Agriculture (Delinked Payments and Consequential Provisions) (England) Regulations 2023

Earl Peel Excerpts

Wednesday 13th December 2023 Lords Chamber

Any new system of farm regulation needs to support farmers, while also protecting the rural environment by reducing our agricultural pressures on soil, water, air, landscape features, hedgerows and stone banks—the Minister is very aware of this and I know he believes that this is very important. But one other thing that has come up is the lack of general awareness within the farming community about the transition from BPS to delinked payments. Again, it would be interesting to know, as we move into the new system, how the Government are looking to raise awareness of farmers’ obligations under the new system. Farmers need clarity, and they need to know how to plan for the future, so I am looking to the Minister for further assurance that the instrument will neither lead to a reduction of proper enforcement nor introduce regulatory gaps that could result in undermining our existing environmental protections. I beg to move.

[Earl Peel (CB)]

My Lords, I declare an interest as the manager of an upland estate in North Yorkshire. I am grateful to the Minister for explaining the new regulations, although, like many other people, I still find them vague and difficult to comprehend. The noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, raises some fundamental issues. Under the previous regulations—under the basic payment scheme and Pillar 1—there was a general standard of environmental well-being throughout the countryside, which was generally welcomed by most farmers. Under the new ELMS arrangement, that will be lost. It strikes me that a lot of public money has gone into Pillar 1 under the original system that will now be lost, and I cannot see that that is good value for money. My question is this: under the new ELMS system, is there any way to have a basic standard of cover, like the original standards under the basic payment scheme, so that that money is not perceived to be lost and the general standards are maintained throughout the countryside? There are some interesting developments under the new scheme, which will be worthy of the countryside, but my main concern is around this loss of basic standards throughout under the new scheme. If the Minister could give us some assurance that that could be covered through the new ELMS, I would be extremely grateful.

[Baroness McIntosh of Pickering (Con)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend the Minister for bringing these regulations before us this afternoon in what has been a particularly busy week for him at COP 28. Most of the concerns that I was going to raise regarding the potential for regulatory gaps have been covered at some length; I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman of Ullock, for that. I am delighted to follow the noble Earl, who also resides in North Yorkshire.

I am a frequent visitor to the mart at Thirsk. I have a small number of shares in it; no one else was going to buy them so I thought that they must be good value and that I should buy them. I suppose that I must declare an interest: I have one lot—not a lot but one lot—of shares in Thirsk mart, of which I am immensely proud. North Yorkshire has one of the two largest fat-stock marts in the whole of England and plays a pivotal role in livestock production, not just in the north of England but in Scotland and other parts of the UK. The message that I get from farmers when I visit the mart and other parts of North Yorkshire is that they are deeply concerned about one aspect of the changes being made. In preparing for this SI, I consulted the Tenant Farmers Association in particular, which believes that the Government have carried out what they committed to do in implementing the regulations in a way that protects the value of payments to tenant farmers. My noble friend the Minister will be aware that that is one of my main concerns.

Increasingly, however, whether they are landowners, tenant farmers or farmers on small family farms, farmers need certainty and clarity—this is the point that I think my noble friend the Minister must tell us—about when we are going to have more detail on the sustainable farming initiative. That is what is holding back a lot of investment that might otherwise be made. In his introductory remarks, my noble friend clearly stated that the delinking and the new payments that he is bringing forward through these regulations, which are welcome for the most part, mean that farmers face a situation where direct payments will be phased out before they know the real content of the SFI and all the other payments. I leave my noble friend with a thought—indeed, a plea. Can we have this information and the details at the earliest possible stage, either in another SI or just in some document that he can release to all the farmers affected?