Flood Prevention: Farmers

Earl Russell Excerpts

Thursday 10th October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Earl Russell (LD)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to speak in this debate. I thank the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of St Albans for bringing it to us, and thank the others who are speaking. It is important that we fight to support and protect our farmers from the hardships they face. Between the impacts of Brexit, the implementation of delinked payments, wet weather, declining crop yields and inadequate compensation schemes, our farmers face a perfect storm that is sending many to the wall. The collective impacts are heartbreaking: the loss of family farms to bankruptcy, increased rates of suicide, and an overall decrease in crop yields due to the ever-present wet weather.

No farmers, no food: farming contributes £120 billion to the UK economy and is responsible for 4 million jobs, and our farmers provide 64% of the food we eat. Our farmers produce the food we need to survive. We all ate lunch today thanks to the work of our farmers. Farmers are our champions in the fight against climate change. Equally, the impacts of climate change hit them hardest and first. Farmers are the backbone of our food security—the protection of our land and soils. They are key partners in the work that must be done to protect the natural environment.

This September has been one of the wettest on record. Something is wrong when all we do is break climate records day after day. The UK is getting warmer and wetter as the impacts of climate change and climate breakdown are increasingly felt. The luxury of talking about possible future extreme weather events and their possible impacts is over. They are here now and only set to get worse.

For every rise of 1 degree Celsius in the atmospheric temperature, the atmosphere can hold up to 7% more moisture. Increasing heat brings increasing evaporation, which means that we will experience more precipitation, extreme rain events and flash flooding. Storms such as Babet, Ciarán and Henk have caused considerable damage to our agricultural land. Some of our farmers have had their land continuously underwater since October last year.

Either farmers have not been able to plant crops at all or the crops that they have planted have been impacted by waterlogged soils. Crop yields are down as a result. Wheat is down 15%, oilseed rape is down 28% and winter barley is down 22%. These are the real impacts that climate change is having today on our food security and farmers’ bottom lines. In 2023, the income from farming decreased by 19% as a result of flooding. It is against this background that we need to talk about the role of farming in our flood defences. Society needs farmers’ help in the fight against flooding and government needs to be clear that this means sacrificing their land, and their livelihoods, so their land is used to delay or hold water so that it is then released slowly and does not cause extreme damage to our homes and critical infrastructure. All this has an opportunity cost to farmers and we must compensate them fairly and quickly for this public service.

The announcement by the last Government of the flood recovery framework and the farming recovery fund were both welcomed. The flood recovery framework was poorly designed. Farmers struggled to get the information necessary to make applications. The requirements for 50 or more properties to be flooded were inappropriate for a farming fund. The local authority verification processes were also slow. The farming recovery fund still requires 50 properties to be flooded, but I welcome the fact that the qualifying measure of being 150 metres from a river has been removed. However, these systems are still not really fit for purpose and payments are still being delayed, which is causing real hardship. We really need a clearer and more flexible payments system that has the right criteria and is efficient in making the payments necessary. Above this, we need long-term stable support mechanisms so that farmers can prepare and plan longer-term changes and recover from traumatic weather-related events.

Farmers are only one small part of the food resilience framework. I welcome the Floods Resilience Taskforce that has been set up, but the Climate Change Committee has been clear that government must do more work on our resilience to plan for and invest in our flood defences. Government must properly fund the Environment Agency and other bodies. The Environment Agency has a £34 million deficit in its maintenance budget. Government must ensure that capital funding is in place for flood defences, to ensure that basic maintenance is conducted on drainage and flood defence systems. My view is that we need to do much more work with nature-based solutions that delay and hold water and release it slowly. These systems are good for people and the planet.

To conclude, there are rumours in the press that Labour may be planning to cut funding support for flooded farmers and that the budget decisions are also delaying reforms that are required to the application criteria. A Defra source said that decisions about how much money could be paid to farmers for the floods were being held up because of the spending review, and that cuts were on the table. We have already seen threats to cut £100 million a year from the nature-friendly farming budget.

I respect the Minister and I suspect she is not able to comment on the Budget, but my speech here today is leading to one appeal, and I suspect she can guess what it is. Now is the time to find solutions that work in practice, pay out on time, are adaptable to individual farmers’ needs and balance the competing objectives of flood prevention and food security. The window for finding solutions to the flooding problem is closing. Let us get these solutions right and let us get them in place now. The longer we leave this, the worse it will get and we will be overwhelmed with dealing with everyday levels of chaos, without having the necessary robust, basic systems in place that we need to weather the storms ahead. I call on the Minister to protect budgets and fight for a fair deal for our farmers and for holistic solutions to the ever-growing flooding risks.