I’m very pleased to take part in this debate and to congratulate Mike Hedges on his emergence—as Tory leaders used to before elections—as Chairman of the committee. I know we didn’t have an election, but I can say that if there had been one and he was a candidate, he would have had my enthusiastic support, because I’ve seen the way that he has worked in the Public Accounts Committee, which is very impressive indeed, and I’m sure he’ll be an excellent chairman of the climate change committee.

I believe this is a very good report. I don’t agree with absolutely every recommendation, but almost all of them, and I do think it does help to put matters in perspective. If we turn to paragraphs 8 and 11 of the report, they give us the figures that Wales exports £12.3 billion-worth of goods, but only 2 per cent of those are accounted for by food and live animal exports. So, agriculture is a vital part of the Welsh economy, but, as I said earlier on, whatever problems might be thrown up by the uncertain process of transition from where we are now to where we’ll be post Brexit, it should be relatively easy for the British Government and the Welsh Government to accommodate the financial implications of whatever is decided. I’ve no doubt whatsoever that agriculture in Wales will not be worse off, post Brexit, than it is now. Indeed, the scope for improvements are much, much greater.

We have a massive trade deficit in food products. We exported, from the UK, £20 billion in food and drink; we actually import £43 billion. In 2016, the latest year for which figures are available, that trade gap actually widened by over 4 per cent. So, if the European Union is so foolish as not to enter into a successor agreement with us, then there is massive scope for import substitution, because, again, the report very usefully provides us with the effective tariff figures for food products, which are, of course, colossal. Eighty-four per cent in cattle carcasses, 87 per cent in frozen beef, 46 per cent in lamb carcasses, and so on and so forth.

What that demonstrates to us is actually how regressive in its impact on ordinary people the common agricultural policy is, because tariff forms of protection are a very inefficient way of supporting agriculture and farm incomes, because the people who bear the biggest brunt of the burden are those on the lowest incomes, because everybody has to buy food and food products. Therefore, they tend to be very regressive in their impact, and one of the great advantages of being able to design for ourselves an agricultural policy for the UK and for Wales is that we will, perhaps, be able to skew the system more in favour of people at the lower end of the income scale. And I very much hope that that’s what we’ll be able to do.

I do think that recommendation 2 is unrealistic, which calls for an equal voice at the negotiating table in the talks and access to the single market for the devolved nations, because the United Kingdom Government is charged with the responsibility for negotiating on behalf of the entire United Kingdom, and I think it’s unrealistic to imagine that any of the constituent nations could have a veto on its decisions. Given that England has 85 per cent of the population of the UK, it’s just not practical politics to make this argument, whatever the merits might be from Plaid Cymru’s perspective, and I fully understand why they want to make the case for that. But, nevertheless, being part of a federal system would be a very different state of affairs from the one that we currently have, and that would have implications for fiscal transfers between England and the rest of the United Kingdom as well, the consequences of which might be very significantly adverse for Wales. So, it’s a game of swings and roundabouts.

But having said that, I do believe that the devolved nations should have a parity of esteem within the United Kingdom in these negotiations, and the United Kingdom Government should have at the forefront of its mind the interests of Wales, and Welsh agriculture in particular, in the negotiations. Although free trade negotiations are, inevitably, as Simon Thomas said, a trade-off of one interest against another, we must find a way of compensating the losers, if there are losers, from that process. Given the statistics that I quoted at the start of my speech, I don’t think that that is an impossible situation to find ourselves in, ultimately.

As regards the issue of migration, and agricultural workers in particular, before we went into the European Union, we had a seasonal agricultural workers scheme that was being maintained right up until relatively recently, and it should be not beyond the bounds of possibility to restore that and to take account of whatever skills gaps there are in the Welsh economy, as well as in other parts of the UK. Again, that calls for sensitivity on the part of the UK Government.

So, there’s very little time in this debate to go into all the complications of this process, but I do believe that this report gives us very good ground upon which to take the argument forward, and I congratulate members of the committee for reaching the consensus that they did.