Pembrokeshire farmers deserve a break

Pembrokeshire’s farmers, already badly hit by plummeting milk prices are about to be hit again, this time with new regulations on the way they spread slurry on their land. Bear with me on this question which on the face of it is not one to gladden the heart. But believe me it has the potential to do enormous harm to farmers and our way of life in Pembrokeshire.

 

Farmers should have the option on when they spread their slurry

Every four years the Cleddau river catchment, which covers about 80 per cent of Pembrokeshire’s land area, is tested for nitrates that are largely caused by farm waste flowing into the water system. If they are too high they cause the growth of algae and other harmful organisms. In turn this upsets the fish and plant life that depend on the health of the waters in Milford Haven and the Marine Special Conservation Area beyond.

When the rivers were last tested in 2012 the nitrate levels almost reached the point where the Welsh Government would have been obliged to impose severe restrictions. The farming unions are resigned to this happening at the beginning of next year. Any day now a 12-week consultation period will be launched, followed by an appeals period, with restrictions likely to come into force from January 2017.

If a Nitrates Vulnerable Zone is declared it will have had a massive impact on the 1,800 Pembrokeshire farms that operate within the river catchment area. Farmers will be prevented from spreading slurry on their land between October and February, the winter months when most rainfall occurs. They will be required to ensure they have a capacity to store six months worth of slurry produced by their farms. And they will have to keep strict records of their nitrate discharges.

These new obligations and their costs could be enough to tip many farm operations, already running desperately close to going under, over the edge. Irreparable harm would be done, not just to the lives of the farming families but also to Wales’s agricultural industry. After all Pembrokeshire produces 25 per cent of the Wales’s dairy output and 50 per cent of our potato crop.

So what can be done? In the first place the Welsh Government must produce firm evidence that it is farm slurry that is the sole cause of the harmful nitrate levels. There could be other contributors, such as the Pembroke Power Station which abstracts water from the Haven for cooling, returning it at higher temperatures.

If restrictions are imposed they should be done voluntarily, in ways that mitigate their impact. There could be a collaborative approach between the farmers, the Welsh government and Natural Resources Wales. Farmers could be left to decide themselves when weather conditions allow for spreading slurry on their land. After all July and August can be exceedingly wet months and there are times when October or January can be relatively dry. There should be greater efforts to separate clean and dirty water on farms. For instance, rain run-off from the roofs and yards of farms should be prevented from flowing into slurry containers, with the result that they fill up and overflow.

Such an approach would be less easy to monitor and enforce than the imposition of strict controls. However, the gains for the farmers and the Pembrokeshire’s economy would make it worthwhile. Our farmers deserve the chance to make it work.

Tory split threatens Pembrokeshire in the EU

Ian Duncan Smith - "crocodile tears"

In the best part of a lifetime reporting on politics I cannot recall when a Conservative government was so bitterly divided. Ian Duncan Smith’s resignation last week was merely a surface manifestation of a fissure that runs deep through the party. I don’t buy Duncan Smith’s crocodile tears that his resignation was prompted by the proposed welfare cuts in the budget shambles. He has too much form of implementing cuts on the poorest in society over the past six years for that.

No, this was all about Europe. The headline in the Daily Express told you all you needed to know: “Tory split helps fight to free us from Brussels”. The Tory divisions are inevitably weakening the Yes side in the forthcoming referendum. Many voters still to make up their minds will undoubtedly take a lead from the Prime Minister and his Chancellor of the Exchequer. Their authority has been unquestionably been undermined by the events of the last week. And to that extent the strength of those arguing to remain inside the EU has been weakened as well.

Certainly, Pembrokeshire stands to lose heavily if by some misfortune Britain was to vote to leave the EU. First in the firing line would be our farmers. Wales will benefit by £1.7 billion between now and 2020 by Common Agricultural Policy Payments that support more than 80 per cent of farms. Moreover, if we were to leave, farmers would face tariff barriers at the borders of the EU which accounts for nearly the whole of our beef and lamb exports.

As for tourism, so vital for the Pembrokeshire economy, we have benefited from investment in developments such as the coastal path, while European water directives have ensured cleaner waters and beaches around our coast.

The fact is that Wales benefits from EU membership more than any other part of the UK, and within Wales our western rural areas and the Valleys benefit most of all. Wales is due to receive more than £3 billion of EU investment between 2014 and 2020, while Welsh exports to the EU will be worth in the region of £5.4 million.

Few would argue against dualling the 23 miles of the A40 between St Clears and Haverfordwest. It was proposed a decade ago but was put on ice by the Labour government in Cardiff which had other priorities. The only improvement since then has been the Robeston Wathen by-pass, completed in 2011 at a cost of £41.4 million. This was hugely necessary and indeed was first promised as long as the 1950s. The by-pass cut out an acute bottleneck in the village itself and removed an accident blackspot at Canaston Bridge. The European Convergence Fund contributed £20 million, nearly half the cost. Without it I very much doubt whether the by-pass would have been built. It’s just another example of how continued EU membership is so vital to Pembrokeshire’s interests.

Forgotten lessons from the Sea Empress

It’s hard to believe that it was 20 years ago last Monday that the Sea Empress became stranded at the entrance to Milford Haven, causing a spillage of 72,000 tones of crude oil and catastrophic damage to the Pembrokeshire coast. Thousands of seabirds were killed and 120 miles of beaches were contaminated, stretching from St Brides Bay around the southern Pembrokeshire coast and into Carmarthen.  Some beaches were buried under a foot of oil. And although the immediate cleanup took place remarkably quickly, at a cost of £60m, it took the best part of a decade before the ecology of the shoreline fully recovered.

 

Sea Empress stranded off St Ann'e Head at the entrance Milford Haven

Such anniversaries always raise the question: could it happen again? Much has improved. In particular a much enhanced port control operation and command structure means the immediate circumstances that led to the spillage would be unlikely to recur. An inexperienced pilot was allowed to guide the Sea Empress in and took her too close to the north shore which led to the grounding. That was on a late Friday evening. By the middle of the following day only about 250 tons of oil had been lost, five Milford Haven tugs had managed to free her from the rocks and there was an option to tow her further out to sea away from immediate danger. The imminence of a Force 9 gale made this a pressing necessity.

The pilot aboard the Sea Empress radioed the Port Authority’s Control Room to ask permission from the Harbour Master and received the following, now infamous reply: “I agree with you but I have a room full of men saying No.” They included men from the salvagers, the oil and insurance companies, the coastguard, and the Department of Transport Pollution Control Unit. Their collective and soon to be mistaken view was that the Sea Empress could be emptied of her cargo where she was and then towed to safety.

In the event the Force 9 gale duly arrived, the towlines connecting the tugs broke and the Sea Empress was thrown about the rocks for twelve hours, losing most of her cargo of crude in the process. As I say, lessons have been learnt from the decisions that led up to this disaster.

But in another respect thre lessons are being forgotten. In the wake of the disaster, emergency towing vessels with much greater capacity than those operating in the Haven, were put in place around the coast of the United Kingdom - at Dover, Orkney, Stornoway, and Falmouth, the last providing cover for the Welsh coast.

However, in 2011 the Conservative government scrapped this fleet, as a cost saving measure, although one tug in Orkney won a reprieve until March this year.  Questioned about this last week, the Maritime and Coastguard Agency said, “The government believes that responsibility for ensuring the operational safety of ships is properly a matter for the commercial shipping industry, working in partnership with the tug and salvage industries. It does not believe that it is appropriate for the taxpayer to fund this provision."

Meanwhile, other European countries, including Spain, France, Norway and Germany are maintaining government financed emergency towing vessels. And, of course, since the Sea Empress disaster we have much larger vessels coming into Milford Haven, carrying liquefied natural gas, a much more unstable and dangerous cargo. We’ll just have to hope that this further example of the Conservative government’s ideologically-driven cost-cutting doesn’t end-up in a false economy of cataclysmic proportions.

The real question in the European referendum

 If John Redwood, MP for Wokingham and former Secretary of State for Wales was Prime Minister then I’m sure Stephen Crabb would be campaigning for us to leave the EU. Redwood, of course, is the high priest of England’s sovereignty as expressed through Parliament and an arch hater of Brussels and all its works. Stephen Crabb was of a similar persuasion when he first entered Parliament in 2005. Certainly, like most of his fellow intake into the House of Commons in that year he was firmly on the Euro-sceptic wing of his party.

However, since Crabb became Secretary of Sate for Wales in July 2014 he has adopted what he calls David Cameron’s centrist position on Europe. Last week he gave a speech to the Cardiff Business Club urging a Yes vote in the forthcoming referendum based on the Prime Minister’s renegotiation of the terms of Britain’s membership.

Yet the matters being renegotiated are peripheral to the fundamental concerns at stake over Britain’s continued membership. These are to do with the economy, trade, jobs, the future of farming and above all Britain’s security in the world. The matters being negotiated – the opt-out from the Euro, Brussels red tape, the meaning of “ever closer union”, and benefits claimed by migrants – are insignificant by comparison. They are just a smokescreen to give Cameron an excuse to campaign in favour of a Yes vote, against the views of most of his party.

Security was always the main purpose of European unification and that continues to this day. The main prize was peace following the two catastrophic European civil wars that disfigured the first half of the last century. To be fair to Stephen Crabb he acknowledged this in his speech last week. This is what he said: “My late father-in-law grew up in Nazi-occupied Paris and was a teenager in 1945 when the war ended. He and I used to argue a lot about the future of Europe back in the late 1990s just before he died. For him, and for so many people of that generation including many here in the UK, the emergence of the European Union was a matter of cementing the peace in Europe and guaranteeing economic security. And it became for him and so many others an article of faith. What they lived through and what they saw meant this faith was unshakable.”

Crabb went on to say that though he respected this view it was not how his generation thinks: “The world that shaped my own political outlook has been one which has seen the rapid internationalisation of markets and the extraordinary global digital and communications revolution which has changed forever how we work and how we live.”

But in this globalising world we still need the security that European unity offers. Just take the challenge of terrorism. Tools such as the European Arrest Warrant, the European Criminal Records Information System and the Terrorist Finance Tracking System are essential in preventing and responding to terrorist activity throughout the continent.

And the basic question still remains, which is at the heart of the referendum debate and which Stephen Crabb is wrong to think is now just part of history and not relevant to the present day. Do we want to see a continent in which there is German roof over Europe, or one where there is a European roof over Germany? I know the answer to that question.