Part of 2. 1. Questions to the Cabinet Secretary for Environment and Rural Affairs – in the Senedd at 1:51 pm on 24 May 2017.
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.