Agriculture Bill — Decline Second Reading — 10 Oct 2018 at 18:48

The majority of MPs voted in favour of a new agricultural subsidy scheme to replace the European Union's Common Agricultural Policy; moving towards spending public money in return for environmental protection, public access to the countryside and measures to reduce flooding.

MPs were considering the Agriculture Bill^[1].

The motion being debated was:

• That the Bill be now read a Second time.

The amendment rejected in this vote was:

• to leave out from “That” to the end of the Question and add:
• “this House, whilst recognising that on leaving the EU the UK needs to shift agricultural support from land-based payments to the delivery of environmental and other public benefits,
• declines to give a Second Reading to the Agriculture Bill because it fails to provide a strategy to safeguard the nation’s food supply at a time when food poverty and foodbank demand are rising rapidly alongside an epidemic in food-related health inequality, fails to recognise the central importance of UK sustainable food production and supply, leading to a greater reliance on imports, while failing to provide for controls over the production methods, working conditions, or animal welfare and environmental standards in countries from which the UK’s food is imported, and, when the natural environment is in crisis, with species decline at an alarming scale, soil degradation and increasingly volatile and extreme weather conditions driven by escalating climate change, provides the Secretary of State with wide-ranging powers but no duties or legally enforceable environmental protection targets, whilst giving Parliament limited ability to scrutinise any changes in the regime, and fails to legislate for current funding to continue until 2022 as Ministers have promised; and
• is of the opinion that the publication of such a Bill should have been preceded by a full process of pre-legislative scrutiny of a draft Bill.”
• Parliament's webpage on the Agriculture Bill 2017-19

Debate in Parliament |