UK ‘in need of a coherent farm policy’ says expert
The devolved administrations will struggle to develop coherent farm policies if the UK government adopts a “piecemeal” approach to the release of the powers to set farm policy, a new academic report published yesterday has warned.
Claiming that agriculture in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland faces post-brexit uncertainty, the Edinburgh-based Centre on Constitutional Change said the question of where powers to set farm policy and support budgets will lie after 2022 needed urgent clarification.
In the report – The Repatriation of Competences in Agriculture after Brexit – the centre’s director, Professor Michael Keating, warns that there is a major underlying difference in views held by the UK and devolved governments.
“The UK position is that the devolved administrations do not make policy in agriculture – but rather implement EU policies.”
He said that the UK government believed that after Brexit the devolved nations would implement UK national policy, claiming this amounted to much the same thing. “The EU Withdrawal Bill proposes to address the issue of coherence by reserving all existing EU competences to Westminster under the guise of ‘retained EU law’,” he said. “Then particular competences will be devolved again over time.”
Keating said that, according to the UK government, this would not mean the loss of policy control by the devolved governments, claiming that, on the contrary, they might gain more powers.
However the report states that the devolved governments’ perspective is that they make policy within EU frameworks.
“It is disingenuous to suggest that an imposed UK framework would be the equivalent of the EU frameworks as the latter are the product of multilateral negotiations in which devolved territories might share some interests with other EU member states rather the rest of the UK,” said Keating.
Stating that a piecemeal release of individual powers in agriculture would hamper the creation of a coherent policy, he said that devolved governments would be searching around for powers to allow them to achieve what they wanted, adding: “This could amount to a return to the old Welsh system of defined powers, which required constant recourse to Whitehall and Westminster.”
Keating warned that the issue was of prime importance – as support accounted for around half of farm income in England while climate and land quality meant that this figure was closer to 75 per cent in Scotland, 80 per cent in Wales and 87 per cent in Northern Ireland.
“Although the devolved nations currently benefit greatly from CAP funding, this is as a result of greater need. Scotland and Wales receive more than twice the funds per capita than England,” he said.
Keating said that if these funds were put into the block grant, this would allow the balance of payments to be maintained.
However, he said it looked more likely a specific formula would be adopted – but this would mean that as support for agriculture in England fell, the amounts coming to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland would be subject to the same cuts.