Committee (3rd Day)

Part of Public Bodies Bill [HL] – in the House of Lords at 6:45 pm on 1 December 2010.

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Photo of Viscount Eccles Viscount Eccles Conservative 6:45, 1 December 2010

My Lords, I reinforce the argument made by my noble friend. I drove a tractor some time ago-1943, I think it was. Whether I was underage I will leave the House to decide. I remember that we were very happy if we got 30 hundredweights an acre. We stooped it, then it was put in a stack, and it was then thrashed by a threshing machine that came around at about this time of the year.

Today, you have a computer-controlled combine harvester that does the whole thing on its own. It is about two and a half times the width of the old cutters that we used to have. I will gamble that there are very few farmers that own one of those combines. There are some in Norfolk, in the grain area of the east of England, but in my part of England-in north Yorkshire-none of the farmers owns their own combine harvester. The contractors own it-and they do the potatoes as well. There are no labourers left in north Yorkshire in agriculture. No such person exists any longer. If there is not a skill, then you cannot employ anybody in agriculture in north Yorkshire-I am not sure about north Scotland.

I contend that-never mind the £8-something-you will not get that combine driven by anyone paid anything less than £10 an hour. The statistics that I would like to understand are the actual wages in agriculture today, because-believe you me-they do not bear much relationship either to the minimum wage or to the wages that were set on 1 October by the board which we are discussing.