Speeches by Zeichner.

“I will carry on for a minute. In the time-honoured spirit of scoring political points, I return to the intervention by my hon. Friend the Member for Ealing Southall (Deirdre Costigan), who queried why the Opposition voted against the deposit return scheme. That vote was just a few months ago, in January, when 67 Conser…”

“We absolutely recognise the gravity of the situation, but we believe that the best thing to do is to work with people locally to try to get a solution. It is a complicated situation, as has been outlined by my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham Northfield, and I think we had better concentrate on trying to get a sol…”

“The point we are making is that it is quite extraordinary that the Conservative party in government promoted a piece of legislation that the party in opposition now appears not to support. I am going to move back to fly-tipping, because that is the subject of the debate. We recognise the role of the public in tackling …”

“It is a pleasure to speak with you in the Chair, Mr Stringer. Anyone would think it was election season, would they not? I congratulate the right hon. Member for Aldridge-Brownhills (Wendy Morton) on securing today’s debate and making a thoughtful and considered introduction with a number of questions for me, which I w…”

“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.”

“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.”

“The assessment the Treasury did is detailed in a letter that the Chancellor published to the Treasure Select Committee. I have not seen any evidence to suggest that those figures have changed since then.”

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

“I have not had any communication so far.”

“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…”

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

“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?”

“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.”

“There is unhappiness, clearly, within the agricultural sector about the way they are sometimes treated. But I would not want to characterise the food system as being anything other than actually, overall, successful. We do have a successful food system in this country. I am trying to choose my words carefully here beca…”

“To tax and subsidies?”

“I am not sure I quite follow the question, but basically it is obviously a market-driven system, so it depends essentially on the relationships within the sector. I am perfectly happy to pay tribute to the Chair and his predecessors for intervening in this a decade ago, introducing the Groceries Code Adjudicator and GS…”

“That is one of the legacy European Union schemes; we are currently looking at what we would do to replace that. We are in conversation with people on that, but it was a legacy scheme that came to an end.”

“I suspect that I am going to answer in a similar way on a number of these questions. Some of these issues fall far more within the Department for Business and Trade remit, and that is who the GCA actually is accountable to. But my understanding is the Competition and Markets Authority did do an investigation into super…”