Speeches by Zeichner.

“I very much understand that, and I am very aware of it on a daily basis, I can tell you.”

“A lot of time has been spent discussing pollack over the last few years, and I will probably bring my expert colleagues in. But immediately I would say that part of the problem is that the advice is that it is not necessarily thriving, and that is what we have to follow. That then leads us into the complex issue of cho…”

“I totally understand people’s frustration with this, and believe you me, I share the frustration too, because we basically inherited a scheme that did not have a mechanism for resolving and prioritising.”

“As you will appreciate, this is a matter for the Treasury, and the Treasury Minister has been in constant dialogue over the last few months. There was a measure introduced in the Budget, and we stand by it.”

“I have not had any communication so far.”

“We want to look closely to make sure it provides good value for money. Obviously, decisions that devolved Governments make are their decisions, we do not always take the same decisions.”

“I think you will find there have been a lot of debates in this place.”

“As I say, Chair, I believe we have robust supply chains, and I encourage people to have a reasoned dialogue, very much as we have had this morning, about the way forward for the future. The overwhelming message should be that this is a really important sector all the way through the food chain. It does a magnificent jo…”

“That is a very good question, which I will go away and see if we can find the answer to. I suspect, as in so many other things, that there is always more that we can do, but of course we are dependent to some extent on international advice.”

“I understand the point you are making. What I would just gently say is there is a fairly clear legal system around labelling, and labelling should not be inaccurate. Where it is inaccurate, there is a legal issue. But we are, as you rightly say, looking very closely at the whole issue of labelling and it should always …”

“Absolutely, and that is why we will use this period before opening up the new scheme to tackle this kind of issue. The question I find myself asking is how that scheme could have been introduced in that kind of way in the first place, but that is what we had. The choice we had at any point was, whenever we said it is n…”

“Indeed, rumours were beginning to circulate, and because of that we then had to act, which is the responsible thing to do.”

“Thank you for inviting us this morning. I am Daniel Zeichner. I am the Minister for Food Security and Rural Affairs.”

“Well, two things. As I say, it is actually directly a DBT responsibility, but my understanding is that there is a current review under way, the fourth statutory review, which began on 20 March 2025. I am told that Ministers in the DBT are still finalising the exact arrangements for the review, but it is in line with th…”

“It does not tell the whole story, because we are working, as I say, within the legislative framework that was agreed by Parliament under the Fisheries Act. Our task is to make those judgments.”

“It absolutely does, but it shows the complexity of the decisions that are being made. As a Minister, I can only follow the scientific advice we are being given.”

“May I look to you for that one, Mike?”

“Again, I would say this can be raised as part of the current review that is going on. Alongside that, we have the new regulations that are coming in that deal with the Agricultural Supply Code Adjudicator. But I hear the point about the wider issues, and I am certainly happy to look at that if evidence comes from your …”

“To some extent, you are right. But that is why I go back to the starting point on this. We have moved from a scheme where 80,000 farm enterprises were all entitled through the basic payment scheme to get resource, to a different approach. This was the consequence of the Agriculture Act and the move to that system. Theo…”

“I totally sympathise and understand the situation people found themselves in, but when you look at the complexity of these different schemes and the inter-relationship between them, we need to design a better system so that people can understand how it works and what the risks are. We need to decide how we allocate mos…”