South-west of England: Levelling up

Baroness Butler-Sloss Excerpts

Thursday 7th April 2022 Grand Committee

[Baroness Butler-Sloss (CB)]

My Lords, I am delighted that the right reverend Prelate chose this debate to throw a light on a part of England which is all-too-often overlooked. I agree entirely with the points he made. I would just say that I have very poor internet connection. I live in a very small village in east Devon surrounded by farmland, and I love it. My husband and I first bought a house in east Devon in 1964 in another small village. There we were surrounded by active farms of cows, beef cattle and sheep. It was usual to be held up on the road because the cows were passing to be milked. It was a busy community. The present village, which we moved to in 1978, was also a very busy farming community—mainly small, family farms.

The fields today are largely empty. The last local farm near our village is about to close. A hundred acres of solar panels are proposed. I am totally in favour of solar panels, but we are already surrounded by them. I am not against them, but I see that the excellent pasture, to which the right reverend Prelate referred, is being filled with panels and not with animals, other than a few horses and some sheep.

As an example, a farmer friend of mine who lives locally, who inherited his farm from his grandfather and father, and farmed with his son, gave up farming seven or eight years ago. Why? Because the amount of money he received for his milk—he had a milking herd—was nothing like as much as the cost of production; he could not afford to keep farming. The farm is now covered with donkeys from the Donkey Sanctuary Sidmouth, where the son drives one of their vehicles.

There are of course some large and medium-sized farms, but I ask the question rhetorically: how long will medium-sized farms continue to be viable? This is a serious food production issue, which the right reverend Prelate referred to, as well as the loss of livelihood of many small farmers. We should worry about the loss of home-grown foodstuffs such as milk. What, I wonder, will levelling up actually do for Devon?