Here are the climate-related sections of speeches by MPs during the Commons debate Agriculture Bill (Eighth sitting).
14:02 The Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (George Eustice)
At the moment, we spend around £3 billion a year on the CAP. In the scheme of things, compared with the spending of many other Departments, that is a relatively modest sum, particularly if we refocus those resources to delivering public goods—improving the quality of our soils and water, enhancing the beauty of our landscapes, and supporting key Government objectives, such as promoting biodiversity and wildlife on farmland and reducing our climate change emissions to mitigate the impact of climate change.
However, new clause 10 is less about the size of the budget—no doubt we will discuss that later—than about annual reporting on the budget. There are two reasons why it is unnecessary. The first is technical. The new clause would create a legal requirement to list the total funding for each of the purposes outlined in clause 1. As I made clear on Tuesday, the difficulty with that is that many of the interventions we seek will cross multiple purposes. We may have schemes that enhance animal welfare but also the environment, or that enhance the environment but also mitigate the impacts of climate change. It would be difficult to separate those things out and report on the basis of individual purposes.
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