16
Examination of witnesses
Ben Raskin and Ben Malin.
Q218 The Chair: Good morning and thank you for coming along to this evidence session. We will kick off with each of you introducing yourself and saying a little about your organisation. Could you also talk about the greatest risks to soil health and the impacts of that on the horticultural sector?
Ben Malin: I am managing director of the family business EJ Godwin (Peat Industries) Ltd, or Godwins. I am the sixth generation there. We are in a unique position because we are manufacturers of growing media and growers, with a nursery selling hardy nursery stock. I have been in the industry a long time. I was vice-chairman of the Growing Media Association and I sat on the Growing Media Taskforce. I am a director of the responsible sourcing group, an industry scheme to promote responsibly sourced growing media. The industry is absolutely committed to peat reduction. The question is not whether we eliminate peat use, but when.
Ben Raskin: I am the head of horticulture and agroforestry at the Soil Association, a food and farming charity. I have a background in commercial growing. For 12 years I was mostly commercial veg growing, but I also had some nursery stock. I currently project manage agroforestry planting on a 1,500-hectare farm in Wiltshire and write books.
Currently, there are a couple of main threats to soil health. One is growing on lowland fens. There is a massive environmental challenge there, and there are huge opportunities to relocalise some of our vegetable production. We need to keep some of that production on the fenlands. We cannot just cut it off, but it is vital to have a mosaic of production with much more happening around the country and localised supply chains.
The other bit is growers being able to invest in their soil health. At the moment, margins are so low and costs so high that most growers are not able to invest. As a quick example, we did a project with a salad grower in Cambridgeshire who started to incorporate growing a green manure cover crop before his salads. He had not done that before and it worked really well. He got increased water infiltration, better keeping quality in his salads and reduced diesel use because the soil was in better health. Despite all those benefits, his board would not invest in that green manure crop because they could not afford it. Here was a grower who really wanted to do the right thing, but financially the business was not able to do so.
Q219 Baroness Jones of Whitchurch: Ben, you opened the door to my question on when peat will be banned. We know that the retail deadline is 2024 and on the commercial side it is 2026. Obviously, you represent a large number of organisations. We have heard mixed views on those deadlines. Some people said, “We’ve already switched from peat”. Other people say that it is impractical. It would be useful to have your insight on it.
Ben Malin: First, peat extraction impacts on a tiny area of UK peatland. We think there is something like 29,000 square kilometres of peatland in the UK and actual extraction in England is now down to about 3 square kilometres—it is tiny—with another 9 square kilometres in Northern Ireland and Scotland. A lot of the peat we use now is imported.
On where we are with this, the retail ban is difficult, but we have committed to it. We have made an awful lot of progress towards it. The latest figures, for 2022, show that retail is down to something like 16.8% peat in growing media on average across the piece. We have come an awfully long way. The issue with retail is that we have replaced the easiest elements to replace in the mix and are now moving on to the more difficult elements.
It is worth revisiting why we use peat. We do not use it because it is cheap; we now import it from the Baltic, so it is certainly not inexpensive. We continue to use it because we need it. It is stable, consistent and the right bulk density, so it is relatively light and not a heavy product to transport round the country, and it has the chemical characteristics that we need. It has a good cation exchange capacity, which in layman’s terms means that it holds on to fertiliser and lets it go when the plant wants it. To completely replace peat in the retail sector, we need to make sure that the product continues to grow. We cannot sell product that does not grow. There is certainly some inconsistent product in the marketplace. It is very important that the remaining peat is replaced with quality product with similar characteristics. Effectively, that means coir or composted bark.
Until very recently, I gained considerable comfort from the fact that we had a date of 2030 for professional horticulture, so if we needed to pull quality product out of the professional sector to meet that retail target we were able to do it, because of course there are finite quantities of these quality materials, and that is our issue. Fundamentally, our issue is the availability of quality materials. Nobody cuts down trees for bark. Bark fines are a by-product. Coir comes from South Asia—Sri Lanka and southern India. It is a long supply chain and we compete with other markets for it. It would be foolhardy to build an industry in the UK on a product that is entirely imported and that we are very vulnerable to. At the moment, we absolutely need coir. It is a key element in our peat reduction strategy, so I do not want to say that we should not use it at all. I merely point out the potential fragility of that supply chain and the competition from other markets.
On the timescale for the retail ban, as an industry we fully accept that and we are working towards delivering it. A few products will be more difficult, such as ericaceous compost, simply because there are not enough alternatives to peat available in the country. Some seed and cutting composts will be more difficult, too. At a previous stage of discussions, there was talk of exemptions for those products. Those have now gone, so it will be difficult. I have some pretty serious concerns for growers of ericaceous plants. Even if they can continue to use peat, their customers will not be able to buy sufficient ericaceous compost.
The Chair: What is “ericaceous”?
Ben Malin: Acid-loving plants, such as camellias, that grow in acidic conditions. Peat is acidic and most peat alternatives are neutral or slightly alkaline. If you plant an ericaceous plant in an alkaline soil, it will die. My own soil at home is alkaline. I would say, “Don’t worry, I’ll just dig a big hole, fill it with peat and it’ll be all right”. Of course, after three or four years it is not all right. You always lose them. That is the issue with ericaceous plants.
On the professional ban, frankly it is a cliff edge. There are two very minor exemptions, which are 2 centimetres of peat in mushroom casings for mushroom compost and plugs below 150 millilitres. That effectively means the whole industry must be peat-free by 2026. I have come off the phone to my step-father, who started our nursery in 1971 and has been a grower all his life. He said, “It’s just impossible”. The date of 2030 with exemptions was challenging, but to have 2026 dropped on us at this stage is in practical terms impossible. There are a number of reasons for that.
First, there are the timescales. We already have plants in pots that will be sold after 2026. Bigger things take time to grow on. We still do not have legislation or know exactly what form the ban might take. We do not have a definitive date. How can a business make decisions in those circumstances? We are second-guessing what will come out. The timescale means that we are effectively trying to deal with the amateur, retail and professional bans at the same time. We are dealing with an amateur ban for 2024. In 2023 and 2024, we are planting plants to be sold in 2025 and 2026 that potentially, if this follows through, we have to grow in peat-free compost as well. We will not really have a staged process. Before, with 2030, we had time to deal with the retail ban for the amateur sector, see how that worked out and what it did to the supply of raw materials for professional horticulture and work through those issues, but 2026 gives us no time.
Baroness Jones of Whitchurch: Thank you. I am sure you could go on at length. Could we give the other Ben an opportunity to respond? I guess that the Soil Association has a slightly different view.
Ben Raskin: It may be nuanced. I totally understand Ben’s and the industry’s challenges. We have had much stricter restrictions in the organics standards on peat, for instance, for a long time. We have run peat-free trials for certainly the last 15 years. There is a real opportunity to use not just bark but woodchip as compost. I even wrote a book about that as I thought it was such an opportunity. Iain Tolhurst, a grower in Berkshire, who has just got an OBE, has done some great trials where we compared his home-made woodchip compost against a leading peat brand. It performed exactly the same and even did slightly better out in the field. We know we can grow stuff without peat. What we do not have currently is an infrastructure to support that. We built our current infrastructure around peat, so it will take time. Ben is absolutely right that we cannot just suddenly go from using it to entirely peat-free.
There are a couple of challenges. One is supply, as Ben mentioned. If we looked at using the whole of woodchip, not just the bark, we could specifically grow things such as coppicing, where we would have a renewable resource for making it. Some things are definitely easier than others. I was growing peat-free ornamental plants 20 years ago. We can do that. There are some trickier things such as blocking for vegetables, and the ericaceous plants that Ben mentioned. The ban is absolutely right, and we have been calling for it, but we need to support manufacturers and growers to enable that transition.
Q220 Lord Colgrain: Could you both talk a little more about woodchip and the extent to which it is a domestic market that you can see realistically expanding? Which sort of trees are you talking about? To what extent would it be woodchip as opposed to bark? I do not really understand the distinction between the two in this context.
Ben Malin: We use bark fines already. Obviously, we are not growing in chipped bark that you would use as an ornamental mulch. We are also extensively using wood in the peat-replacement process. We use wood fines, which are screenings from chipping—the fine fraction. The industry also uses woodchip in the manufacture of a wood-fibre product. That is basically an extruded woodchip that creates a more fibrous product. We use wood extensively.
The issue with wood products and green compost is that they are active. Stabilising those products is much more difficult and the manufacturing process reactivates them. That means that the microbes in the products are active and when you add fertiliser to them they consume it. You can feel that the products are warm. Peat is thousands of years old and coir is stable: they are cold. These wood products are warm when we process them. We reactivate them even if we stabilise them, as we do, by putting a plant through them under manufacturing conditions.
I completely agree that you can produce very good peat-free compost, and we do. The issues are how much of it we can do and the manufacturing process. We are limited in the amount of wood we can put in because of reactivation and microbial action, which cause nitrogen lock-up. We are overcoming that by putting in three times as much fertiliser as we used to with peat. Of course, that may be regarded as somewhat counterproductive, but it is the route we have been led down.
Ben Raskin: It is really interesting to hear Ben say that. One of the reasons why we thought that the woodchip did better in the field was that biological activity. In organic systems, we look for biology. It is a challenge when you then have a controlled environment and try to eliminate it. That is the point about needing time. We need more research.
On your question about which varieties, we have no idea because no one has properly researched it. The stuff we have been making is actually just from tree surgeons’ waste. As it happens, if you get it biologically active and have a system that can deal with it, it works brilliantly. I absolutely recognise that it might not work in some of Ben’s systems. There are ways forward, but they will not be turned on instantly.
Ben Malin: Doing this on an industry scale is the challenge. We are currently now down to using around 950,000 cubic metres of peat a year. We need to replace that with 950,000 cubic metres more of quality, stable product. If we had it, we would use it.
Q221 Lord Curry of Kirkharle: Following on from that, what are the financial consequences?
Ben Malin: Compost will inevitably be more expensive. That is just a fact. I think everybody involved in this process accepts that will be the case. For the businesses involved, considerable investment is required. For example, a woodchip plant—something I am looking at—is a million-pound investment, give or take. You cannot store peat-free compost in the same way we used to. We used to start manufacturing a high peat content compost in September or October and it would be perfectly good when we sold it in April or May, and probably the following September and October. It lasted.
With peat-free, we must be much more just-in-time. We are looking at sell-by dates and encouraging garden centres to rotate stock. That means that we need more instantaneous capacity. In the spring, during the season, at the moment you rely on the stock you have built. If you cannot do that and have to manufacture just in time, you need much more instantaneous capacity. That means more investment. You need to control the materials, so you need more space. We used to build big stockpiles of peat. You cannot make a big heap and bulldoze a pile of peat-free material that is active and hot because it will catch fire. The infrastructure needed by industry is expensive. That requires investment and obviously that cannot be generated overnight. Yes, there is a cost to the consumer, but first there is a cost to us as an industry.
Baroness Fookes: How much can you scale up the actual product itself? Are you satisfied that you will be able to get sufficient wood to undertake this at large scale?
Ben Malin: The issue we have with wood is that we compete with the subsidised biomass industry. One of our concerns is that we have the potential to be outbid by biomass for the raw material. At the moment, we have sufficient wood, but as we move forward that question is difficult to answer, so it needs to be logged as a concern. I could not say definitely no or yes, but it is certainly a concern.
Baroness Buscombe: We have been told by some in the retail ornamental sector that this will impact hugely on them financially in the short term, given their obvious inability to grow plants for sale during the transition because the time limit has been brought forward.
Ben Malin: As a grower, we have that concern, too. The issue with the timescale is the supply of raw materials—just there physically being enough materials of the right quality—and the R&D. You can only grow two or three trials a year because of seasons, when plants grow and times of year. That is just the way it is with horticulture. You cannot grow under the conditions that a consumer grows under, other than during spring and early summer. The R&D timescale is fitted into two or three cycles a year and we cannot go any faster than that. As materials come forward or we trial new mixes, there is a limit to what we can do in a single year.
As a grower, there is also the import issue. We import stock from France and the Netherlands, which we then pot on, grow through and sell. Some of that will be imported in November and December and we will sell it the following spring or summer. Some of it will sit in pots for two or three years. Our suppliers in France and the Netherlands are nothing like ready for this. We were talking about 2030 and then suddenly it was 2026. I have been involved in the discussions for a long time and I have no hesitation in saying that it was dropped on us. That really gives us an issue in our imports. We import some 30% to 40% of our turnover as value and those plants are all grown in peat. If we lose access to that, it will have an immediate impact on my nursery business. Over time, we can increase our own propagation and scale up, but, again, it needs time and investment, and skilled labour.
Q222 Baroness Walmsley: That brings us nicely to my question, which is about support. Is the industry getting any support? What support are amateur growers getting in the transition? Is there information, knowledge, help and that kind of thing for both professional and amateur?
Ben Malin: Let us start with the amateur sector as that is the pressing issue. Effectively, peat reduction coming down from 90-odd per cent when I was first involved in the industry to 16% in amateur compost now has been achieved by industry itself, by our own investment and efforts. Defra financed some projects. There was the data collection exercise and it has been very helpful on the responsible-sourcing scheme, which was designed to sit alongside the voluntary target, whereby we made sure we were not replacing peat with something equally damaging elsewhere. We looked at things in the round and in balance. That voluntary approach achieved an awful lot.
On information for the consumer, Defra was also involved in that, but undoubtedly the consumer needs to understand a lot more about the difference between peat-based and peat-free compost. For example, there is watering. Peat holds water pretty well. A peat-free compost will dry out on the surface, but scratch the surface and it is often wet underneath. It is easy to waterlog it and to wash out all the fertiliser. It is easy to let it dry out.
Much more effort and knowledge is required on watering. If you use recycled materials, inevitably you will get bits of debris because that is the nature of recycling. If you use wood products, you will get bits of wood. It will not look the same as it used to. I have had stuff from consumers where they sieved out all the bits of bigger fraction sizes and sent them back. I have had them pick out the controlled-release fertiliser, which are little balls we put in to release fertiliser over time and overcome the issue of nitrogen lock-up. They say, “There are eggs in my compost”, or “There are insects laying eggs”, and they send it back to you.
Baroness Walmsley: Those are made of plastic.
Ben Malin: Yes, exactly. It is a microplastic, which is not great. In trying to solve one problem you may create another. The consumer needs more education and we as individual businesses can do only so much. Certainly, the consumer needs more help and understanding. Otherwise, we lose gardeners. They plant their seeds and they do not grow or something goes wrong. Maybe they try again once and then give up, and we lose gardeners for the future. We know how important gardening is in so many ways.
Baroness Walmsley: Who should be doing it: the RHS, “Gardeners’ World”?
Ben Malin: The industry needs to come together on this. Maybe it could be the Growing Media Taskforce, which is an industry body. We could do with some help on it and some explanation. It is beyond what individual businesses can do.
Practically, in terms of finance, there have been no grants or support towards this peat-free drive. We have financed it. All the investment has come from us as an industry. Growers need to work with us and with their individual suppliers on how these products will work. The difficulty with the change of timescale is that we thought we had until 2030, and now as matters stand we probably do not. That is problematic. As I said, we are trying to deal with both sectors at once. There has been no overall help. Defra has been closely involved with the responsible sourcing scheme and has put in staff time, supporting and helping us to move forward with that. In terms of grants for peat-free infrastructure or for increasing our propagation capacity on the nursery, there has been nothing like that.
Another issue we have on the nursery is professional watering. We have a combination of overhead spray watering and capillary beds—sand beds that hold water that the plants draw up as required. With a professional peat-free compost, we probably need to move entirely to capillary-action sand beds, but we still need spray irrigation because we need mist in the air on a belting hot day in August to save the plants. Capillary beds will not stop leaves wilting in high summer. Effectively, you need a duplicate watering system. The amount of investment needed to do this by 2026 means it is not possible.
Baroness Walmsley: Mr Raskin, do you have any comments?
Ben Raskin: I do not have a lot to add. Ben is absolutely right. Moving from peat to peat-free can be a challenge. Certainly, from the work we have done it can take even professional growers a couple of seasons to get used to a new product. More support is definitely needed for amateurs and professionals to enable that change.
Q223 Lord Colgrain: Ben Raskin, can I direct this to you, please? What environmental challenges are presented by artificial pesticides and fertilisers? How can growers be supported to transition to more sustainable approaches?
Ben Raskin: There are huge risks to the environment. There is obviously soil health. Every time you add a pesticide, fungicide or fertiliser to the soil, it has an impact. We are only just beginning to understand some of those impacts. Then you have the impact on insect life and all the other changes. We know that there are challenges. Most growers want to reduce their pesticide and fertiliser use. There is a huge movement of people who might not become organic, because they do not want to go the whole hog, but they definitely want to reduce what they are doing. For instance, a few growers have cut out all pesticides and just use fertiliser. They are starting to realise, “Oh, we don’t need some of this stuff. We’ve been putting it on and our crops are doing all right without”. There is a changing mood. In the same way as with peat, working towards reductions and bans would be helpful in pushing that. We are calling for a 50% reduction by 2030. Having that kind of push from behind would really help focus the mind.
The other bit is supporting and enabling best practice. I know there is a question later about support, but historically horticulture has not been supported. It has always stood on its own. It has fought in the marketplace. That is fine if the returns are there, but they are not any more. The whole horticultural sector is in crisis. If we want growers to be environmental and to look after and build their soil health, they have to be supported and there has to be a system in place to enable them to do that.
We are really disappointed by the dropping of the horticultural strategy. I was co-chair of the Fruit and Vegetable Alliance and the Edible Horticulture Roundtable. We were really optimistic that the strategy would give us a starting block. I do not know what will happen with it. Historically, through countryside stewardship, and it looks the same through the SFI, horticulture has not been understood. It is lumped in with arable and lower-value crops. In horticulture, that does not work. The things they put in place for farming do not work for horticulture. We need that strategy to enable us to identify what can work.
Ben Malin: There needs to be engagement with horticulture on these issues. We can contribute a lot to the discussion and debate, given the opportunity. Soil health is not specifically my field of expertise, but as an industry we have people with a lot of interest and expertise in it. The way the process is progressing effectively ignores horticulture. There needs to be much more engagement with the HTA and other industry bodies on this.
Baroness Jones of Whitchurch: Can I ask a very simple question? We were all expecting the horticulture strategy. Was it ready to go? You might both have been involved in that. Is there a draft out there that someone pulled at the last minute or did it not get to that point? If we pressed the button could it be produced?
Ben Raskin: Not quite. There were two groups: the ornamental sector that Ben is more involved in and the edible group that I was part of. As the Fruit & Vegetable Alliance, we developed a vision and a starting point for a horticultural strategy. I am not suggesting that everything was in there, but it certainly had most of it. We had the British Growers Association, the NFU, the Landworkers’ Alliance and every scale of production involved in it. We worked closely with the Defra horticultural team until they told us that we were not going to have a strategy, at which point we removed ourselves from the process. We are keen to engage. We are not looking for lots of handouts. We feel we have it within our sector, but we need support, a framework and the right policy environment.
Q224 Lord Curry of Kirkharle: Moving on to R&D, science and the crucial issue of soil quality, for obvious reasons we are now focused on the quality of our soil, having neglected it for so long. Is science providing us with the information we need to establish sustainable production with good-quality soil? If not, what needs to be done to improve that?
Ben Raskin: There are two bits, possibly. In an understanding of soil and how it works, particularly soil biology, we have a very fast-moving picture. There is stuff coming out all the time. You go, “Wow, I didn’t know about that”. I heard about a study in Germany, for example, where they grew one species of green manure two, three, four, right up to 36 times in the same soil. They looked at soil diversity and productivity. You would think that it might go up in a straight line, but actually it went up in steps. By the time you got to 36, the productivity of the soil was extraordinary. There is unbelievable productivity because of the diversity in the system. There is stuff like that where we go, “We sort of knew that might happen, but we didn’t really know”.
Much of it is from universities studying science and learning more about soil. That is really important. Even more important is enabling growers to implement that and understand on-farm innovation. In my opinion, far too much of our R&D budget goes into high-tech, robotic solutions on soil and not enough into enabling farmers to do more on the ground. As an example, we run an innovative farmers programme to bring groups of farmers together around a problem. We get in a researcher to help them to design a trial and we find that they are much more likely to implement change. It is cheaper than million-pound university projects, where it is typically £20,000 for a field lab. You can achieve a lot more and make things happen on the ground. Of course, that needs to be supported by other research. Sometimes, on-farm and relatively low-tech innovation will enable more change than lots more money to develop an expensive robot that only a big grower can afford.
Lord Curry of Kirkharle: We have heard concerns expressed about the abolishment of the AHDB horticulture levy. Is that of concern to you?
Ben Raskin: Ben might have a view on this as well. We were disappointed. I do not think it was working properly, so it definitely needed reform. Whether the abolishment was right, I do not know. Historically, ADHB had done little to support organic growers and agroecological production. A lot of it had been about finding replacement chemicals or very niche crop things, as that was how the crop board decision-making process happened. They had started to change that. For instance, we ran a soils programmes for them and they had started to look at some of the more holistic stuff and we felt they were moving in the right direction, so we were disappointed. There is definitely a gap. What seems to be happening is that the big growers are now effectively doing it themselves because they need to. That leaves out small and medium-scale growers with very little access to this stuff. There is a real risk that they will be left behind.
Ben Malin: As a levy payer previously, I was disappointed as well. I felt that it represented our industry and important work was being done. I think that was a mistake.
Q225 The Chair: Can I ask about quality? There is great talk about going to peat-free, but as a consumer I have no idea whether it is peat-free or not. Is there a way of checking? What will the enforcement programme be from Defra?
Ben Malin: Typically, a bag of compost that is peat-free will say so on it. Historically, it has done so up to this point. Now, because we are moving towards everything being peat-free, and in the amateur sector we are down to 16% peat, it is shouted about far less. By the time the ban comes in for the amateur sector—if indeed it comes in—it will be irrelevant, because whatever it says on the bag it cannot have peat in it anyway. I understand that the legislation will allow a de minimis amount, which is necessary, because if you run a manufacturing facility and have professional compost manufactured here and retail there, you will handle it with the same kit and you cannot get 100% separation. Fundamentally, at the point when the ban comes in, everything will be peat-free. I do not think that there is any great risk of that being flouted.
The Chair: What is the enforcement procedure? Do we even know?
Ben Malin: From talking to Defra, I understand that to hold or use peat you will need to register an exemption in the same way that you register a waste exemption, for example, to use waste for whatever reason the exemption allows. You will then have your exemption checked and regulated. Peat is a relatively low-value, bulky product. I do not think people will be smuggling it, although they might be tempted in Scotland. The issue we have is with the Office for the Internal Market and its view that, potentially, a ban in England could not prevent a manufacturer in Scotland or Northern Ireland bringing in product containing peat because of the nature of the internal market. We are waiting for Defra to address that issue. It is a massive fairness issue for an English-based manufacturer.
There is a great variety of quality peat-free product on the market. There are some very good ones and some not at all good ones. As an industry, we recognise that. Compost was traditionally stacked at the garden centre door to draw people in. They would see the three-for-£10 and then they might buy plants, gloves, tools or whatever. You drew them into the garden centre with compost. The perception of compost needs to change. It needs to be regarded as a quality product that is worth money in its own right.
At the office, we have on the wall a 1989 price list. Our wholesale price for an 80-litre bag of compost was £5.99 and for a 50-litre bag was less than £3—I will not tell you exactly how much. Compost has become a low-value product over the past 30 or 40 years and that perception needs to change. Quality is one of my main concerns in this process. I do not know whether committees can do this, but if you would like to come and see us in Somerset to look at our nursery and manufacturing site, you could touch and feel the product. I could show you our growing trials and the product growing, with different constituent elements in it. The invitation is open to the committee.
The Chair: Thank you. Finally, should there be a quality control scheme? If so, who should run it?
Ben Malin: As an industry, we have been talking about this. We think it is very important. One of our concerns is that quality needs to be maintained throughout the process. There is a risk that quality will go backwards, as I said, and that consumers will be put off. In my opinion, it needs to be an industry-wide scheme; not just manufacturers but retailers and growers need to buy in. Growers have an individual contractual arrangement with their supplier. If it does not grow, you know about it. It is much more important for the consumer to have a quality-assured scheme. To sell a compost, a growing media, it must meet a minimum standard. We have been talking to Defra about that as an industry.
Baroness Buscombe: This may not be helpful, but we asked a previous witness about the possibility of recycling peat. I gather there is an issue with licensing because it is licensed as waste. Would it be practical to be allowed to do that?
Ben Malin: There are two issues with that. We as an industry, and I in particular, have been involved in discussions with Defra on what constitutes peat for the purposes of legislation. Neither we nor Defra would want to see a situation where, let us say, someone building a housing development or marina on peat soil could not use it. If peat soil came from there, it should be able to be used. I understand that that will not be captured, although I have not seen the legislation yet and nor has anybody other than Defra. Recycling peat is a trickier process. That brings me on to the waste regime.
You would not have thought that the Environment Agency and the soils team were effectively in the same government department. It is difficult to imagine an organisation with more disparate responsibilities than the Environment Agency. Who thought it was a good idea to have an organisation controlling waste and rivers? I have absolutely no idea. We have been trying to engage with the Environment Agency over the waste regime. I do not pretend that this is the whole answer, but there could be a relaxation of the waste regime on the raw materials we use. That will not necessarily help with professional horticulture, but in the amateur sector, with the right controls—frankly, we want to control what goes in our bags—it will help.
At the moment, there is a lot of difficulty with end of waste, the waste recovery process and environmental permitting. The exemptions regime for waste lets us have an exemption for the use of waste in manufacture. We are allowed 100 tonnes of a product at any one time. We use that up in an afternoon and we are not a big manufacturer. It disappeared into the black hole of the Environment Agency, but I suggested creating a specific exemption for the use of waste in the manufacture of growing media. That would be an option that would help us, but from my experience the Environment Agency is a very difficult organisation to engage with, where nobody appears to want to make a decision.
Baroness Buscombe: That is very helpful, thank you.
The Chair: Every sector has raised waste and the Environment Agency.
Ben Malin: I am sure it has.
Q226 Lord Carter of Coles: You both touched on this, but what is your assessment of government schemes to promote sustainable horticultural practices and improve the product and soil? Ben Raskin, you might like to comment on why you think the Government dropped the horticultural strategy altogether. You touched on that earlier.
Ben Raskin: Clearly, I do not believe that they support the horticultural sector, given the fact that we do not have a strategy. I have no idea why they dropped it, I really do not. I do not understand why a sector that takes up only 4% of the land area but is 25% of the monetary value of agriculture is not supported more. I find that bizarre. It is such a thriving, innovative sector that generates so much revenue that I do not quite understand why they cannot get their heads around it. Clearly, there might be some political issues around labour and immigration that play into it. In my sector, the edible sector, there are huge opportunities to increase our market share in certain areas.
There is a real issue with the overdominance of the supermarket supply chain. That is one reason why prices are kept so low. We have an obsession in this country with very low prices for produce, and for peat and plants. We cannot be seen to have expensive food. That is then seen as a problem for the growers, who feel guilty about raising their prices. They feel that they should support people to eat. Everybody wants to do that, but it is no reason to make growers go out of business. I find it very strange.
There is a more fundamental issue about the understanding of horticulture. It is difficult, because it is very diverse. What Ben does is very different from a field veg grower, which is different from a cucumber grower. There are lots of different sectors, each with its own challenges. As another example, you are probably aware of a scheme where you can get support as a farmer for buying equipment. Again, it is bizarre. Defra comes to us and says, “Can you recommend machinery that might be needed by growers?” They create a list of machinery that might be needed and that is the official list. If it is not on the list, you cannot get support for it. We all go through this slight panic of, “Oh, I’ve got to try and get everything on”.
Actually, growers know what they need. If you just said, “Here’s some support. You choose what is useful for your business”, we would cut out a whole load of bureaucracy. Then there are regulations within that. You have to get three quotes for a piece of machinery. That is fine if you are talking about a big drill to sow arable crops. If you are talking about a specialist apple harvesting machine, there might be only one manufacturer or you might have to get it made bespoke. That is a real issue. You are not allowed to buy second-hand machinery, so you end up buying new machinery. They push the prices up, so that even though you are paying only 50% you probably pay more than you would for a second-hand bit of kit anyway. There are all these things around it that just show a total, fundamental lack of understanding about horticulture.
That is why we were so excited about a strategy. We thought, “Finally, we’re going to be able to set it all out and have some vision”. Where is the horticultural training? I did my training 30 years ago. There were 30 of us on a production horticulture course. When, 15 years later, I was commercial manager at the Welsh College of Horticulture, there were two full-time production students in the college—two. We were managing three acres of glasshouse for two students. Now that college has disappeared. Where is the overall strategy? How will we build our sector? If we cannot import labour, how will we train our own team? There are so many issues and, it seems, so little real will from the Government to support us. Rant over, sorry.
Ben Malin: I have a couple of points. To start with, in some ways as a business we have never been less environmentally responsible. We used to take peat from next to our factory, combine it with some other products that all came from within five miles, manufacture the compost and distribute it. Now I have coir from India, wood fibre from round the country, and woodchip. I bring it in, reconstitute the coir with machinery powered by diesel. I chip wood with diesel and process that stuff. Then I put it in a bag and put in three times as much oil-based fertiliser. I am not at all sure that we have gone the right way with this, but successive Governments decided that peat reduction was the way to go.
I think that the responsible sourcing scheme, which we worked with government to set up, has done a fantastic job in driving peat reduction. We are down to 15% in the amateur market and some 40% in professional. I really wonder whether it is necessary to legislate at all. I would say that, wouldn’t I? But is it really a good use of parliamentary time? Given what we have achieved voluntarily and the problems of tackling these difficult final sectors, would it really be that bad if we used 10% peat in the whole market in the long run? Would that be so problematic? I wonder why the collaborative approach has been abandoned in favour of a legislative ban and a cliff face.
Lord Carter of Coles: How much has the industry not done a good enough job in representing itself?
Ben Malin: We have struggled to represent ourselves. I put my hand up to that. The industry has always taken the attitude of, “Don’t stick your head above the parapet, because someone will shoot at it”. We should shout more about the great work we have done in peat reduction, the fantastic progress we have made and how important this industry is. As manufacturers of growing media, we underpin a huge amount of the industry—the people who make seeds, the people selling plants, the growers and the people selling tools. For a lot of these things, it all starts with compost and putting things in a bag, whether professional or retail. There is a good-news story to be told that has not been told and we have to take a share of responsibility for that.
Lord Curry of Kirkharle: From your comments, I detect that as an industry, as you have both said, you have lived without support. You are an unsupported sector. You have always solved your own problems and just dealt with them. Listening to your comments, I detect that you now feel that to some extent that is backfiring, in that you are not recognised by government as an industry that needs support.
Ben Malin: I completely agree. That is absolutely right. I go back to my point about competing for woodchip with a supported biomass sector. It is incredibly frustrating.
Lord Curry of Kirkharle: Indeed. The other Ben touched on this. Have we lost the science base we need? Is it still there or can it be reinvigorated? With the closure of various sites, institutions and research centres, is there sufficient capacity in our science and research to support our sector?
Ben Raskin: There is probably still a lot. It has not disappeared entirely, but clearly it needs investment and support. Ben touched on one fundamental thing in that he gets less for his product than he did 30 years ago. It is the same with vegetable producers. I remember visiting a vegetable grower 20 years ago. He had a lovely farmhouse and said, “We built this farmhouse on two really good years of sales 10 years ago. I’m now getting less than I was 10 years ago”. He is still getting less, 20 years on.
As a sector, in a way we were quite happy to be unsupported, because it gave us the ability to innovate and move forward, but that could only happen when there was enough margin in the system to allow us to reinvest in the business and do the R&D. We now have this perfect storm of increased costs, labour challenges and this, that and the other, and there is nothing left. We need to get back to a situation where we pay properly for what we buy or to be supported as other sectors are. As Ben said, we are competing against other subsidised industries.
There is still great horticultural science. Institutions are starting to be interested in it again. Writtle is starting to do more commercial horticulture. We have run growers’ apprenticeship schemes in the past. Loads of people want to come into horticulture. Particularly at the small scale, it is seen as attractive. A lot of quite political people come in. They want to change the world and see this as really important. They want to work in small-scale, agroecological and organic community-supported agriculture. We could have all that around the country, which would build that capacity. They would all need to study and go to college. There are opportunities to rebuild but it needs support.
Ben Malin: We have a tie-up with a local college. I employ as a consultant its head of horticulture, who is an RHS-qualified lecturer. He works on our growing trials and R&D. Some of the students come to do work experience. We are paying one to run this year’s growing trial. It has been a source of labour for us, for work on the nursery. I believe the appetite is there. A lot of people regard horticulture as a vocation, so they will stay with it as long as they possibly can. The opportunity is there to rebuild it, but it needs driving. We can only do so much as one business with a local college. It is sad for horticulture that it has not been properly recognised and because of what has been lost.
Q227 The Earl of Arran: What will happen to someone who is found using peat after 2030? Will it be treated as cocaine?
Ben Malin: Good question. To be honest, I am not sure. We will have to see what the penalties are when they eventually publish some legislation for us to look at. I do not know. I guess that to start with they would have their exemption removed. Then they would not be able to touch it at all. I am not sure.
The Earl of Arran: Who advised the Government on this movement to ban peat?
Ben Malin: Ironically, they had a stakeholder meeting where the manufacturers were asked to define peat for the purposes of a ban and how the legislation might work, and to suggest how the exemptions might work. I sat in a room with Defra and, with my colleagues from the industry, contributed to how it might work.
The Earl of Arran: So it is your fault.
Ben Malin: Absolutely. Turkeys voting for Christmas, perhaps. If there is to be a ban, it is in our interests to have legislation that works. The Dangerous Dogs Act is the example people always give. Obviously, we have worked with Defra for a long time and we will continue to be as constructive as possible, even when we fundamentally disagree, as we do on 2026.
Q228 The Earl of Arran: Other than telling the Government to think again, what recommendation would you suggest this committee make to them?
Ben Malin: Any recommendation that you make about peat can only be about thinking again. Clearly, there are recommendations to be made around supporting horticulture as a whole, education and the story of what we have achieved as an industry in both peatland restoration and peat reduction so far. All those things could be recommended, but the fundamental point is that 2026 will not and cannot work. We need to go back to 2030 with realistic exemptions, and we need to try to protect elements of the retail sector such as ericaceous plants. I am afraid that, from my perspective, it comes down to telling them to think again.
Ben Raskin: Obviously, a horticultural strategy would be great, as would a decent proportion of ELMS for horticulture. More specifically, I would love to see proper levels of investment in grower-led research and development, and on-farm trials.
The Chair: Thank you for that thoroughly interesting meeting. It has been really useful. That is the end of the session.
