Farming Families

Lord Bishop of St Albans Excerpts

Thursday 21st November 2024 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Bishop of St Albans]

My Lords, I too congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Northover, on securing this debate. I declare my interests as president of the Rural Coalition and a vice-president of the LGA. I am a farmer’s son, and one of the great privileges of my job serving in a diocese that covers Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire is going into some of the most wonderful, forward-looking and innovative farms in this country, which are at the forefront of farming across Europe.

Even though there are many successful, go-ahead farmers, there is nevertheless a huge level of mental stress among them. That has been true for many years. Sadly, there is an extraordinarily high number of suicides among the farming community. As one elderly farmer put it, “Many of us are feeling so depressed because these announcements suggest that we are not wanted and are worth more dead than alive”. He pointed out that if he manages to die before April 2026, his assets will be passed on; if he does not, the farm will probably not survive.

This cost on the mental health of so many of our farmers should not be underestimated. They are performing a fundamental service to our nation. The responsibility of government is defence of the realm, of course, but also to guarantee that we can feed the realm. If we cannot feed it, we will not have anybody here to defend within a very short time indeed, and that is why I pay tribute to organisations such as the Farming Community Network for their marvellous support for our farmers.

We understand that the Government are facing challenges and the need to raise revenue. We also know that APR has been used by some as a means of tax avoidance and treated as a loophole. We have some extraordinarily complex tax arrangements in various areas of life; is it not possible to find some way of defining those who really use their land and produce food to make a living? Can we not define that in some way, to address the loophole of those who are causing huge hikes in the value of land and sometimes taking it out of production because they have bought it as an investment? Can the Minister give us any clues as to whether some work is being urgently done on this? Will she commit to responding to the modelling done by the CLA and the NFU, so that we can really try to understand this huge disparity between the Government’s analysis and what the people on the land believe is happening? It would help us as we try to find a way through this impasse.