I was going to move on to that very point, because the Minister’s reply to my intervention inspired me to go to the Library in search of some figures. I will answer that point in a moment.
Let me move on to pillar two, the second major aspect of agricultural support. I have been doing some comparisons and looked at what would have happened if in negotiations Scotland had achieved from pillar two the same amount of agricultural support as the Republic of Ireland, which in many ways is a comparable country with regard to land area and agriculture as a share of the overall economy. The answer is that Ireland has achieved a budget four times the size of Scotland’s budget under pillar two—€2.19 billion compared with €478 million—in the years to 2019.
Given that it has been decided that the common agricultural policy should continue and that farm payments should continue to be made, how will it be possible for Scottish agriculture to compete effectively when it gets such a dramatically lower share than the minimum
allocated to any other EU country? Far from getting an excellent deal on pillar two to compensate for the poor deal on pillar one, Scotland gets a miserable share in comparison with comparable countries.
2.30 pm
That brings me to the point made by the hon. Member for Wyre Forest (Mark Garnier). The Minister said that the comparison of support per hectare does not really matter. I would say that it is exactly what matters, given that agreements per hectare, per country govern the size of the overall budget.
As the Minister said, for the share per farm or per estate, there is a different figure and a different comparison. We have some very large farms and very large estates in Scotland. Indeed—this is the point that I was checking in the Library—500 companies or individuals own half of the country. That is how imbalanced is the concentration of ownership in Scottish agriculture and Scottish land. If someone is receiving a lower payment per hectare, that tends to favour and militate for even further concentration of land ownership.
I took the Minister’s reply to me, when he alighted on a very significant point, as a coded call for the fairer distribution of land ownership in Scotland. I was inspired to look at an article in an edition of The Spectator only last month entitled “David Cameron’s father in law offers to adopt a ‘Rob Roy’ style Scottish accent to stop ‘Mugabe-style’ land grab by SNP”. In that article, Viscount Astor, presumably in The Spectator to get to the wide audience that the Conservative party was after in this European debate, was extremely suspicious of the SNP Scottish Government’s proposals on land reform, which are being enunciated in the Scottish Parliament this very day. I am delighted to reassure the Minister that no Mugabe-style land grab is intended; we are just seeking a fairer distribution in agriculture so that family farms and communities across Scotland get a more equitable distribution of the land holdings. That also helps to answer his point. It cannot be seriously argued that we should look at payments per individual farm or estate—whether of 200, 300 acres, or, in the case of Viscount Astor, 20,000 acres. That cannot be used as a serious argument in relation to the imbalance of agricultural support.
Substantial insult has been added to injury in these matters. The European Union, after representations from the Scottish Government and others, tried, in a minimalist fashion, to address these imbalances, which had occurred due to the total incompetence of the UK Government’s negotiations and their stance on the CAP. It decided to allocate €220 million as convergence money to take account of the fact that there was such an imbalance in support per hectare in the United Kingdom—in Scotland, in particular—compared with the rest of the Europe. All of that €220 million is to be distributed geographically across the UK instead of accepting that the UK is getting it because of the dramatic imbalance in terms of the huge land holdings in Scotland and the very, very low payments per hectare. I have heard that described in National Farmers Union meetings in Scotland as akin to embezzlement by the United Kingdom Government. That is how it is regarded. I hope that the Minister will at least revisit the issue of the convergence money, or if not, another issue that should be revisited—getting a fairer distribution of agricultural support.
An industry in a competitive position in a common market with other industries must have a fair distribution of support in order to compete effectively.