Food Prices (Planning Policy)

Chris Heaton-Harris Excerpts

Wednesday 17th October 2012 Westminster Hall

[Chris Heaton-Harris (Daventry) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship again, Mr Streeter. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Sherwood (Mr Spencer) on securing this timely debate. As anybody who has canvassed recently will know, cost of living is the big issue on the doorstep. Whether it involves fuel prices or food prices, someone at every door has a view and a proper concern about the direction of travel of the cost of living.

Unlike everybody else, I cannot declare an interest. I used to have one; that is as good as I can get. In a former life—when I had a proper job, as my mum would say—I used to wholesale fruit and veg for a living in New Covent Garden market. I worked nights for 11 years and dealt with farmers daily. They were a joy and a pleasure. Never could there be a nicer group of people to do business with. At the other end of the equation, because it was a pure market—supply, demand and information—I dealt with buyers from very big companies as well as high-street grocers. I know how the demands of ordinary punters can change the market for farmers. They can grow one type of lettuce one year and lose a ton of money, and then grow a different type of lettuce the next year and make a ton of money. I understand the supply and demand issues of food, or at least I did when I worked in the business.

The Minister will be pleased to know that the business was set up by four Lincolnshire farmers in the late 1970s, and thrived through the days of the supermarket boom. The four farmers who helped set up that family business all diversified; in fact, in my lifetime, I have never known a farmer not to diversify. One went into transport. Two went into building things: one built homes, the other built offices that he rented out to local businesses. One ended up building a karting track, and people now hurtle on go-karts around fields that used to produce good-quality cauliflowers. It is difficult to find a farmer who has not diversified due to the market over the past three or four decades. Although food prices are now high, that cannot be said of food prices in our short-term history, which is why we started subsidising farming in the first place. We needed food, but there was not enough return on the goods being produced, so the Government started to subsidise it so that we would have enough.

Anyone considering a planning policy to encourage the production of good-quality food on a large enough scale to feed the nation would not start from where we are now, and I do not think we should try. We should support farmers a bit, but our planning policy should be much broader than simply worrying about food production. We live in a world market. If we want to encourage farmers in Africa to trade themselves out of poverty, they need a market to supply. I am not overly concerned about some of the issues raised, but we should paint the picture in historical terms.

[Mr Spencer]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for giving way; I am conscious that I have had more than my say. Does he recognise that although the market will flow when there is enough product, the product may cease? For example, on the wheat market, Russia basically said a year ago, “That’s it, we’re not going to export another grain of wheat.” It does not matter how much money we have; we cannot buy something that is not for sale. That is when there starts to be an impact on the UK.

[Chris Heaton-Harris]

I completely recognise that, but we still produce a decent amount of wheat. Five years ago, lots of the farmers who grow wheat were diversifying into an energy crop, miscanthus. There was simply not enough value in the market for them, so they decided there would be better value in growing miscanthus, which is pelleted for biofuels, trucked up to Drax and chucked into the coal-fired plant up there. Again, the market responded. Now fewer people in the United Kingdom are growing miscanthus, or seeking to grow it, than five years ago, because the market price of wheat is rising, not exponentially but rapidly, and there seems to be no basis for it to fall. However, that is not necessarily a planning policy issue; it is a different policy issue affecting the use of land. Ultimately, it is an energy subsidy, which is different.

As far as the Minister is concerned, though, we have a dilemma. We are an island nation with roads, homes and businesses, and we need to supply energy and food for them, but we have traditionally had a broad-based food production economy. We were very good at providing for ourselves until 30 or 40 years ago. The Minister must consider his portfolio in the broadest possible sense. There are legitimate concerns about food security, which have been mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for Suffolk Coastal (Dr Coffey). People worry, properly, that if foreign supply of a particular good dries up, we will be priced out of the market, but we are fortunate in being a relatively rich western country, and we will almost always be able to buy the goods that we require. However, that diverts goods away from developing countries. There is a concern, but I am not convinced that it is the concern highlighted at the start of the debate.

The Minister must consider some areas that are within his remit. It is significant that one part of his Department incentivises farmers not to produce food through a policy enabling renewable energy production that is way more financially beneficial to farmers than the hard graft that goes into producing a decent arable or livestock crop annually. In my last couple of minutes, I want to bang on about something that I regularly bang on about, namely the delights of onshore wind energy, how it fits within the Minister’s portfolio and how it directly affects food prices, as my hon. Friend the Member for Sherwood said. Any farmer who has not considered diversifying into renewable energy is slightly mad. The gains from doing so are phenomenal. Even the £1 million investment for a small 325-MW turbine, which is about 40 m high, might well be paid back in three or three and a half years, and subsidy is guaranteed for 25 years. A farmer who wants to put their kids through school and ensure that they can go to university will find a field—they do not care which one it is—and stick turbines on it.

The Minister will know because numerous local planning authorities have written to him—including at least one that I represent—as well as from his own experience of policy in Lincolnshire that local planning authorities are hugely concerned. They feel slightly under the cosh having to allow turbines and other renewable energy projects even when they know that the projects are not suitable for the land, whether for food production reasons or because of their proximity to dwellings. Will he help planning authorities around the country by advising us, them and the Planning Inspectorate how he intends to deal with the conundrum of super-subsidised energy production replacing less subsidised food production in areas where few people want it? Even where the parish council, local residents, the district council and maybe the local MP and MEP all object for good, solid planning reasons, a decision can be foisted on them, even though the energy production unit might be close to dwellings and so on.

Finally, I want to tell the Minister that the Planning Inspectorate that he directly controls, even though it is an arm’s length body with delegated powers, needs direction on this issue, which is causing great upset across the countryside. There is only one man who is made for the job of sorting it out, and I would like to think that it is my hon. Friend the Member for Grantham and Stamford (Nick Boles)—the Minister himself.

[Glyn Davies (Montgomeryshire) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Sherwood (Mr Spencer) on securing the debate on such an interesting topic. I did not intend to speak—I came to listen to what my hon. Friend had to say—but a number of points have been made that are of sufficient interest to me and I am grateful that there is time for me to do so. First, I should declare an interest. I have been a farmer all my life. At the moment, my land is rented out, but the rent I receive depends on the profitability of the industry, so I feel that I need to declare an interest that will be recorded in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests.

We are debating the consequences of land that is used for food production being used for other purposes. I accept the point—I think that we all do—that we are a trading nation and part of a trading world and that Britain has always been subject to change over the decades. I cannot help but feel, however, that we have reached a stage regarding land use where the change that we face is greater than we have ever faced before. In a sense, that is inevitable, but the Minister, the Government and all of us have to be aware of unintended consequences. Unintended consequences are always the problem—those things that happen that we are unaware of and do not give sufficient attention to when dealing with an issue.

The main driver for change in land use is population growth. During my lifetime, we have seen an enormous change in the projected number of people who will live in the United Kingdom. Before too long, that number will reach 70 million. Inevitably, if that happens, we will need more houses, more roads and more rail. How we live changes, and there will be more demand for leisure activity. All that uses a huge amount of land, far more than anticipated. We have to consider population increase carefully, because of its impact on the way we live as a nation.

I, too, want to touch on the use of land for energy production. I do not oppose that, but I am one of those stupid farmers who, because I detest onshore wind to such an extent, has decided that he does not want the additional income. I have no intention whatever of going down that road, and I advise most of my fellow farmers, if they can afford not to, to do the same. I must admit that in my Montgomery constituency, an awful lot of farmers take that view: they despise how my constituency could be destroyed by the ravages of the onshore wind business. This issue is more than just about that, however.

I have always supported biofuels, but in mid-Wales the potential for the development of miscanthus is huge. That is having an immediate impact—an issue that I raised in an intervention about maize. A new biofuels plant requires maize. For decades, dairy farmers rented land to grow maize to sustain their dairy stock. That was part of how they farmed. Suddenly, they can no longer do that. It is totally impossible for them to compete in the market, because there is a subsidised industry—biofuels—buying up all the maize and they have had to withdraw. Clearly, that involves reducing the number of stock that they keep—an unintended consequence.

When we talk about onshore wind—as my hon. Friend the Member for Daventry (Chris Heaton-Harris) did, as always, in such an authoritative way—it is not just the wind turbine that takes up a certain area. I want to make two points on this. In mid-Wales at the moment, we are talking about a project that has a 35-mile line from Shropshire into the middle of my constituency. There will be 150-foot high pylons—steel towers—all the way along that line. That will mean sterilising a huge amount of land, and even the substation at the end of it will cover 20 acres. The impact on land use is huge, notwithstanding the 600 or 700 turbines involved.

We also have to be really careful about how the people of this country feel they are connected with government. In my constituency, the local authority has turned down all the large applications associated with this big project going ahead. If I have a public meeting on the issue, huge numbers of people turn up—probably a couple of thousand people. In fact, 2,000 people came to Cardiff with me, in 37 buses, to express our viewpoint. It is clear that the constituency feels that it does not want this imposed on it. Yet, my constituents also believe that, despite that being their comprehensive view, the Governments in Westminster and Cardiff do not care at all and will use every device that they have to ensure that those applications go through. It is dangerous for any Government to allow that democratic deficit to happen, in addition to the land use change, without being very careful about what they are doing.

[Chris Heaton-Harris]

For the Minister, the damage is to the localism agenda. When so many people who have a vital part to play in the communities that they represent are being ignored—this is the point that I was trying to make about the Planning Inspectorate—and overruled by one person who comes in from outside with delegated powers, that causes an issue for localism. Perhaps the Minister can give us some assurances on how the Planning Inspectorate will deal with future local plans that involve renewable energy elements.

[Glyn Davies]

That strikes a real chord with me. I very much support the principle of the Government putting localism at the heart of what they are doing. However, I must admit that if one talks to anybody in my constituency about the principle of localism at the moment, when we are talking about onshore wind, they will snort with laughter. The idea of localism has gone completely out the window.

Returning to the land use issue, there is one other point I want to make.

--- Later in debate ---

[Roberta Blackman-Woods]

My hon. Friend makes a good point, but that is exactly the issue that the planning system is supposed to resolve.

I fully recognise the important issue of food prices and congratulate the hon. Member for Sherwood on raising it. Last year about 130,000 people turned to food banks to meet their families’ daily needs. The number is growing weekly. I am sure a lot of hon. Members will have recently taken part in the FairShare campaign organised by Sainsbury’s to collect food in their local supermarkets. Such is the degree of need in our communities. Indeed, we see more and more families who are simply not able to feed themselves because of rising food prices. The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation says that cereal prices could be 20% higher over the next decade, and that will eventually lead to higher food prices in our shops.

I am not sure whether the point was made by the hon. Member for Sherwood, but the UK produces about 65% of its own food, so domestic land use policy clearly has a significant role to play in keeping food prices low and, critically, affordable. We therefore need a planning system that supports vibrant communities and Government policy that encourages long-term sustainability—exactly the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Ogmore (Huw Irranca-Davies)—and builds on a sustainable rural community and economy. Things have to change somewhat if we are to achieve that, in particular in the face of some of the wider issues raised by the hon. Member for Sherwood, such as climate change and alternative land use challenges.

This year alone, the UK’s harvest was down 15% because of the unusually wet summer weather. Such unpredictability is set to worsen and will lead to a need for, possibly, a change in Government policy and, certainly, more intervention. The Government’s record to date is not good.

[Chris Heaton-Harris]

The hon. Lady said that the weather is set to worsen and that we therefore need Government intervention. Can she tell me what the weather will be like next Wednesday or in a year’s time? Weather is remarkably unpredictable, and I am not sure that it justifies Government intervention.

[Roberta Blackman-Woods]

Sorry, I thought that was going to be a sensible intervention. Obviously, given that we will have more unpredictability in the weather—that is what we think, at least, because of climate change—I meant that we need to plan for it and perhaps look particularly at a policy that would support more food production on the land we have, or on additional land, which was another point made by the hon. Member for Sherwood.