Questions now from the party spokespeople. The Plaid Cymru spokesperson, Simon Thomas.

Diolch, Llywydd. I also welcome the Cabinet Secretary back to this place. I’m sure the Cabinet Secretary, like me, welcomes the report from the National Farmers Union Cymru, published yesterday, ‘Farming—Bringing Wales Together’. I know that she was present at the report’s launch. It sets out how farming contributes to the seven well-being goals that the Government has in its own legislation—the Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act 2015—and it’s part of the work that we all have to do, I think, in setting out the ongoing argument for support payments and continuing support for farming and the wider rural community as we leave the European Union. In that context, I was struck by the publication of the Welsh Labour Party manifesto, which doesn’t seem to make any commitment to maintain those payments in the whole of the next Parliament, and I wondered if the Cabinet Secretary could explain why.

You will have heard me say many times that I cannot imagine a time when we do not have to support our agricultural sector. Obviously, the manifesto was launched, there was a significant chapter in the manifesto regarding agriculture and environment, right across my portfolio. We have said all along we don’t know what funding we’re going to have post Brexit, but, if you remember, during the campaign for the EU referendum, we were told we would not lose a penny, and that’s what I’ll be holding the UK Government to.

And so will I, but I thought you wanted to become the UK Government and therefore were seeking to make financial commitments for the next Westminster Government, because it’s there that the 8 June is being fought upon. The one thing that you do state in your manifesto, however, is this:

The Conservatives were dragged to court and forced to publish their draft nitrogen dioxide plan. But their commitments are disappointing and lack information about the action needed to address emissions on a UK basis, providing no detail about a diesel scrappage scheme.’

I think that’s quite factually correct, but does this mean that Welsh Labour is going to introduce a scrappage scheme to Wales?

That’s something that will have to be looked at. You are quite right about the UK Government, and I’ve been working very closely with colleagues to make sure that we are in a position to take air quality forward. You know that I’ve made it a personal priority. I think it’s really important, and I’ve written to DEFRA recently on it. You’ll be aware DEFRA have recently published a joint consultation. One of the things we have committed to is to consult, within the next 12 months, on a clean air zone framework for Wales.

This is indeed true of what you’re doing as a Cabinet Secretary, and I welcome it insofar as it goes, but it does underline the fact that, as a party, you don’t seem to be serious about taking control at Westminster at all. I don’t really have firm proposals or financial securities and commitments for how you’re going to support these actions going forward.

However, let’s look at something that happens here in Wales, because I think we can agree, or potentially agree at least, that if we are to have diesel scrappage or some kind of approach like that, we will move away from diesel into, yes, more petrol, but also into electric vehicles, which are predicted now by the ‘Financial Times’ to be at the same price by 2018 as petrol vehicles. At the moment, there are about 100,000 electric vehicles registered in the UK. There are 1,500 electric vehicle rapid charging points in England and Scotland. It’s possible to drive from north Wales to Orkney in an electric car using rapid charging points, but you can’t drive from north Wales to Cardiff. There are just 13 rapid charging points in the whole of Wales and not a single one in mid Wales. What is Cabinet Secretary doing with her colleagues, because we have a 2015 report that hasn’t been acted on yet, to develop a network of electric vehicle charging points throughout Wales and particularly in mid and west Wales?

I actually had a discussion about this this morning because this is something that we need to look at. On a personal level, I’m making sure that Welsh Government puts some charging points in as soon as possible. Unfortunately, for a variety of reasons, which I won’t bore you with, they can only be used by staff in the beginning, but I think it’s really important. You’ll be aware of an app that we have to make sure that we know where the electric points are. One of the suggestions we’ve had is that perhaps we put charging points where there are public toilets.

So, there needs to be significant investment in charging points because, as you say, we haven’t got enough in Wales yet. I don’t want it to affect our tourism offer, and I know my colleague, Ken Skates, doesn’t want that also. So, we need to think about that too, because, as you say, you need to be able to move freely around Wales and know that you’ve got those charging points available.

The Conservative spokesperson, Paul Davies.

Diolch, Llywydd. Like others, I’m delighted to see your return to this Chamber and I hope you will be fully recovered in the very near future.

Now, Cabinet Secretary, at the Royal Welsh Spring Festival recently, you said that young farmers are the future of the industry and we must invest in them to ensure both they and this industry have a bright future. Of course, I completely agree with you on that, Cabinet Secretary. Therefore, could you tell us what specific policies you’ve introduced during your time as Cabinet Secretary for Environment and Rural Affairs for young farmers to ensure that they have a bright future?

I’m not sure about specific policies, but I’ve certainly supported them financially. You’ll be aware of the significant investment we’ve put to young farmers. For instance, we’ve got the Agri Academy, which is full of young, dynamic farmers who are very willing to help me formulate policies going forward, and I’ve met them regularly. I’ve also made it a personal choice to go out to visit as many young farmers on their farms as I can. Certainly, I can think of a couple in north Wales that I’ve visited—one of them leased the farm and wanted to talk to me specifically about what we could do in our policies to encourage young people to be able to lease their farms. I then wrote to all local authorities to try to encourage them not to sell their farms, which, unfortunately, some local authorities seem to be doing at quite an alarming rate.

A recent NatWest report concluded that, young farmers need more support to diversify and while the entrepreneurial ideas may be there the support networks could be improved.’

Therefore, it’s crucial that more support is offered to young farmers, both in terms of advice and support, and in terms of finance as well. So, in light of this report, will you confirm what funding you will now bring forward to better support young farmers who are looking to diversify?

That can be part of our programmes. You will be aware of the farming business grants that we’ve just brought forward. That’s not just available to young farmers, it’s available to all farmers, and I know that when it was launched recently young farmers were telling me that that was really helpful for them, because if they wanted a piece of equipment that they couldn’t afford, they didn’t have to go through that long business plan and getting several quotes—we’ve taken all of that hard work away. Going forward, we can be looking at what specific support we can give them as we formulate a Welsh agricultural policy.

Cabinet Secretary, the same report concluded that

There is a generational crisis in farming’, which has long been a concern of many in the agricultural world. Indeed, according to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, the percentage of farmers under the age of 45 had fallen to just 13 per cent in 2015, down from 18 per cent in 2003. Therefore, in light of the pressing need to attract young people into the farming profession, and the need to keep young people in the farming profession, what immediate steps will the Welsh Government now be taking to ensure that the percentage of farmers under the age of 45 doesn’t continue to fall in the future?

I don’t recognise those figures. I’m not sure if you said that they were DEFRA’s figures, because I don’t think that is the case in Wales—that significant drop. I don’t like the word ‘crisis’. I do understand that it’s very difficult for young farmers if they’re not part of a farming family—if they want to come into farming cold, if you like, it’s very difficult for them to be able to do that. One of the things we have been working with young farmers on is around ensuring that we help them to break into the agricultural world. I go back to what I was saying about working with local authorities to try to get them not to sell off the farms that they have in their portfolios, because, certainly, speaking to young farmers, that is one of the ways that they can get into farming. I spoke about somebody in north Wales; he actually is from a farming background, but he wanted to go out and get his own farm. At the age of 21, he’s gone out and leased a farm, which is incredibly impressive.

UKIP spokesperson, Neil Hamilton.

Diolch, Llywydd. I don’t want to be left out of the crowd of the Cabinet Secretary’s fans, welcoming her back to the Chamber, and I’d like to say how glad I am to see her looking so hale and hearty.

I’d like to return to the question of the Labour Party manifesto, to follow up on the point that Simon Thomas made right at the start of proceedings today. As far as I can see in this manifesto, there are two paragraphs about farming under the chapter on negotiating Brexit, and then there’s, broadly speaking, one small paragraph under environmental and rural affairs. Given that agriculture is entirely a devolved matter, and we are in the middle of a general election campaign, I think the farming community will be pretty surprised that farming features so negligibly in this rather thick document.

Given that the First Minister has criticised my party and others for lack of clarity about our post-Brexit vision—I’m coming to this in a second—in fact our vision for agriculture was rolled out last year in the Assembly elections, in our manifesto there, where we were quite clear that we would maintain the basic payments scheme, then on the basis of £80 per acre. We’d have to revisit that figure—it may be possible to increase it, with extra payments for hill farmers based on headage within World Trade Organization rules, et cetera. This is the fundamental point that everybody wants to get some assurance on: if a basic payment scheme is going to be maintained in Wales post Brexit, and whether the existing payment regime will be replicated. I appreciate, as the Cabinet Secretary said, that we don’t know yet what the Westminster Government is going to give us by way of a financial settlement, and like her and her party, UKIP thinks that we should have every single penny of British taxpayers’ money that is currently spent by Brussels in Wales, but on that basis, it should be possible for her as the Cabinet Secretary for agriculture to give the kind of concrete assurances that farmers need.

Well, I have given that assurance to farmers. I’ve been in post for just a year now, and certainly I’ve made it very clear that we cannot envisage a time when our agricultural sector would not need that support. As to how the basic payment scheme will look post Brexit, as I say, it depends on the funding that we get, but, like you, I think we should get every penny that we were promised. We were told Wales would not lose one penny, and that is what I will be holding the UK Government to.

And the other question that arises is the freedom that we will have to consider the regulatory regime applying to rural industries in general. Whilst I accept the points that were made by Huw Irranca-Davies in his question earlier on about maintaining essential regulations, it can’t be said that the existing corpus of regulation imposed upon us by the EU is perfect in every particular, and there may be ways in which we can very significantly reduce costs without endangering the public benefits that we all want in terms of environmental protection, and so on. Farmers’ incomes are negligible, and the administrative burden of the EU regulatory regime is often very considerable upon them. They don’t have the income levels that would make life easier for them to employ staff to do all the form-filling, box-ticking and all the other complications of life in the farming industry. So, I hope that, as the Cabinet Secretary said in answer to David Melding earlier on, it’s not all doom and gloom post Brexit—I was very pleased to hear her say that and that she is taking a positive approach to these opportunities—and that we will take an open-minded science-based approach to regulation, and over time, no doubt quite a long time, we will go through the whole corpus of regulation and see how we can lift administrative burdens on farmers without losing any great public benefits that the non-farming community values.

Well, I do try to be a glass half full, rather than a glass half empty, so I am really trying to embrace the opportunities that I do think are there when you look. I was a passionate remainer and nothing will make me believe that leaving, that Brexit is good for us, but we do have to look for those opportunities. Regulations were one of the reasons cited to me by farmers as to why—I won’t say a majority, but certainly of the people I spoke to, the majority of them had voted leave. However, environmental standards and regulations, as a minimum, are going to be maintained. I keep saying this to them: we could strengthen them where there’s need to, and when we look at them all individually, there are literally thousands of regulations in my portfolio, and it could be that we’ll be strengthening some of them. So, perhaps some of them should have been careful what they wished for.

So, I would say that that regulation regime is essential. However, we will need to look at it on a case-by-case basis.

I know from having spoken to many farming organisations and individual farmers that they do appreciate the Cabinet Secretary’s open-minded approach and, indeed, her general approachability and willingness to discuss these issues in the round. There’s one particular case that I would like to raise with her now where she would be able to do something.

She will be aware that the regime surrounding livestock movements on farms, coming up into the county show period, is now a matter of controversy, with the introduction of new quarantine units from 10 June replacing the old regime of approved isolation units on farms. There have been significant complaints that this is unacceptably bureaucratic. There are 61 rules as part of the new system, which include installing double gates and double fences, as well as wearing specialised clothing. There’s also, of course, a fee payment regime of £172.80 for one quarantine unit and £244.80 for two, and many farmers are struggling to understand why this should be as bureaucratic a scheme as it is. For many of them, they’re saying that it’s just not worth the effort now to go to county shows with livestock and to show animals. So, I wonder whether we might be able to revisit this scheme and introduce a bit more flexibility than appears to be there at the minute, given that we already have an effective regime with approved isolation use and there isn’t really any evidence to show that there is a risk to animal welfare or health from the limited circumstances of moving animals to and from county shows.

Before I come onto quarantine units, just picking up your first point about approachability, certainly, I want to have those discussions with the sector and one of the reasons I set up the stakeholder group straight after the referendum last June—I think we met on 4 July for the first time—was to make sure that we brought the agriculture and environment sectors together. I thought it was really important that we didn’t have those silos. I have to say, we’ve had probably up to about 10 meetings now, and it’s been really good to see those two sectors working so positively together.

On the issue of quarantine units, when I came into post a year ago, I was told we needed to get moving really quickly on these new arrangements and I was criticised last summer for not bringing it forward quickly. We have worked on this policy, with the sector, really closely. My officials have worked with the livestock identification advisory group on those proposals and we continue to work with stakeholders on the delivery of the project. It’s not a mandatory scheme, so, they can choose: if they prefer the six-day standstill to the quarantine unit, they can choose to do that. I know there’s a financial cost and, again, if they choose not to have a QU, then any movements onto their farm will trigger the six-day standstill. They need to weigh up which is the best scheme for them personally.