Ms Christine Tacon:

I suppose Deputy Stanley is asking me for an opinion, because it is not something that I do. In my role, I do not engage in price at all. I have been fairly strong in the United Kingdom because many people felt when the role was created, that it was not going to make any difference.

I hear so many suppliers say to me that they did not think I would make a difference but I have. They thank me for doing so. Just as with the EU unfair trading practices regulations, I was able to make a difference because of ten years of lobbying, working teasing it out, and creating something that really could make a difference. I was able to work intensely with those ten retailers. Things would have been different if I had been given the whole supply chain in one go, as the Deputy proposes. That would involve doing the job at a completely different level. I felt that because what I was working on was making a difference, there was a danger of being given a huge amount of further concerns to work on. This might have caused the system to fail on the bit where it has already succeeded. All along I have been quite wary of people who propose to give me a lot more to do because my job works, or propose to expand my remit to the 8,000 suppliers to the retailers and the 100,000 people who supply them. If that happened, the job would have to be done very differently.

All I can really say is that because there has been such pressure from primary producers in the UK to provide some protection, it is foreseen that something to that effect will be included in the agriculture Bill to be introduced after Brexit. People will be able to go to the Rural Payments Agency and get some sort of redress. That is not going down very well with farmers, who would prefer me to do it. At the moment it is foreseen that these will be two separate remits in the UK. If we overload something that is working with too big a task, there is a danger that we will not make the progress we have been making.