So far, everybody's talked quite a lot about COVID and what it's told us, but nobody's mentioned the elephant in the room, which is the end of the European Union transition period, happening in less than a month. In that small amount of time, we potentially face the most momentous upheaval in our food supply chains, which will make queues at supermarkets in March look like a tea party by comparison.

So, I'm clear that the Welsh Government's end of transition action plan admits that fruit and vegetables are likely to be disrupted—we like to think of Britain as a green and pleasant land, but these are mainly imported from the EU, particularly in the winter. We won't starve, but choice is going to be limited, prices are almost certainly going to rise, and it is hospitals, care homes and schools, as well as the most vulnerable in our community, who've also been worst affected by the pandemic, who are likely to suffer most from the shortage of fresh food.

The Welsh Government is doing its best to work with food businesses to avert a crisis, we are told, and I'm sure we'd like to know a great deal more about that. I have endeavoured to get information from the top four supermarkets in this country, but they say that commercial confidentiality—or at least Tesco does—is preventing them telling us exactly what their plans are, given that their model for 'just in time' is absolutely not going to work in this scenario. 

The National Audit Office has warned that, whilst there has been progress in UK Government departments, it is still likely that widespread disruption will occur from 1 January. The House of Lords has similarly warned this; the chair of the UK Parliament's Public Accounts Committee has warned it. It is the UK Government that decided not to seek an extension to the transition period, because the Maoists within the UK Government seem determined to go ahead with the biggest change in our trading relationship in the most inauspicious of circumstances, in the middle of winter and in the middle of a pandemic. That enthusiasm for what they call a 'clean break' is what could yet see them take us over a cliff into crashing out of the EU without a deal.

With four weeks to go before the end of the transition period, traders and logistics providers are still waiting for much of the information and clarity from Government, and they are just shocked by the lack of consistency in Government policy. Duncan Buchanan, the policy director of the Road Haulage Association, has said that, from January, he is expecting something 'between shocking and a catastrophe.' It could take up to eight weeks for goods to come in by truck once we take back control of our borders, and all the evidence is that the UK Government will simply try to blame everybody but themselves for this situation.

A leaked letter from the Cabinet Office Minister, Michael Gove, to logistics organisations, pins the blame on them and says that queues of up to 7,000 lorries are all the fault of the companies for not being prepared. He assumes that, once heavy goods vehicles realise that they're going to have to comply with the new regulations, they will simply disappear over time. Presumably, that is why they're building a 27-acre lorry park in Kent.

These warnings have come from the National Farmers Union, the Farmers Union of Wales, the Federation of Small Businesses. One food expert described to me, 'Nothing is ready, nothing will work. It is expected that the whole system of importing and exporting will collapse, and, on top of bad weather and COVID, it will be a tragedy of our own making.'

So, this has to concentrate our minds now. There are some excellent suggestions in the report that was commissioned by the WWF, but we have to do something now. We have to ensure that we massively ramp up our horticulture. The Welsh Government has provided small grants of between £3,000 and £12,000 to do that, and the economy Minister has provided over £400,000 for a foundational economy grant for controlled-environment growing, otherwise known as hydroponics. It seems to me that that's exactly the sort of thing we need to be ramping up now.

We need to stop local authorities from selling off county farms, which is one of the ways in which we find new entrants into agriculture, because I'm afraid I disagree with Janet Finch-Saunders that we can simply go on with the same old system we've got at the moment, and ensuring that people can't be in any way—. They need to—. Farmers need to maintain productivity; we can't undermine that. We've got to change the way we do things, because of our nature crisis, apart from anything else, and we've got to ensure that we have local food for local people, to ensure that we have the public health gains we absolutely need to make in the next period.

So, these matters are going to be discussed further at the cross-party group on food tomorrow, and, obviously, I'd be very keen to see any of you who are able to come along and ensure that we have a better food policy for dealing with these matters in the sixth Parliament.