Farming and Rural Communities

Lord Fuller Excerpts

Thursday 3rd April 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

My Lords, in just six months Labour has morphed from casual indifference towards the farmers who grow the barley—for our noble friend Lord Bilimoria—and the communities who act as custodians of our landscapes towards outright hostility.

Noble Lords will know from the register that I have farming interests, but I am principally involved in the fertiliser industry, which sits at the start of the food chain and is part of a very large economic ecosystem in the sticks, alongside machinery dealers, dairy engineers, animal feed manufacturers and the more esoteric artisan trades such as ditchers, drainers, fencers and thatchers, to name just a few. The Government’s hostility to these people is felt not just by farmers but in the trading estates that surround every market town in Britain, mostly through these family-owned businesses. We know, and have just heard, that it has taken Defra to tell the Treasury how to count the number of farmers correctly, but neither Defra nor the Treasury has stopped to consider those wider ecosystem businesses, which are the true multipliers of rural prosperity.

Labour’s fundamental misunderstanding of how the real economy works has perversely and disproportionately affected the shires, where 90% of businesses employ 10 people or less, and the business property relief plans discriminate particularly against tenant farmers, the most dynamic and entrepreneurial of farmers, who live by their wits without the cushion of inherited land. As our noble friend Lord Bilimoria, says, business property relief is not a loophole; it is a feature of our economy.

Labour has precipitated a countryside cash-flow crisis by the summary suspension of SFI, with the result that artisan craftsmen have to wait longer to be paid. Astonishingly, the scaling back of ELMS has made nature-friendly farming approaches economically unsustainable. Now only intensification can prevent a small fortune being made by starting with a big one. The effects of VAT and business rates on private schools are hollowing out our rural market towns, where the school is often the largest employer, and the cook, the cleaner and the groundsman—not highly paid people—are being let go.

Alongside this economic illiteracy, I detect something more sinister afoot in the new planning measures, for buried away in the Finance Act we saw provisions whereby agricultural property relief could be available only to environmental schemes operated by the state. In Labour’s world, there can be no room for private sector innovation in the delivery of environmental goods, where Britain has demonstrated substantial comparative advantage. Labour’s solution is to reward the deeply conflicted enemies of growth at Natural England with monopoly operating powers, alongside other powers to confiscate land in pursuance of their activist agenda. Who knew that the socialists wanted the state to own all the factors of production so badly?

I should know because I have had to deal with Natural England as a leader of a council. I exposed it as selectively quoting and misrepresenting academic evidence that it said supported its views but did not. It capriciously chops and changes its mind on a whim. It stands in the way of progress and innovation by mendaciously and spitefully placing every obstacle in the way of councils and others who have been forced to step in to do the work it and the Environment Agency are paid to do but are not doing. It is unaccountable, yet places unaffordable burdens on business, stops the building of affordable homes for rural families and has driven many small builders to the wall. I have read the Corry report, published yesterday, and I regret to say that there could not be a less appropriate body than Natural England to be given this important work or to be awarded trusted status, for by its actions it has forfeited that trust.

My overwhelming fear is that the Government will now be “Nationalising Nature” by becoming the sole regulator, financier, inspector, confiscator and operator of environmental schemes, jacking up charges to support a bloated bureaucracy while acting as judge and jury of what only they deem to be acceptable. I welcome suggestions to realign the overlapping cat’s cradle of regulators that hold back ambition, but we will need more than a rewriting of guidance to remove the dead hand of the state that acts as a drag anchor on progress, innovation and growth in the shires. Only a complete rewiring will do.

Whether it is by its economic, social or environmental policies, Labour may think that it is attacking farmers in a class war, but it is ordinary working people in family firms in the wider rural economy who are caught in the crossfire of its culture clash, the effect of which is to damage the long-term rural economy and the landscapes we should all strive to enhance.