AGRICULTURAL MARKETING ACTS, 1931 AND 1933. (Hansard, 5 July 1934)

§ Mr. SKELTON

I beg to move, That the Scheme under the Agricultural Marketing Acts, 1931 and 1933, for the regulation of the marketing of milk in the North of Scotland, a draft of which was presented to this House on the seventeenth day of May, nineteen hundred and thirty-four, be approved. This Scheme deals with the Northern area being applicable to the counties of Inverness, Nairn, Ross and Cromarty and Caithness. In general structure, it is on the same model as the Aberdeen milk scheme to which the House gave approval a few months ago. In this Scheme, as in the Aberdeen scheme, but unlike the schemes in the South of Scotland and in England, the ordinary milk supply, what is called the basic supply, is dealt with separately from the surplus supply. It is easy to do that both in Aberdeen and in the area of this scheme, not for any of the reasons which I am sure the hon. Members opposite have in mind, but because this area, like the Aberdeen area, is not mainly a dairying country, and therefore there are none of the risks of great flushes and floods of milk such as you get sometimes in the South-West of Scotland and in the West of England.

We deal separately with the ordinary, normal basic supply of milk and fix the standard price for that, and deal separately with the surplus, so that there is no indication that the surplus will ever be of such a size as to be a serious menace to the finances and economy of the industry, whereas hon. Members in all parts of the House know that the great problem before the main Milk Board for the South of Scotland and the Milk Board for England is the fact that you have this large surplus, which is at present only used for manufacturing. The larger the surplus, which can only attract a very small price, the greater the danger of the price of liquid milk rising and having to rise. That danger does not exist here, and I would like to add that, by keeping in separate accounts the basic supply, which is for liquid consumption, and the surplus supply, you reduce any risk that there might be of an increased production, because there is no such 2202 surplus production just now as would bring menace and danger to the ordinary basic amount, and by keeping these categories of milk separate, you reduce the risk of an increased production. I think that follows inevitably from the separation of the basic supply from the surplus. That is the only point of substance in the scheme, which has already been before the House, in effect, in the Aberdeen scheme.