Farming and Rural Communities

Lord Grayling Excerpts

Thursday 3rd April 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Grayling (Con)]

My Lords, it is a particular pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Shephard, and to very much agree with what she said about food security. I congratulate my noble friend Lord Roborough on securing this debate.

Underpinning what the noble Baroness, Lady Shephard, said about the need for food security is the need to see a clearer strategy for our countryside, our farmers and our rural communities. We have seen none of that so far since this Government took office, and we desperately need it right now because, as the Chancellor rightly said last week—one of the few sensible things she has said recently—the world has changed. We cannot be certain that we will always be able to import all the food that we need. We cannot be certain that we will not see a further period of geopolitical instability. Therefore, the need to protect in particular our most productive land in this country is of paramount importance.

Right now, we are trying to grow our food, generate our electricity, protect our nature and build our houses all in the same land spaces. We cannot do it in a haphazard way; it has to be done carefully, strategically and thoughtfully. So the first thing I say to the Minister is: please can she and her colleagues in government work this through in a much more careful way than has happened up to now? There are some very practical examples. We should not, for example, be building solar farms on our most productive agricultural land. There is clearly a place for solar power in this country, and there is a lot of land that is of second-degree or third-degree usefulness, where there is a genuine opportunity to do more with it. But we should not use our most productive land for this purpose.

Likewise, there is a need to build more housing, but the easy option for housing development is always just to build new houses on greenfields, which is by far the easiest option for developers—but we should not be taking the easy option. There are plenty of avenues in this country for us to pursue smarter urban development. It is a matter of great regret to me that this Government do not seem to believe in urban development as a core part of meeting the housing needs of the future. The targets for our big city areas have not risen in anything like the same way as the rural areas, the areas on the fringes of our cities and the areas of green-belt land. I saw this in my former constituency, where there is a real opportunity to build on brownfield land and to densify the developments already there—not just to build on the green spaces.

There is also the very important task of restoring our biodiversity, which I believe the current Government, like the last one, want. We have to be smart about how we do that as well. There are disappointments in the Government’s approach to our farmers. The previous Government were right—although they did not get the detail right—to try to empower our farmers to do more to protect the countryside of which they are stewards. I do not see the way in which the current Government are approaching things such as the SFI as reflecting an understanding of the role that farmers can play. There really has to be a more holistic, more strategic and more thoughtful approach to how all this happens.

I will make one point in particular to the Minister. It drives to the heart of the question of how planning goes forward in our rural areas, whether it is about housing or onshore wind—I am not a great fan of onshore wind, but the Government have taken the decision to pursue it—and how all that fits with the challenge of restoring biodiversity. It is the issue of corridors for nature. We have to understand that whether it is wildlife on the ground or birds in the air, putting development in the wrong places has a materially negative impact on nature’s ability to recover. So my final point is: as the Minister works with her colleagues in MHCLG and across government, as they set guidance for local authorities and as they put in place all the different measures they are looking at to drive growth in energy and housing, it is of paramount importance that they also reflect the realities of local nature recovery. If we do these things in the wrong places—if we erect wind farms in the middle of bird migratory routes or if we build housing estates in the middle of migratory routes for species on the ground—we will go backwards, not forwards. What we need from this Government is a holistic strategy. So far, sadly, we have not seen it. I hope the Minister can deliver it pretty soon.