My Lords, I would be more than happy to be a signatory to the amendments, and I am particularly pleased that two of my Belfast-based colleagues are responsible for tabling them. Someone like me—representing, as I did for many years in the other place, the south-west of the Province of Northern Ireland—knows what it is like for farmers to find themselves misled and encouraged to participate in a scheme such as this. I am seeing this happen to those who were my constituents. We get some change and, like many, I have some hope that the Minister will have a means towards resolution.
I go back a long way in farming in Northern Ireland. Moy Park, which grew from very small beginnings, is now an internationally known farming enterprise. As a teenager—when Dungannon Park, as it was originally known, was establishing its breeding stock—I had the annual job of going to Dungannon Park and testing every single breeding stock for BWD. Members will not know what BWD is, but I will not go into the finer details. I saw Moy Park grow from small beginnings to the firm it is now. The people who helped it grow were the ordinary farmers, the people who have been misled.
Noble Lords will remember that last week I read on to the record the letter sent to the banks by the then Minister of Enterprise in Northern Ireland, which grandfathered—to use her word—the scheme that encouraged ordinary farmers to take out loans to be repaid over a five-year period. Remember that farms in Northern Ireland are small enterprises compared with farms in GB. That will now become impossible because of the reduction—I may not have these figures right—from £13,000 per burner per year to a mere £2,000. This new biomass scheme encouraged farmers to look to the future, to the son who would inherit their small farming enterprise and carry it forward as part of the backbone of the Northern Ireland economy.
I hope that noble Lords will look very carefully, not at the emotional dilemma that I face—noble Lords will understand why—but at the moral dilemma that the Government should face when they allow things to move forward without maintaining a firm hand on the tiller. In Northern Ireland, we have endured years of non-government by the Assembly, yet we find the
money to keep that afloat when many of us believe that a more radical solution—a return to direct rule—is a way forward. When speaking here, we would feel that we had a direct influence on what the Government thought and did. Instead, I had what was intended to be a helpful briefing yesterday evening from the Northern Ireland Civil Service, the people who conspired—I should not use the word, but I will, for want of a better one—with the Minister in charge of this scheme to bring forward what has proved to be a flawed scheme. I do not believe that there can be any moral justification whatever in leaving Northern Ireland’s farmers to carry the can for that error.
I hope that the Minister will address how the Civil Service can be allowed to concoct something that perhaps frees it from an inquest into its behaviour and, at the same time, leaves our farming industry in a dilemma which I fear it will be difficult for it—and impossible for some—to survive.