John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con): There has been a big decline in our self-sufficiency as food producers during the 46 years in which we have been in the common agricultural policy. As a result, we are now net importers from the continent of Europe, to the tune of £20 billion a year—a very large part of our balance of payments deficit—of food, including processed food, that we could rear or grow for ourselves, or process for ourselves if we wished. I hope that, as the Secretary of State works away at the Bill during its passage through the House, he will take on board what is being said by all of us who are urging him to make good production—high-quality food production, and local food production—a central part of his mission and what he is trying to achieve in conjunction with our agricultural businesses and our farmers, because much more can be achieved.

One of my colleagues has already pointed out that we could have new procurement rules that would allow us competitive procurement that also takes into account food miles. A really good green policy is to get the food miles down. We do not need ships and trucks carrying around bulky and quite heavy items of not huge value, when we could be growing them for ourselves and the farmer could be making a profit because transport costs would be lower, so can we please do that?

Will the Secretary of State understand that perhaps the most important thing farmers need to know, from 30 March next year if we leave without an agreement or from 2020 if we leave with an agreement, is what our schedule of tariffs will look like, because Brexit is not a great threat or problem; it is a massive opportunity? Here is an industry that has been wrecked and damaged and pillaged for 46 years, almost as badly as the fishing industry in some cases, which was probably the worst hit, and we have the opportunity to take it back in hand and encourage those who work on our behalf in the industry and to bring a bit of sunshine to the operation to show that there is a huge market opportunity out there.

The great joy is that this Bill rightly takes powers so that the Secretary of State and the Government can do what they need to do with the WTO, which will be running our trade framework whatever we do by way of agreement or no agreement. The WTO also has a pretty important role in this today, but of course we cannot influence it directly because the EU handles the account, and very badly it does so from the UK point of view.

If we look at our tariff schedule, we see at the moment that we have eye-wateringly high tariffs on temperate foods that we can grow or produce for ourselves from outside the EU, but zero tariffs on temperate products we could rear or grow for ourselves from inside the EU, and that competitive onslaught from some of the intense, and often subsidised and highly capitalised, farming on the continent has done enormous damage to our market share and undermined the businesses of many of our farmers over the 46 years we have been in the EU.

The Government should set out urgently for consultation what our tariff schedule will look like if we are leaving on 30 March 2019, because I assume the tariffs will be above zero for the EU as they have got to be the same as for the rest of the world, but I assume that we would want lower overall tariffs than the EU imposes on the rest of the world, and I assume that we would want to flex the tariffs down more on the things we cannot grow and rear for ourselves and would also want to make sure there is protection in there, in the spirit of our current regime, which is heavily protected against non-EU products.

I am not sure what the right balance is; that is something I am sure my right hon. Friend and the International Trade Secretary have either worked out or will work out quite soon, but the sooner we consult on it, the more hope we will give the farming industry. It must feel part of this process, because these will be its tariffs and they offer us this great opportunity to get access to some cheaper food where we are not competing and have uniform protection at a sensible level for both the EU and the non-EU, because it is the EU that is causing the main threat.

May I remind my right hon. Friend that he is our English Agriculture Minister and we want him to speak for England? Who in this Government does speak for England? I come into the Chamber and hear debates about the Scottish problem and the Irish border, but we must not forget England, our home base for most of us on this side of the House. England expects; England wants better; England wants to be able to compete; England wants a policy designed to promote English farms. I find that a really good English farm, with really good farming, looks beautiful and deals with the environment as well as food production.

The UK solemnly goes on complying with all requirements on a member state of the EU. This year they dutifully filed their “2018 National Reform Programme and their 2018 Convergence programme”. The Treasury has long accepted the EU’s demands that we keep throttling back the deficit and move to getting down the debt as a percentage of GDP. There are times when the EU are right about this, but at issue is who makes such a judgement and who actually runs our economic policy? The EU has overdone the austerity in some cases causing more unemployment and lost output than needed. Mr Osborne turned this into the keystone of his economic policy and claimed it as his own, but it was just the UK version of EU economic policy which we were obliged to follow by being members.

The EU duly marked our homework this year and concluded formally “The Council is of the opinion that the UK needs to stand ready to take further measures as of 2018-19 to comply with the provisions of the Stability and Growth Pact”. Presumably seeing that this would go beyond our membership, they mentioned in the supporting text the possibility that we will stay in for another 21 months transition when they would expect this policy to continue to be binding. The Council has instructed the Treasury to keep the nominal growth rate of public spending down to a maximum of 1.6%. That is a real terms cut at current inflation rates.

I want the UK Treasury to step aside from the long shadows cast by the European Semester and to announce a new budget strategy for the years ahead following our departure on 29 March 2019. We need a policy which is kinder to growth and to public service provision than the EU strategy has proved. The PM has said she is ending austerity. This is incompatible with following EU rules beyond next March, and depends on getting our money from the EU to spend at home.

In my speech to Parliament on the Second Reading of the Agriculture Bill I will ask the Secretary of State to improve his Bill. It should have at its centre the provision of laws and government policies that support growing food at home, and promote more UK output. Mr Gove presents himself as a champion of the environment. What better cause than to grow more food at home, slashing food miles and taking care of our countryside for a useful purpose at the same time. It will bring big carbon savings on transport, refrigeration and storage.

During our time under the control of the EU Common Agricultural Policy we have watched as we have become more and more dependent on food we could produce for ourselves coming in as imports from the rest of the EU. Meanwhile food we cannot grow for ourselves faces substantial tariffs from non EU sources, with no benefit to us.

So my questions are

Will he put food production at the centre of his Bill? Why is he relaxed that the Great English breakfast often has Danish bacon, continental pork sausage and Dutch tomatoes? Why does traditional English roast beef often use imported beef with Spanish and Dutch vegetables? Can’t we do these things for ourselves again?

Will he with the Trade Secretary publish now the schedule of tariffs the UK will impose on the rest of the world including the EU on 30 March 2019 if we leave then, or at the end of the Transition period if we reach an Agreement? Will he cut the tariffs on non EU products we cannot grow for ourselves? Will he set a sensible tariff on worldwide temperate produce, which can be lower than current EU tariffs as we will be levying on rest of EU produce as well?

Will he examine how the current EU subsidy levels could be better spent to reward those farmers who boost output and productivity as well as dealing with environmental concerns?

The UK establishment media are usually slaves to Treasury spin and Bank of England error.

Throughout the Osborne years as Chancellor we were told the main thrust of economic policy was to bring down the deficit. 80% would be achieved by spending cuts and 20% by tax increases. I set out regularly from the Treasury’s own figures that public spending carried on rising in total in cash terms, and edged up a little after allowing for inflation. In normal language this meant 100% of the large deficit cut achieved relied on a very big increase in tax revenue. Some of this increase came from higher rates, particularly on VAT, and some from lower rates on higher incomes which generated substantial extra income for the state. It was of course true that some programmes suffered from actual cuts, and areas like the NHS and schools with no real cuts were squeezed more than under previous budget plans. It was also true that areas like Overseas Aid and EU contributions marched remorselessly upward. The Chancellor sought to gradually relax the tough controls and cuts Labour had imposed on capital spending towards the end of its period in government as it wrestled with its huge deficit.

More recently last spring I highlighted the addition of a monetary squeeze to the fiscal squeeze going on and predicted this would lead to slower growth. That duly happened. The tax attacks on housing in the 2016 budget and on cars in the 2017 budget meant these areas suffered especially. I have yet to hear or see interviews asking why we need a combined monetary and fiscal squeeze, or even much acceptance that this is what is happening. This slowdown has nothing to do with Brexit. The economy performed well for the first nine months after the vote, when the official forecasts predicted an immediate collapse and a recession in winter 2016-17 which did not of course happen.

There have been too few examinations of how the UK establishment so misjudged the adverse impact of joining the EEC, misjudged the dreadful impact of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism, misjudged the Euro ignoring the obvious structural weaknesses which led to a series of Euro crises, misjudged the banking boom and bust and most recently misjudged the impact of a Brexit vote. One golden strand, which in their hands turns out to be base metal, links them all. Any economic project which comes from the EU is always favourably rated, and is usually bad news. Remember the “golden scenario” they said the Exchange Rate Mechanism would bring about? Or the huge extra growth that the Euro would foster? When you look at economic history you discover that a scheme which could be good for jobs and growth has usually been at best disappointing and at worst downright hostile to progress.

Many people over 50 have money on deposit. They would like interest rates to go up. Some retired people think it is unfair that they have been prudent, not spent all they earned, and now find tiny returns on the cash they put by to supplement the pension.

Their children and grandchildren may see it differently. Lots of people in their twenties and thirties think house prices are too high and think they cannot afford to buy. This generation of twenty somethings has more graduates and higher wages than previous generations, but a lower percentage of home owners than their parents at the same stage.

So what is the right answer on interest rates? To keep them low for a bit longer. There is no great inflationery pressure to worry about.The UK government is pursuing a fiscal squeeze and keeping taxes very high, so higher rates as well would be damaging overall. It would redistribute a bit from young to old which we do not need to do.

Relieving the pain of higher taxes would also help. Take down the cost of buying a home by cutting Stamp Duty. Cut business rates which are worsening the pressures on traditional businesses. Upward only rent agreements for shops are being overthrown by market forces, by renegotiation and by bankruptcies and financial restructurings. Business rates remain obstinately high and rising.

These judgements are always a difficult balance between the interests of borrowers and lenders. Past gross mismanagement by Central Banks and the commercial banks they lead and control has made an extended period that favours lenders more of a necessity. Japan had a more spectacular boom and bust crash at the end of the 1989s and is still living with zero interest rates as a result. Japan also has no inflation.

During this period when long term borrowing costs are very low by historic standards, there is a good case for businesses and individuals to borrow more for worthwhile projects and investments. There is also still a good case for shifting borrowing longer where possible to take advantage of still relatively low long term rates. The UK is short of capital investment in a wide range of areas, and needs to press on with substantial new investment in the digital wave, to increase productivity to allow more better paid jobs and to replace future low cost jobs with technology.

The Bank of England has pursued an energetic monetary tightening since the spring of 2017. Two interest rate hikes,a withdrawal of credit facilities to commercial banks and a major FPC tightening on car loans, some mortgages and consumer credit have helped slow the economy markedly. This has reinforced the fiscal squeeze,with higher taxes and a lower deficit, which is also pushing the economy into slow growth.

In the USA the government in contrast is keen to promote growth. It has done so by tax cuts for all and some state spending increases. As a result the US economy has accelerated well. This week the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board declared war on this policy by letting us know that there will be more interest rate rises to come to brake the economy’s progress.

Markets had been expecting a shallow rate cycle, with a peak official rate of around 3%. There is no undue inflationary pressure, and wages have been going nowhere in real terms despite the low levels of unemployment. The Fed now seem to be implying they think their current rate of 2.25% is “behind the curve” or too low. Markets were duly spooked. Longer term rates rose sharply, the cost of US government borrowing went to a new high for this cycle, and stockmarkets fell.

This icy blast will be felt around the world. There has been a general tendency to higher rates and monetary tightening all year, and that will now get worse.Most at risk are the badly run emerging economies with too much dollar and other foreign debt. We have seen big currency falls in places like Turkey, Argentina and Brazil, with falls by most currencies this year against a dollar buttressed by rising rates.

Central Banks should ease up a bit. Their ruinous policies caused the boom and bust in 2005-10. They have been rightly in atonement for their bad decision to deflate their credit bubble too quickly in 2008, keeping rates low and encouraging banks to rebuild damaged balance sheets to make the system more resilient. Moving too quickly to higher rates is a destabilising move which they should avoid. There is no “normal” higher rate they have to get to.

Debt is sustainable all the time the borrowers keep their jobs and all the time the interest charges stay around current levels. Pushing rates too high too quickly undermines both these conditions for sustainability.

Tell Us Once is a great idea. It looks as if the government wants to help the relatives of those who have just died, and to be efficient at the same time.  I recently suggested it does not work out like that. Today I wish to explain a bit more of the details.

The first odd thing about Tell Us Once is someone registering a death with a Registrar is told about it at the end of the interview. Much of the data needed for Tell Us Once has been  collected and accepted by the Registrar, but he or she does not then press a button to save all that in Tell Us Once format, nor help the relative with the Tell Us Once declaration. Instead the person is issued with a website address and a unique access code and told to go home and go through the whole registration process again on their own, telling the computer what they have just told the Registrar and answering some extra questions about whether the person who has died was receiving benefits and a pension. This makes it Tell Us Twice. It can  also be difficult for the relative to do, as they may not know the financial details of the deceased. Surely the state, primed with the dead person’s National Insurance number, name, address and tax identifier knows what money it is sending the person?

The second odd thing is that not all parts of the government sign up to Tell Us Once. So if, for example, the deceased had a few premium bonds Tell Us Once would not help the relatives as National Savings are not in the system. Why can’t all parts of national and local government be in it?

The third odd thing is it may not work. The relative of the deceased may still get separate communications asking for information already supplied from the Tax authorities. Payments may still be made of pensions and benefits after the state knows the details of the death. Dead patients may stay on GP lists.

I have asked Ministers to look into this. I do so because I think grieving relatives deserve better. I have also done so because the current system  is a waste of taxpayers money, sending money to the deceased and then going through a complex process to get it back.

Many charities do good work, helping people who need support and assistance.Educational charities provide some great education and assist the many who cannot afford fees where payment is required. Health and wellbeing charities offer the extras beyond those that can be afforded from the NHS and benefits system.

There are some other charities that see part of their role to be as a campaign organisation to press a government to do things. This is a more questionable use of charitable donations and the tax exemptions that go with them. Political parties and political think tanks cannot claim charitable exemption from tax. A think tank that wants tax exemption has to demonstrate party political neutrality and an emphasis on education and independence of view.

There is also a divide over money. Many good and successful charities have built up endowments. This enables them to maintain a decent and usually rising rate of spending, without having to raise money to pay the monthly bills.Other charities live hand to mouth, establishing large support organisations with people drawing salaries that requires continuous fund raising to pay the bills. In some cases it encourages aggressive techniques to get the money to meet the salaries of the staff raising the money. Sometimes well endowed charities get criticised for being “ rich” which seems odd. Given that all the money is held as a fund to pay future benefits to qualifying people and causes, surely it is good news that this has been guaranteed for future years by using the endowment model.

There is a growng concern about the charitable model that employs large nunmbers of well paid staff to fund raise and to demand that the government does something about their chosen area.Charities can attract a lot of volunteer talent or able people who understand rates of pay for a CEO of a charity will be lower than for a CEO of a competitive private sector business.

Charities also have to be careful not to compete using their tax free status as a competitve advantage against struggling private sector smaller businesses.

The government used conference to announce a few modest policies and spending plans. There was the much promoted ban on employers deducting money from tips, the freeze on fuel duty, £2 m for the Midlands Engine Partnership, a welcome £240 m extra for social care, future guidance on the maximum time young people should spend on social media, a higher rate of stamp duty for foreigners and a statutory duty for employers to consider flexible working for new jobs.

The financial items made no overall difference to a £2 trillion economy being slowed by a combined fiscal and monetary squeeze, which went undiscussed. The other big gap in proceedings was the absence of detailed positive plans department by department on how they are going to take advantage of Brexit from next April. We did have a confirmation again that the new migration policy will reduce numbers of people coming to seek low paid work or benefits, and will be fair to the whole world. But where was the detail? Where is the draft legislation so we can have it in law by March?

It was the caution, the refusal of the whole government to engage with the big picture and to show energy in using the new freedoms and the freed money which Brexit will bring which drove delegates from the main conference hall to the fringe. There on the fringe were the bold ideas, the bigger picture, the wish to grasp the opportunities Brexit brings. The irony was not lost on many that the single word slogan was Opportunity for the conference as a whole, but all too many cabinet Ministers chose not to take any of the opportunities on offer for our country as we leave the EU.

So lets have the agenda filled. Lets have a farming policy that promotes home grown food, a fishing policy that puts UK interests first, a borders policy that provides the law to back up the aspirations,spending policies that reflect popular priorities. Above all, lets have some tax cuts which can be the best driver of enterprise.

The UK government sent every household a leaflet about the EU referendum.

It has as its headline ” A once in a generation decision”. There was no mention of two votes or a second chance to decide. Nor do we need a second ballot.

It said about the decision to stay or leave “This is your decision. The government will implement what you decide”. It also made clear the government strongly recommended staying in, and warned that we could not stay part of the single market whilst leaving the EU.

Many of us voted Leave in good faith that if we won we would leave the EU and its single market, as we wished to do. We also voted secure in the knowledge that the government would implement our wishes and not expect us to vote twice.
We now want to get on with the benefits of leaving. We want the government to energetically pursue new trade deals with non EU countries. We want a new migration system that works for us. We want new fishing and farming policies that boost our home industries.

A Remain oriented Parliament has made heavy weather of honouring these government pledges, but has now reluctantly passed the EU Withdrawal Act. Taken together with the Article 50 letter which Parliament sent by an overwhelming majority, the UK has now done all it needs to do legally to leave on 29 March 2019.

A possible Chequers deal does not implement the wishes of the majority to leave, but looks unlikely to find favour either with the EU or with a significant number of Conservative MPs. Yesterday again at conference members of the party made crystal clear their dislike of Chequers and their wish to get on and leave quickly. There were large crowds for pro Brexit speakers at fringe meetings, and a muted response to Ministers pushing the government line. I urge the government to make clear to the EU that we are currently planning just to leave in accordance with the Acts passed and with the decision of the UK electorate. The sooner the EU believes this is what will happen, the sooner they will want to sort out those things about their continued access to the UK market that some worry about. In practice the UK government is not planning new barriers, but does need to get on with setting out its post 29 March tariff schedule which might provoke a wish to trade tariff free by the EU.