views on the suggestion that has been made that in the Health Check the rural development funds can only be achieved through increased co-financed compulsory modulation involving a 2% increase annually from 2010-13. Much of the evidence we have received from so many different bodies and organisations has been, "We have got to take money from Pillar I and put it into Pillar II" and that is where rural development really lies. Our concern is how that is going to be used. If we are going to have some modulation that is going to affect cross-compliance, as of course it can and will, then how does it operate and to what extent is that money used in the rural development area?

  Mr Parish: In some ways we are partly putting the cart before the horse. What I think you are saying, Lord Plumb, and I agree with you, is that in some ways we should have proved to us what that money is going to be spent on before it is taken off the Single Farm Payment. Once you get to 13 or 14% you are creating quite a large sum of money and we have got to get that targeted right. I think a lot more of this money, if not all of it, will need to be targeted towards the livestock sector in some shape or form and that is where you can look for special grassland payments. The point I made about payment being targeted, this is after 2013, I am not suggesting up to 2013, but by then we will see in some way how the market is shaping up and we can then see whether we can move that money on to targeting the mountainous areas and everything else we need to target. It is difficult to make that decision now in some ways. I went to a meeting of Polish farmers and others who said to me that the job of the Common Agricultural Policy was to keep every farmer in a farm in Europe. You and I both know that is not going to happen. The huge debate, and this is a serious debate, as we go into 2013 is, is this an agricultural environmental policy or is it a social policy. That is what we have got to watch as a country because there are a lot of the southern and eastern Member States who would like to make it a social policy. I am not against part of it being a social policy but the bulk of it has got to be agriculture environment policy and that will be our big challenge. That is why we have got to watch how this rural development money is spent. One of the comments the Commissioner made during her statement, which when I see her next week I have got to ask her about, was she talked about the amount of employment on the farms as well. You have got to be ever so careful with that because the fact that you have got a lot of employment on a farm may make you efficient or it may make you inefficient and, like I said, I do not want that to be the only criterion. There are big debates to be had out there. We would be deluding ourselves if we think when we get to 2013 we are going to have enough money to carry on in the same way we are at the moment. I think we would all accept if we can have a good profitable agricultural food sector where farmers are getting the majority of their income from the marketplace and not from public money that would be where I would like to see us. I cannot predict what it is going to be like in 2013 but certainly from the predictions of world trade at the moment in foodstuffs it looks like we are seeing the world drying up, Australia having more difficulty and economies in the Far East improving. The need for food production is there and so I think we might be in a position to be able to be reasonably radical. I repeat, the great debate here is going to be in 2013 onwards: is it an agriculture environment policy or is it a social policy? As you know, Lord Plumb, from your past experience and now with 27 countries and with quite a number of countries coming in with very small farms, it is an even greater debate.

  Q625  Viscount Ullswater: Perhaps I can turn to the question of how the Parliament is going to look at the current situation and in the future. As I think the Chairman explained, we are looking at the Health Check and the Budget Review so I would be very interested to hear how you feel the European Parliament tends to approach the matter. Is it going to look at the Health Check in isolation or examine both of these together?

  Mr Parish: The Agriculture Committee will certainly look at the Health Check largely in isolation from the budget and then they will seek enough money to be able to pay for whatever they want. I am not being facetious, that is exactly the way they will deal with it. One point I have not raised and I probably should is there are two lines of opinion but the opinion seems to be if the Treaty is accepted, or the Constitution or whatever you want to call it, by January 2009 the Agriculture Committee will have co-decision powers. If this was off the record I would make another comment but I will not because it is on the record.

  Q626  Lord Plumb: You can go off the record.

  Mr Parish: (The answer began off the record) I think the committee will deal with the Health Check separately and it will want to negotiate as much money as it can out of the system and it will always be pressing the Council for more money. Being in the chair it is quite difficult for me to say to the Agriculture Committee that we do not necessarily need all that money, we should cut our suit of clothes according to our cloth. That is how it will play. We will play hardball through this session because we know that the Commission want to deal with it by 2008, we know that the French want to put it to bed during their Presidency and we also know that we probably will have co-decision powers by January 2009, so people have woken up to that fact. My view, now speaking as Chairman of the Agriculture Committee of the European Parliament, is that Parliament will be best to negotiate as strong a deal as possible before we get co-decision powers because we might be able to get a better deal for the Parliament before we have co-decision powers rather than after and if we co-operate we can say, "We will co-operate but we want X, Y and Z". That is the negotiation tack I will take.

  Q627  Earl of Dundee: Clearly debate over the Budget Review will be pretty intense both inside and outside the European Parliament, the policies will vary and Member States will differ. In spite of that background, what measure of agreement do you believe can still be achieved?

  Mr Parish: There will always be an agreement, whether it is one that we particularly want or like, that is the way Europe works. Love or hate Europe, you have got 27 countries and at least we are all talking and trading together, so that is good news. The bad news is that it is sometimes difficult to come to an agreement but we will come to an agreement. It comes down to fairly blunt politics. In Europe you have got those countries that are paying and those countries that are receiving and the receiving countries will want to push up the budget and the paying countries will want to push down the budget but we will come to an agreement. We will put forward an argument as to what we need for agriculture, rural development, structural funds, research funds, a total budget, and we will sit down and negotiate and an agreement will be had. It will be interesting to see which position the French take this time on agriculture. It is a little bit mixed messages from Sarkozy—

  Q628  Chairman: There certainly are.

  Mr Parish: I do not want it publicised but I am going to Paris next Tuesday on the way to Strasbourg to see Barnier and various other French ministers to talk about agriculture and reform and various things. I could probably give you a better answer to where I think the French are coming from then. The French and Germans will still be key players, especially in agriculture, but you have 27 Member States. It was bad enough to get the 15 Member States to agree before, so getting 27 will be difficult but we will get to an agreement, I have no fear. It will be the eleventh hour and burning into three or four o'clock in the morning but an agreement will be got.

  Q629  Earl of Dundee: As you have said there is bound to be some late night agreement, we would be surprised if that did not happen. However, a superficial consensus might well simply reflect some degree of horse trading between national finance ministers and that is a bit sad. How might that unwelcome outcome be prevented by the European Parliament and your own committee?

  Mr Parish: I do not think we can prevent that at all, to be perfectly blunt with you. What we have got to do is sit down and we will take a view on what funding we believe will be necessary to fund Europe how we believe it should be funded. This is not a personal comment, this is how the Parliament will come to its agreement. The Parliament's aspirations will be greater than those of the Council of Ministers, you can be assured, and the Commission will be sitting somewhere in the middle of all this. There will be quite an element of horse trading but, as I said, I see no alternative. The Budget Committee of the Parliament hopefully will take a much more realistic view on life, I suspect, so there will be a slight convergence there. Eventually the Parliament will come to an agreement and, as I said, our aspirations will be greater than that of the Council. In a nutshell that is the way it is.

  Q630  Lord Greaves: You have answered all the questions I was going to ask but could I ask two follow-ups. The fact that some of the focus of negotiation is now going to switch to the need to get an agreed line between the Council and the Parliament, does that process help the Council to get more of a consensus and to work together as a group or does it not work like that?

  Mr Parish: I hope it might. You are all politicians, or were, and you sit in the House of Lords, not as political I know.

  Q631  Lord Greaves: Don't you believe it!

  Mr Parish: Many of you probably sat in the Commons before. Every institution is jealous of its powers. There is going to be an element of the fact that we as MEPs have considered over the years that we have not been treated with the importance that we believe we should have had because we are the only directly elected politicians for the whole of Europe, so to start with there is going to be an element of flexing of muscles and in agriculture nobody quite knows how this will work. It works in environment at the moment, so we will find ways. The European Parliament, rightly or wrongly, is going to believe that it has got greater powers after this Treaty is in place. From the Council of Ministers' point of view it is going to be perhaps in some ways more difficult to deal with the European Parliament but, on the other hand, they are making big overtures now with the informal councils on agriculture and the Commission services, not only the Commissioner herself, are making great overtures towards me as the Chairman of Agriculture because they see moving into co-decision. If we can work together it might help, but there is going to be some flexing of muscles on the whole thing. It will be interesting to see how it pans out.

  Q632  Lord Greaves: Let me assure you the House of Lords is a highly political place, even if we still have loads of hereditaries who are also around the table here.

  Mr Parish: You are just a bit more pleasant to each other.

  Q633  Lord Greaves: We are very polite.

  Mr Parish: You are polite as you are political, that is right.

  Q634  Lord Greaves: The second follow-up is to ask you about the Agriculture Committee. Is the small "c" conservative nature of it built in forever on the basis that these are the people who want to be on that committee and therefore put themselves forward or is there hope that it might become a bit more progressive in the future after the next elections perhaps?

  Mr Parish: (The answer began off the record) I am a farmer but I do try and take a slightly broader view. There are quite a number of members on the committee like that but there are also some who take a very narrow view, a very narrow vested view. We have got the wine reform going on at the moment and naturally you have a Spanish position, a French position, an Italian position, and even a British position where we do not want to have anything to do with it because we want to be able to carry on to increase the small amount of wine production we have got which is successful. You are going to get that position, that is the way it is.

  Q635  Chairman: Can I come back to co-decision making. There are two arguments that have come up, not just here but in all the discussions we have had. There is one argument that says co-decision making actually stands a chance of improving reform because at the moment the European Parliament can indulge in gesture politics on agriculture because with the first reading that is it, when it comes to co-decision making it will seriously have to think about priorities and not just within the Agriculture Committee but, as you indicated, the budget considerations riding to the rescue and imposing a more rational prioritisation. That is the pro-reform argument, if you like. The other reform argument is as far as agriculture is concerned the European Parliament is just irredeemable and it means that there will be another means by which protectionist interests can slow the whole process down.

  Mr Parish: Heaven forbid that we would have a protectionist instinct, but you are right in some ways that we do. There are those two lines of thought. I would say, and I will stick to my guns on this, I am glad that the reform has gone as far as it has because it would have been difficult to achieve the Fischler Reform. Although you may sit there and say this reform has not gone very far, if you talk to the French and the idea of decoupling away from production, "Non, non, non" and all of a sudden it was "Yes" and they had to go along with it. We have moved a long way with the Fischler Reform but have got further to go. By the time we get to 2009, quite a lot of the reform will be going in the right direction. By the looks of it we will have co-decision powers. Where you are right is it is a bit like when we had to rush through the decision on set-aside and the Commission was late bringing it to the Parliament and some of my parliamentarians were chuntering about this and I said, "Yes, but I am not going to block it because I don't want farmers to hang us out to dry by saying we don't know now whether they can plant on set-aside land because the European Parliament held it up". Co-decision is a mixed blessing. Yes, you will negotiate a hard deal in the Parliament but if you are seen to be the ones who are blocking it there will be a backlash on the Parliament, which we do not have at the moment because we do not have those co-decision powers. In that respect you might be proved to be right. My experience over the last eight and a half years is we would not have got to the reform that we have now. Every time the Parliament is reformed and the institutions are reformed, Europe gets on with the business. You can argue whether it does it in a great way, a slow way or any other way but in some sort of strange way it works, it gets there. I am not saying it is ideal but it actually gets there. This will work its way through and I suspect it will not be hugely helpful towards reform, but we will see.

  Q636  Chairman: I make it clear that I was not advocating a particular line.

  Mr Parish: I realise that. As you quite rightly say, some of what I am telling you is what Neil Parish thinks and believes and I have also been trying to tell you where I think the committee and the Parliament will be and those are slightly different positions as you have probably become aware.

  Chairman: Thank you very much. It has been enormously useful getting your views on (a) what your committee is thinking and (b) your own analysis as well. That has been very, very helpful indeed, thank you.