Rural Landlords and Land Letting: Reform

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Thursday 21st January 2021 Grand Committee

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP) [V]]

My Lords, I thank the Whips for organising my participation after an administrative snafu, and the noble Baroness, Lady Rock, for calling this debate. It is a pleasure to follow the noble Earl, Lord Devon. We share many concerns, although on this occasion my perspective is different.

I begin with the observation from Defra’s consultation feedback analysis report that tenancies reform is not adequate to tackle the many ills of our current system. It is treating the symptoms of a disease, not the disease itself, which is our acute concentration of land ownership. A lightning recap: half of the land is owned by 1% of the people; much land ownership is not recorded or publicly available; and the vast majority of people cannot get access to land to grow food. A handful of NGOs, including the Kindling Trust and the Biodynamic Land Trust, go to great lengths to get land for a small percentage of the huge numbers of people who would like to start businesses on it.

Your Lordships’ House is often accused of being medieval, as it sometimes can be, but the very nature of our proceedings demonstrates how fast a change is possible. We need an even larger-scale reform of land ownership and access to land to get us out of the medieval relic that is our 21st-century reality.

I have one specific question for the Minister and one suggestion. In the past, the Government have sought to use policy to achieve consolidation of land ownership. The clear view has been that the increasing size of farms is inevitable and even desirable. That has been hugely destructive to the environment, productivity and public health, with the focus being on grain and oil production rather than vegetables and fruit. It has also led to the hollowing out and ageing of rural communities. Have the Government abandoned this ideological position? Are they looking to increase the number of growers and farmers in the UK, and to reduce the average size of growing and farm businesses? My suggestion is for the Minister to read, or get one of his officials to read, a quite short book: Miraculous Abundance: One Quarter Acre, Two French Farmers, and Enough Food to Feed the World.