Rural Economy

Earl of Caithness Excerpts

Thursday 19th December 2024 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Caithness (Con)]

My Lords, in our short debate on the 15 October, I was struck by the positivity of most of the speakers for the rural economy and the potential that it offered. In today’s debate, the right reverend Prelate, to whom we are all grateful for introducing this debate so well and so fully, picked up on those ideas of positivity. I so agreed with the phrase that he used: it is time for a strategy for the rural economy. That was the title of the report of this House in 2019, and I was privileged to serve on the committee.

There are undoubted opportunities. The right reverend Prelate reminded us of the gap in productivity between rural and urban areas. It is worth looking at the proportion of gross value added. In England, it is only 16%, whereas in Scotland it is 26% and in Wales it is 28%. Would the Minister get in touch with the devolved Administrations and find out whether there is any potential from up there and over west that could be used in England to improve the productivity and increase the percentage of GVA?

What has changed between now and the debate we had only two months ago? There has been a very significant change: we have had a Budget. The Budget was so beautifully described by Sir James Dyson as

“an egregious act of self-harm”.

The enthusiasm and potential that I thought the rural community had for this Government has been squashed. Small businesses, which the Minister in a recent letter to me described as the beating heart of the high street, were taxed with extra costs, burdens and bureaucracy—the very things that rural businesses do not want if they are going to thrive in the modern world.

A small but very important percentage of people in rural areas are farmers. In our debate on the Budget and small farms the other day, I listed all the extra taxes that the current Chancellor had imposed on farmers. The cumulation of that is the complete lack of confidence in the Government on the part of farmers, and a reduction of the incentives farmers have to plan for the future. It must be a very difficult time for farmers.

Combine that with the fact that climate change is making a third of our clay-based soils in lowland England unfarmable and it is going to have a very large effect on the productivity of farms and the ability to feed ourselves. Food security is one of the things that the Government thought was important before the election. How are the Government going to square the circle of making our food supply more secure, at the same time as berating those who are actually producing it?

In the debate two months ago, I mentioned Project Gigabit, and the right reverend Prelate picked that up earlier. I would add a different aspect to that: the download speed for internet. In rural areas, 5% of the community cannot get a download speed of 10 Mbps, whereas this is only 1% in urban areas. With so much having to be done on the computer now, unless you have a good download speed you are in serious trouble. Could the Minister address Project Gigabit and give us a bit more detail of how she plans to increase the availability of good broadband and social media supply in rural areas?

Another question I asked in our debate two months ago was about the size of Defra staff. Yesterday, I was emailed a written reply. As it is not in the Library, I will quote the first sentence. Our report in 2019 said that there were 60 staff. The reply says:

“It is complex to place a specific figure on the exact number of colleagues in DEFRA who work on Rural policy, given the wide-ranging nature of rural policy and that rural-proofing of Government policy is a cross-DEFRA and cross-Government effort”.


Sir Humphrey would be proud of that.

As the Minister takes her train home for Christmas—I hope she has a lovely, relaxing time—and looks out of the window at all the farms, will she consider that 50% of those farmers earn under £25,000 a year, yet her train driver probably earns three times as much? As she will be on an Avanti train, will she also think, as she looks at the stock farms and the farmers who are working 365 days a year, that these Avanti workers are about to go on strike over rest days?