Industry leader expresses concern over Defra

He was asked to talk about Brexit and how the regulatory authorities help or hinder the industry.

“What are are going to end up with in Brexit we don't really have a clue. What I would say is that my belief is that we will end up in not too different a place to where we are now.

“The one thing we do need is a good team of ministers to fight the corner for the farming and meat industry. You have got Leadsom who just a year or two ago thought hills were for butterflies and Eustace who as far as I'm concerned is Margaret Beckett in a pin striped suit.”

“From the regulatory authorities point of view, I was asked to comment on FSA and it just goes to show how things can change. Not much more that eighteen months ago we had a CEO who was clearly anti -business and a chairman who was prepared to do nothing about it. The chairman has gone, the CEO has gone and they have been replaced by a chair in Heather Hancock who is an extremely able lady whose plan is to return the organisation to a proper regulator and not the campaigning anti business body it had become.

“I have every confidence in her that she will do that, even more so now that the old CEO has gone as well and we have a new one in Jason Feeney and you don't often hear me say this but I think he is the nearest thing to the best civil servant that I have come across in the last thirty years.

“In terms of FSA I think we in England are in a much much better place than we have been for the last number of years. I am not saying that about our friends up in Scotland but they can look after themselves.

“Defra is a total different proposition and in a sense we should have seen it coming. At a Beef Summit about three years ago when beef prices were on the floor and the head civil servant who is still there made a presentation that the future for Beef production in the U.K. was rare breeds. We should have realised at that time that we were dealing with a heart of Defra that clearly did not have commercial livestock farming at its heart but rather more just rather small part time farmers.

“But it gets worse. We now have a situation where Eustace is telling the dairy people why are you not all going organic and extensive. How long is it going to be before he says that anybody farming above 500 feet shouldn't have any suckler cows at all?

“When I said that we need a strong Defra team to deliver Brexit for us I hope that I have just demonstrated that we have a real struggle on our hands. We had an all industry meeting with Eustace several months ago and at the end of it, completely unsolicited he said “I am going to impose on the industry an animal welfare regime that the world has never seen nor tried.”

The Minister's hopes were that this would allow the UK to have much higher value exports. Norman Bagley claimed that the effect would not be as predicted.

“He has no evidence for that, the evidence is the opposite. All the work that AHDB has done over the last ten years has demonstrated, in countries where we export to animal welfare is at the bottom of the pile and not at the top.

“Even worse, when challenged as to whether he would insist on imports being processed to the same standards as us, answer there came none.

“So we are dealing with a fundamentally poor department when it's bad enough that it is ministers who are anti livestock farming, but there is a rump of civil servants who have been there quite a few years who think in exactly the same way.

“After the election we may end up with the same team by default and we will certainly end up with civil servants in there who are plainly bought into Eustace's agenda. Some of this is being written by Civil Servants but I would suggest that most of it is being written by animal welfare pressure groups like Compassion in World Farming. This demonstrates a Defra that is fundamentally anti commercial livestock production.

“Look at Scotland where they worry about production levels of beef going down but the Scots are quite likely to put something in place to assist Suckler beef production.

“I see Eustace and his team doing the plain opposite, making absolutely certain that commercial livestock production withers on the vine. That would affect the abattoir and processing sectors in a most horrendous way.”

“Within the current ministers the appetite for direct support for livestock production is zero. England in particular would be put at a significant disadvantage if they get their way.

“How the Brexit deal will look I don't know. I honestly believe that it will be okay and I believe that it will be neutral, I could be totally wrong.”

Norman added that he was doing a piece of work with FSA examining what meat inspection will look like when Britain leaves the EU.

“We will have to have a new controls regime. We will have to have a new one unless we adopt the EU ones for domestic purposes. If you look at the European Food Safety Authority, their scientific assessment of the current EU regime of meat controls is that it adds zero to public health, animal health or animal welfare.

“That is not a great starting point so I suspect we will end up like a lot of other countries with a domestic regime which would then be overlaid by whatever the importing country would need. So if you are exporting to the EU or China you would have to comply with the rules that exist there.

“Some people are concerned about that because it would create a two tier system but we already have a multi layered system. If you produce to EU standards that is still not good enough for USDA, China, North Africa – all these places have different requirements and all they do is overlay the EU system and that is what they would do with a UK system.

“There is a potential for a better system than one at the moment that is not delivering.”

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