Farming and Rural Communities
Baroness Coffey Excerpts(2 days ago)
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Baroness Coffey (Con)
My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Roborough for having introduced this debate. His eloquent speech at the start was full of detail and excellent suggestions on how things could be better if the Government listened. I try not to get too political in these debates, but I am conscious that, while the Minister is from a very rural area—a magnificent part of the country—it is worth noting that all the Commons Ministers represent urban areas. That is why I feel that there has been a lack of consideration and true understanding of some of the impact of recent decisions that have been made on the farming community but on rural communities too.
There is often an assumption that rural communities are wealthy, but that is simply not the case. The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of St Albans talked about rural strategy. A couple of years ago, the previous Government produced something called Unleashing Rural Opportunity. It was the one time I was able to get a map into a particular document showing that contrast and challenging other Ministers at the time but also the country as a whole to see how stark the variation is.
So what can be done? Unfortunately, confidence is now trashed by not only the actions but by the proposals to be made—particularly in the Planning and Infrastructure Bill. I am sure that we will debate it at length when it arrives in this place, but I hope noble Lords understand quite how bad this has got. When we think about the relationship—the unfortunately regrettable relationship—that Natural England has with a lot of our farming community, for it to be given powers to compulsorily purchase land means not only putting it in the wrong hands, because, if anything, it should be done by the Secretary of State, potentially delegating, but it completely destroys the nature markets framework and the approach of bringing private finance into the sector. Just last week, Steve Reed, the Defra Secretary, was right to praise the standard that has come out to open up this market, building on work from two years ago. It is great that we have finally got there, but the Government do not see the irony that giving powers such as this begs the question of why farmers should be bothered to get involved now in the first place.
When we come to debate the SI in a couple of weeks’ time, after the Recess, we can get more into how the money is being spent—and I am conscious that, with the change in paying farmers away from the guaranteed fixed payments there was always going to be a sort of see-saw when that moved over. People might not initially take up the proposals but they would understand, learn and commit—and we have seen the huge level of commitment. I genuinely hope that farmers are making complaints to the department, because I believe that serious maladministration has been done by pulling the plug against an expectation—and not by going through judicial review but by going straight to the department and the ombudsman.
We need farmers. We need landowners and rural communities to help not just with food production but with the future of our planet. It is about the topsy-turvy difficulties with which they are living—and our farmers are the original friends of the earth. Yes, there have been some really poor farming practices, which we have later recognised, which have now been changed. But we need to bring those people with us.
On one other point that I wanted to make, on housing, I am concerned about the proposal to adjust some of the planning decisions. Noble Lords will find that most councils are not nimbys, but when they are faced with an 82% increase for housing in east Suffolk and no changes in London, where the housing demand is really strong, that will put pressure on not just the fields but the villages and those small communities. By the way, at the same time, housing associations are flogging off the houses in those villages so that they can release capital to build more houses, they say, but they are doing that 60, 70 or 80 miles away—very close to the new areas of growth. It is just ridiculous.
There are other things that worry me about council officers taking decisions, when local plans have already set the housing densities and all of a sudden developers come along and say that they do not want to build at that density any more. What councillors and Ministers are not realising is that as a consequence even existing targets are going to take two or three times the amount of land to build the houses that are already there—so just imagine now being expected to double it.
We are in a difficult time, and I know that the Minister is very much a champion of rural areas. I genuinely hope that she can persuade the rest of the Government to be so too.
Sustainable Farming Incentive
Baroness Coffey Excerpts(2 weeks, 4 days ago)
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Lord in Waiting/Government Whip (Lord Leong) (Lab)
We will hear from the noble Baroness, Lady Hoey, and then from the noble Baroness, Lady Coffey.
Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)
The noble Baroness’s question references a lot of the longer-term work that Defra is doing to get these things right. Regarding solar farms, the land-use framework is designed to look at things such as where we put energy, where the best-quality agricultural land is, where we put housing and so on. The land-use framework looks to address much of that.
Regarding what farmers should be doing, whether their first priority is to produce food and so on, we are developing the food strategy and the 25-year road map for farming. Both are looking at how we address this and how we ensure that we have high-quality, sustainable food production in this country for us to become as self-sufficient as is practically possible. These are important long-term pieces of work that the department is doing. We wanted to move away from short-term decision-making that did not deliver in the long run. A big criticism of what has happened with the sustainable farming initiative is that it was too short-term. Taking that bigger picture view, to give farmers certainty for the future, is a really important piece of work that the department is doing.
Baroness Coffey (Con)
My Lords, I know that the Minister is a friend of farmers and recognise her experience in Cumbria and her previous time as a Member of Parliament. She will know that farmers are disappointed. The money that is available through SFI was always intended to increase over the five years of the agricultural transition, so it is no surprise that more and more farms have come in. A record 65,000 are now in agri-agreements. I am really worried in a different way about the intensification of food production, which will actually hamper the progress that had been made in getting farmers signed up to nature. Let us be candid: the ambitious but practical nature targets can be achieved only with the help of farmers and landowners across our country.
Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)
The noble Baroness makes a really good point about the increasing intensification of farming, and that is something we do not want to see. Our focus has to be on high-quality sustainable food that we can buy locally, and on farmers being able to support the country. We said in our manifesto,
“food security is national security”
and that is very true. It is incumbent on us as the Government to look at how we deliver on that promise.
High Seas Treaty
Baroness Coffey Excerpts(3 weeks, 5 days ago)
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Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)
The UK will continue to be proactive in preparing for implementation and entry. We are committed to partnering with others, in particular the global South and the Commonwealth Secretariat, to ratify and implement the agreement. We are actively engaging in that. The first meeting will take place at the UN in New York this April. We very much support this, and we are working with others to move forward.
Baroness Coffey (Con)
My Lords, as Environment Secretary, I visited several marine protected areas in 2023. I accompanied my noble friend Lord Ahmad when the United Kingdom signed the agreement in New York. I am really concerned, given that officials had shared with MPs and Peers last year that a Bill would be ready by the end of 2024. I am sure that there is sufficient agreement on both sides of the House to get this legislation through in time for the conference to which the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, referred. It would be really embarrassing for the United Kingdom not to be a full member of the first UN ocean COP in June.
Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)
Let me confirm that the Government are completely committed to ratification of the BBNJ agreement, in line with our determination to re-invigorate the UK’s wider international leadership on climate and nature. We are working on the measures needed to implement the detailed and very complex provisions of the agreement before we can formally ratify.
Separation of Waste (England) Regulations 2024
Baroness Coffey Excerpts(2 months ago)
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Baroness McIntosh of Pickering (Con)
My Lords, I congratulate the Minister on introducing the regulations before us, which I broadly support. I will direct my questions to two specific areas.
The Minister mentioned that guidance will be given to councils on the separate collections. My concern is around what guidance will be given by councils to households in particular. I remember chairing the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Select Committee at the time of the “horsegate” scandal, where people found that they were eating prepared foods—usually lasagne—made from horsemeat, not beef. It ended, I think, a lot of people’s desire to carry on eating these pre-prepared, highly expensive, undernutritious, highly salted foods. However, if you are a householder and you have one of these trays in front of you, it normally goes, I assume, in your food waste because it is highly contaminated—or the packet that the lasagne I have eaten was in will have to be rinsed sufficiently to ensure that it is not contaminated.
Who is going to guide households on what to do with such prepared food, where it is difficult to get rid of the residual food waste? How does the Minister intend to ensure that, if it goes into the paper recycling, which will now be a separate collection, this will not lead to greater contamination? How will guidance be given to households to ensure that there is no cross-contamination? How does the Minister plan to ensure that there will be no increase in cross-contamination because of the contaminated stuff going into the wrong recycling bin or plastic bag—whatever it is called—that we are going to be issued with?
I would also like to press the Minister on ensuring that a strong message will go out from the Government to councils that there will continue to be a mandatory weekly food waste collection. Anything less frequent than that will lead to vermin and a lot of highly undesirable threats to households, through no fault of their own.
Baroness Coffey (Con)
My Lords, I made my maiden speech last week simply to make sure that I could speak in today’s debate. I congratulate the Minister on bringing these regulations forward; it is fair to say, I think, that they have been a long time in gestation. I recall, back in 2018, the resources and waste strategy setting out the idea of trying to get consistent recycling. I have to say, when I became the Secretary of State a while ago, I worked quite hard on this issue to try to get simpler recycling to achieve the outcomes that the Minister has set out.