Orders of the Day — Agriculture (Small Farmers) Bill

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 12:00 am on 10 November 1958.

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Photo of Mr John Taylor Mr John Taylor , West Lothian 12:00, 10 November 1958

The noble Lord the Joint Under-Secretary of State for Scotland must have listened to the first part of the speech of his hon. Friend the Member for Aberdeenshire, West (Mr. Spence) with a great deal of relief, as it was the first speech from that side of the House to give the Bill an intelligent justification. The second part of the hon. Member's speech dealt with very important matters, common to both sides of the Border, but for which no provision is made in this Measure.

The hon. Gentleman gave what I thought was the most intelligent summing up of the possible results of the Bill. I hope that he is right in his estimate of what it will do, but as I read it, as I read the White Paper and the comments in the Press, and as I listened to the Minister introducing the Bill, with all the talk about this being a Bill for the assistance of small farmers, it seemed to me that the Measure brings us to a very odd circumstance. Under its provisions, the smaller the farmer the less help he gets, until, if the farm is under 20 acres, he gets no help at all.

In my constituency there are a good many small farmers, and many other people engaged in agriculture, who will get no assistance whatever from the Bill, but they are the hardest working people in the industry. That, as hon. Members know, is saying something. The hardest working people of all are to be found among the smallholders. They have to make the smallholding their full-time occupation, as that is a condition of their Government tenancy. They also have to make a living out of it, otherwise they starve. In the main, they have proved to be very intelligent, successful managers and users of the soil that they hold in trust, and they produce a very welcome contribution to our national food supply.

Those people will get no assistance at all. It can be argued, of course, that they hold their tenancies on very favourable rents, and that to that extent there is a sort of hidden subsidy. I know, too, that the tenancies also include the house, which is generally a reasonable house, and that, perhaps, in that respect they are not too badly treated. But it is just as essential to encourage these people to attain a reasonable standard of life as it is to encourage the small farmer to do so.

I think that the upper limit is reasonable, but if we are to have both a lower limit and what, at first sight, appears to be a complicated yardstick of man-hours, that is overdoing the business. There is no need for both. The apparently complicated yardstick of man-hours is not unknown to the industry. I agree with the Minister that it is not so complicated as it looks at first.

A large number of people who engage in the industry's administrative arithmetic—and their name is legion—are used to this kind of measurement. Although I must admit that if that yardstick were applied also to farms under 20 acres only a comparatively small number would benefit by the scheme. nevertheless, if there is any benefit accruing under the scheme, to apply it here would give those farmers a sense of fair play, and remove from them the feeling of being left out in the cold.

The first paragraph of the Explanatory and Financial Memorandum does not exclude the possibility of reducing the limit to under 20 acres. It states: This Bill authorises the provision, in accordance with schemes made by the Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food and the Secretary of State for Scotland, of financial assistance for increasing the efficiency of small farm businesses in the United Kingdom. A small farm business for this purpose is one carried on on not more than 150 acres of land, excluding rough grazing land, and coming within such other limits as may be specified in the scheme in question. There is no specific mention of a lower limit of 20 acres. I therefore ask the Minister to look again at this lower limit, and, even if he has to stick to his other measurement of ability and capacity to benefit from the scheme, to consider whether that lower limit is necessary at all.

Reading the adjustment of the scheme to Scotland, I do not think that we shall really get very much out of it at all. As my hon. Friend the Member for South Ayrshire (Mr. Emrys Hughes) has stated, to produce a satisfactory scheme for the assistance of small farmers in Scotland would require a separate Bill. In my view, this Measure does not give the amount of assistance required.

The existing M.A.P. scheme, which has been in operation for about six years, I think—