My Lords, I declare my farming interests as set out in the register. The matters in these instruments are closely related, as they are the first produced using the powers of the Agriculture Act 2020. They lay the groundwork for our new agricultural policy.
First, the Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board (Amendment) Order 2020 assigns additional functions to the Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board, or AHDB, enabling it to run the new livestock information service—LIS—effectively. The LIS will operate in England, while the AHDB will be able to collect, manage and make available information regarding the identification, movement and health of animals, and to allocate unique identification codes for the means of identifying animals.
Livestock are currently identified through three separate livestock traceability services: one for cattle, one covering sheep and goats, and one for pigs. As existing systems are species-specific, keepers with more than one species of livestock must switch between databases. The LIS replaces these separate systems with a single multi-species system. The existing sheep service in England is expected to transition to the new arrangements in spring 2021. Cattle and pig services are due to transition in 2022. The service will be more cost-effective and user-friendly; it will allow faster, more accurate livestock traceability, enabling us to manage disease and protect human health better, giving confidence to trading partners. The LIS will use cloud-based IT infrastructure, ensuring that the system has capacity to scale up response when user demand is high.
Although the LIS operates in England, an important part of the service is working with the devolved Administrations to ensure that we can share data, allowing seamless livestock movement and traceability throughout the UK. Defra and the devolved Administrations will enter into an agreement to control and share data. Each territory’s traceability systems will be able to communicate with each other, supporting day-to-day business operations such as cross-border moves. This is called the UK view. The ability for veterinary officials across the UK to be able to access the UK view is essential to ensuring a rapid, targeted response in disease-control situations.
The AHDB will also run a unique number identification service on behalf of England and Wales, controlling the issuing of official individual identification numbers to animals. The new system will also allow for value-added services where submitted data can be used to generate information in wider areas, such as livestock productivity and disease management.
The Direct Payments to Farmers (England) (Amendment) Regulations 2020 amend and update direct payments legislation as it applies in England. The legislation governing direct payment schemes contains financial ceilings to calculate direct payments to farmers. However, it only includes financial ceilings up to and including the 2020 claim year. This instrument specifies how the Secretary of State will set financial ceilings for England beyond 2020. Once these provisions on financial ceilings have come into force, 2021 ceilings
for England can be set. This will be done by the end of this year. Ceilings for future years will be equivalent to England’s share of the 2020 UK national ceiling. This is because the ceilings are the starting point for payment calculations, before any reductions are applied to payments to phase them out.
The regulations also make minor changes to ensure that schemes continue to work effectively in England beyond 2020. This includes replacing dates specific to the 2020 scheme year with equivalent dates that are not year specific. The regulations also remove rules that are not applied in England, such as those relating to voluntary coupled support, which is operated in Scotland.
No substantive policy changes are made by these regulations. They ensure that direct payment schemes in England can continue beyond the end of the 2020 scheme and are largely technical. The Government remain committed to beginning to phase out direct payments from 2021 as part of their ambitious agricultural reforms in England. We will bring forward a separate instrument to apply reductions to the payments so that we can phase them out over a seven-year transition period. Devolved Administrations plan to make their own legislation in relation to their direct payment schemes.
The World Trade Organisation Agreement on Agriculture (Domestic Support) Regulations 2020 are UK-wide. The instrument ensures that after the end of the transition period, the UK continues to comply with its international obligations under the WTO Agreement on Agriculture in relation to classification and notification of domestic support and its commitment to reduce its aggregate measurement of support. Compliance with the agreement was previously managed by the EU on the UK’s behalf. This instrument is limited in scope to ensuring continued compliance with the agreement. This is a reserved issue because individual nations of the UK do not have legislative competence to act in these matters for other parts of the UK.
The Agreement on Agriculture divides domestic support into “green box”, “blue box” or “amber box”, depending on the potential to distort trade. Under the agreement, each country must limit the amount of trade-distorting amber box domestic support given to agricultural producers. The UK’s overall amber box spending limit remains unchanged after EU exit. These regulations specify the amounts of amber box payments that may be given in each UK nation. Limits have been set, following consultation with devolved Administrations, at a level not constraining policy choices, meaning that there will be no impact on farmers.
The regulations also outline the procedure for classifying such schemes and permit the Secretary of State to request information from devolved Administrations where needed to enable the UK to satisfy Agreement on Agriculture obligations. The regulations outline the transparent and objective process by which UK constituent nations will share information on proposed support schemes in order to establish their classification and ensure timely and accurate notification of domestic support to the WTO.
These instruments implement provisions provided for by the Agriculture Act 2020 and I beg to move.
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