There can be no excuse or justification for the UK Government's failure to prepare for the possibility of a 'no deal' Brexit. I'm sure I shall carry the Minister with me in starting in that way. We've had two and a half years to prepare for leaving the EU and it's shocking that no real preparation has been done by the UK Government, because this was always a possibility. Monsieur Barnier was reported in French magazine Le Point saying in 2016 that: I shall have succeeded in my task if the final deal is so hard on the British that they'll end up preferring to stay. And that's what this has all been about, of course, because unelected technocrats like him pursue their own agenda, which is very different from pursuing the well-being of the people. There are massive opportunities in Brexit. There are challenges—nobody's ever denied that. The challenges are much bigger now than they needed to have been, because Theresa May's intransigence and deafness to reality has made this an unexpected end to the two-year process, where we've actually done virtually nothing to prepare for the outcome that looks as though is going to take place. That, I think, is a gross act of negligence on her part and the part of her entire Government. 

A moment ago, the Minister did speak of opportunities in public procurement. I wonder why these statements that we're hearing this afternoon seem to offer no hope or optimism whatsoever in this process. Of course these things are all a balance at the end of the day and I've always accepted that leaving the EU, in a transitional period at any rate, is going to impose certain costs, but the advantages in the medium to long term far outweigh those costs.

One of the opportunities, for agriculture in particular, that's opened up by Brexit was referred to by Andrew R.T. Davies. He mentioned only beef, but we have a massive deficit in our trade with the EU in most areas of produce, particularly livestock. For example, in poultry, we import four times as much as we export; beef, three times as much as we export; pork, three times as much as we export; and even things like eggs—24 times as much as we export is imported. So, there are huge opportunities here for import substitution. And if the EU is so stupid as not to agree some kind of interim free trade arrangement that preserves the status quo in the short term, without keeping us within the governmental institutions like the single market and the customs union, then EU countries are going to face massive losses, not least the Irish Republic, as Andrew R.T. Davies referred to—82 per cent of their milk exports go to the UK and 49 per cent of their beef. If there are taxes of 25 to 35 per cent on the export of beef, or in the case of milk even more, I believe, then they're going to be in serious trouble in Ireland. So, the same kind of conundrum that we're trying to solve here is going to have to be solved elsewhere, because we're in a huge deficit with almost every member of the EU: a £4 billion trade deficit with Holland, £2 billion with France, £3 billion with Germany, and £0.5 billion a year with Ireland, which is a small figure for the UK but a very large figure for Ireland. I could go through the whole litany of countries and produce similar figures. So, their problems are our opportunities.

I wonder what work the Welsh Government has done, or proposes to do, with Welsh farmers to plug the gaps that will open up if, after 29 March, we do have tariffs on food imports and exports, which nobody wants to see, least of all me—I believe in free trade. I always thought that a free trade agreement should be in place with the EU by the end of the two-year period, but the Government unfortunately didn't embark upon that course of action. Theresa May embarked upon a course of action that was bound to fail right from the start, because nobody wanted a halfway house solution such as the one she seems to think is the best. 

Last night, at the same dinner that the Minister attended, I had many discussions with farmers as well about the uncertainties of Brexit, and one of the uncertainties that they were complaining about was the uncertainty that the Welsh Government had introduced through its proposal to end basic payments for farmers. One of the ways in which the Welsh Government could reduce uncertainty is actually—although I approve of the general direction of policy of the Welsh Government—not to telescope it, as I believe is proposed, but to phase in the movement away from basic payments over a period of years, to give farmers the time to adjust—although I do think that certain types of farm unit will always need to have some kind of basic payment scheme method of support, particularly on marginal land, in upland areas and so on and so forth. It seems to me that to go over the cliff edge, to use a very familiar analogy, as the Minister proposes in her consultation, is quite the wrong way to deal with whatever uncertainties are going to take place as a result of the failure of Theresa May's negotiating strategy.

The third and last point I'd like to ask about is: one of the opportunities that we will have as a result of repatriating agricultural policy here to Cardiff is in regulatory reform. There are lots of areas of regulations that farmers complain about that could be simplified, where costs could be reduced, without any violence being done to the overarching public policy issues that most people would agree on in terms of environmental protections. The EU wants to ban glyphosate, for example, as a weed killer, and there is no more efficient form of weed killing that farmers could have. Glyphosate would be a big problem for many types of farmers, if that's not available. Nitrates regulations, habitats regulations—there are nuts-and-bolts kinds of alterations that can be made to these forms of regulation that will make farmers' lives easier and less costly. That also helps to open up new opportunities, because, yes, if there are costs that will be imposed as a result of Brexit, there are also countervailing savings that could be made by having an agricultural policy that is tailor made for the different topographical, climatic and cultural traditions of Wales. So, what work is being done to look at the EU statute book, as it were, with a view to scaling down regulatory costs without actually prejudicing the overarching policy objectives, which we would all share?