I think this is an important debate to ensure that people realise in the farming community that we are listening to them, but I think there has been some exaggeration of what the problem is as far as what we're asking of farmers. We're asking farmers not to pollute the land and not to pollute the rivers, and that is a perfectly rational and civilised ask. We can't go on having nearly 3,000 substantiated agriculture-related pollution incidents over the last 20 years. We've had more than three each week in the last three years. There's been loads of discussion going on between the Minister and representatives of farmers over the last five years, and the farming community has simply not come up with the solution that we need to see. We can't have zones where we have regulation and zones where there is no regulation. You wouldn't expect to see that when it came to a butcher's shop or a hospital—'We'll have a bit of regulation here but not there.' It seems to me that of course we need to listen to our farmers, but I just think that they have been made overanxious, and doing nothing is simply not an option.

Lord Deben, who chairs the Climate Change Committee, is coming to talk to the climate change committee here tomorrow, and he would be pretty shocked if we weren't doing all we needed to do to reduce our emissions. This is one of the ways in which we can do it. Money is available to help small farmers put in suitable places for storing the muck that they need to store. There's always been this phrase that there's money in muck, and I do not understand why it is not possible to make it into a marketable commodity in order to enrich the land and make it easier and better to grow crops on. This seems to me a really significant issue, and I think that the overspecialisation of farming with these mega dairy farms is really going to be a major source of the problem here. We need to ensure that the circular economy applies to farming, just as much as to plastic bottles.

So, I really do hope that we can find some resolution of the fine detail of this problem, but probably not in a 30-minute debate. We need to be looking at this in the climate change committee to see if there's anything here we can do to ensure that small farmers are not going to be put out of business by being compliant with the existing regulations, never mind anything that the Minister thinks we need to do to improve on them. We have to remember that this is all being done in the context of being warned that one third of all the fish and freshwater invertebrates in our fresh waters are due to be exterminated in the not-too-distant future, and, therefore, we have to act now to protect our environment, protect nature and ensure that we have sustainable farming that does not undermine other aspects of our economy.