Farming Families

Viscount Goschen Excerpts

Thursday 21st November 2024 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Goschen (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Northover, for bringing the House’s attention to this issue today and for her powerful speech. I declare at the outset that I am the owner of a smallholding of farmland in Devon. I am not going to cover the IHT issue; I will leave that to others in this distinguished company with much greater knowledge than I have. However, I listened carefully to the noble Baroness’s powerful speech and look forward to the Minister’s detailed response to her specific questions.

I am certainly not an agricultural expert, but I have great admiration for those who have farmed land for generations and a strong belief that a thriving farming sector lies at the heart of prospering rural communities. We are very fortunate in the UK in having farms run by families for generations. They have immeasurable expertise in understanding what works and what does not for their land. They are prepared to make a total commitment to the management of their enterprises, their stock, their ground and the habitats it contains in what is, as we must recognise, particularly in the hill-farming world, a tough, demanding and often dangerous vocation.

Farmers also have a very deep and multi-generational commitment to the environment, and tend to take a very long-term view of maintaining and enhancing the quality of the land and the habitat that they manage. However, we should not take them for granted, and this is a very delicate balance which should be preserved.

We have heard that farming is a highly capital-intensive activity that typically generates a very low return on capital employed and a relatively high risk, given the volatility of commodity prices and, of course, the vagary of the weather. It is, therefore, a very long-cycle business. What is required is a stable and settled regulatory and financial settlement, against which long-term investment decisions can be taken. That requires an unambiguous agricultural policy with very clear objectives against which a regulatory settlement can be developed. There was extraordinary frustration even before the Budget that this really was not the case. That is not a party-political view, given the total lack of clarity that the previous Administration provided in the post-Brexit subsidy settlement.

Food production goals must be put front and centre of a regulatory system. It is far too complex to be understood, but clearly many small businesses do not have the resources to drill down to truly understand the regulatory and financial environment. There is an overall concern that farmers’ voices are not being given sufficient weight in the development of agricultural policy. I look forward to the Government’s response.

Bat Habitats Regulation Bill [HL]

Viscount Goschen Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Friday 27th April 2018 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Goschen (Con)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Cormack for introducing the Bill, which raises an important issue, and I look forward to hearing the other contributions today. I should say at the outset that I very much support legislation designed to protect wildlife, including bats. That legislation has made a major contribution to the preservation and support of our biodiversity in the UK.

If the House would humour me for a moment, I have some bat credentials to declare. I am a trustee of a UK charity that supports the management of a small national park in Africa, where I used to live as a young man. Every year in November it provides the backdrop for what is thought to be, by numbers, the largest single gathering of mammals anywhere in the world. Some 10 million straw-coloured fruit bats—the eidolon helvum—gather in a small area of primary swamp forest known locally as “Mishutu”, which is a quite extraordinary spectacle, particularly because the eidolon is a very large bat; it has a wingspan of around 75 centimetres and weighs in the region of 300 grams. If my mathematics are correct, this equates to a total of some 3,000 tonnes of airborne biomass visiting a very small area of woodland for a few weeks in November. It could perhaps be thought of as the equivalent weight of 600 male African elephants. The problems in my noble friend’s church might be put into perspective in one way by that allusion.

To return to the Bill and the matter in hand, I think my noble friend has made an important point and given the House an opportunity to consider the inherent proportionality here, which is essentially part of the deal in any legislation for the conservation of wildlife and the conservation of our wonderful national heritage, of which churches are clearly such an important part.

My remarks perhaps go rather broader than purely related to churches. I follow the noble Lord, Lord Redesdale, in the issue of bat surveys, which are referred to in Clause 1. My experience of that is only as someone who has sought and secured planning permission for an old house and some former farm buildings, but these issues are very common in rural areas where a bat survey is required in order to give information about what species may be present. That seems a very reasonable proposition, but every time an application is submitted, even if it is closely related to another application regarding the same building or cluster of buildings, then a fresh survey is required. If the renewal of planning permission is sought after the three-year expiry, the process is repeated all over again.

Each of those surveys costs many hundreds of pounds, and bat specialists come out at night with highly sophisticated equipment. In the course of evaluating and securing planning permission for the development of perhaps a farmhouse or former farm buildings, multiple surveys may be required over time and that could be at the cost of many thousands of pounds. I fully support the need to have a bat survey and find out what species are there. However, does my noble friend feel that due consideration has been given to a more flexible, targeted and intelligence-led scheme, where information has already been gleaned about bat populations? Bat surveys that I have seen in my, admittedly narrow, experience—I have commissioned half a dozen or so—have said almost exactly the same thing each time. The same species are present in broadly the same numbers. Broadly the same mitigating factors should be taken into account and broadly the same timing consideration for the development should be undertaken —it should be undertaken at a particular time of year.

That has caused me to think about the total number of bat surveys that must be commissioned across the UK annually. It would be interesting to know that figure; clearly, I do not expect an answer now. If one then looked at the total cost, it may be worth considering whether what I suspect is a large figure could be better targeted towards conservation of the most important bat species, gathering intelligence on what measures could be taken to support those populations.

I leave the House with that thought. In any area of law where the public are asked to spend considerable sums, they must feel that they are getting value and that it is not just a tick-box exercise, as I feel that it may be at the moment. We have great expertise in the bat field across the UK—the Bat Conservation Trust and others have been mentioned. I plead for a little more flexibility for local authorities, national park planning authorities and so forth to take an intelligence-led, flexible and proportionate approach, which may be to the value of conservation of both wildlife and buildings.