Agriculture Bill

Debate between Baroness Young of Old Scone and Lord Inglewood

Committee stage & Committee: 3rd sitting (Hansard) & Committee: 3rd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 14th July 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Young of Old Scone (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, I support Amendment 122 in the name of my noble friend Lord Grantchester and I thank the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, for bringing forward his amendments. We are standing at a watershed for farming and land management. We cannot underestimate the scale of change that this Bill denotes. We need to fund an effective advisory process to support farmers and land managers through what could otherwise be cataclysmic changes. Over the past 30 years we have seen the erosion and virtual disappearance of what was, in early days, a systematic advisory support service, which had developed to support farming improvements in the post-war era. Most farming advice is now provided by commercial agronomists with products to sell or by fragmented single-focus organisations. Advice needs to cover not only technical and productivity improvements but ecological literacy. The scale and ambition of the changes the Bill proposes and the multiple functions we need land to deliver show that the time has come again for a comprehensive and joined-up approach to advisory services, and for the funding to deliver that. I hope the Minister can support this.

[Lord Inglewood [V]]

My Lords, being a farmer, over the past two or three years I have had to think very carefully about my activities in future. In my case, I have one specific and really quite complicated land use problem—or perhaps I should say challenge—to deal with. The way in which I have approached it is to take a certain amount of specialist advice. In simple terms, that advice has been paid for by the BPS payment I received. As all your Lordships know, the BPS payment is to be cut and the effect is that the money that otherwise would pay for advice may well not be there.

My example is not particular to me; a lot of farmers are thinking seriously about what they have to do next. They will have to take external advice, probably now—it is no good waiting until the changes come into effect before you decide what to do. What you have to do is think about the future, work on the basis of what we know about the general rules and regulations that will be in place and plan a course. In all sorts of ways, this is something which many farmers cannot do. Of course, if you are going to take advice, you have to pay for it. When the BPS is cut back, individual farms’ resources to do that will be curtailed. I suggest to the Committee, and through it to the Minister, something which I have mentioned to his private office. Instead of simply cutting pieces off the BPS payment until ELMS comes into being, it should be possible for that money to be drawn down from individual farms and hypothecated to get the advice necessary to prepare the farmers for the future world that will come. Otherwise I fear a lot of farms will not do enough homework, which will be to the detriment of not only British agriculture but Britain as a whole.