Environmental Land Management Scheme: Food Production

Debate between Geoffrey Clifton-Brown and Geraint Davies

Tuesday 1st February 2022 Westminster Hall

[Geraint Davies (in the Chair)]

Before we begin, I remind hon. Members to observe social distancing and to wear masks. I call Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown to move the motion.

[Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown (The Cotswolds) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered food production and the Environmental Land Management Scheme.

I begin by drawing attention to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests: I am an arable farmer. It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Davies. I am delighted to have been able to secure this debate today on food production and the environmental land management scheme. I thank the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs; the Minister for Farming, Fisheries and Food, my hon. Friend the Member for Banbury (Victoria Prentis), who is here today; and the Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, my hon. Friend the Member for Taunton Deane (Rebecca Pow), for addressing us at the highly successful launch of the UK agriculture partnership at the Royal Agricultural University in the heart of my constituency last Thursday.

As more and more land is taken out of food production for environmental schemes, we face the dangerous consequences of becoming reliant on importing larger and larger amounts of food. In short, this debate is all about putting the “F” back into DEFRA. Food should be at the heart of ELMS policy and should be classed as a public good with public money under the scheme. I am aware of the 2021 UK food security report, but it is largely full of dry facts and we are looking for some policy to underpin it.

This is a timely debate because the Public Accounts Committee, of which I am deputy Chair, carried out a detailed inquiry into ELMS and published a report on its findings at the beginning of the year. Now that we have left the European Union, we have a once-in-a-lifetime chance to completely replace our agricultural support system with an ambitious post-Brexit agricultural policy that supports the Government’s ambitious 25-year environmental plan.

Our environmental policy should be joined up with agricultural policy that encourages sustainable food production here at home. Alongside sustainability, we need to help the agricultural sector’s competitiveness and resilience in the macroeconomic, trade and regulatory context. At the heart of ELMS are the changes to the mechanism for distributing funding—that was previously done via direct common agricultural policy payments—to a system that will launch fully in 2024, where farmers will be encouraged towards environmental and productivity improvements.

The Government have stated that all the objectives of ELMS will be delivered for just £2 billion. During our hearing last October, the Public Accounts Committee pointed out that that was a highly ambitious target. As we all know, there are three key elements to the project: the sustainable farming initiative for all farmers to be paid to manage their land in even more environmentally friendly ways; local nature recovery, for more complex and collaborative projects; and landscape recovery, for large-scale projects such as afforestation, rewilding and re-wetted peat.

However, there are clear structural and timetabling issues in ELMS implementation, because details are still not as comprehensive as we would expect by this stage in the scheme. It is not apparent what the aims, objectives or metrics are for supporting more than £2 billion of public funding, whether the schemes will provide good value for money, or how they will help in achieving the Government’s 25-year environmental plan and net zero by 2050. Some farmers are concerned about the practicality of implementing schemes on time. Because of the natural cycle of animals and plants, such schemes can take two years or more to implement, and that is why timely information from DEFRA is so vital.

The Government trialled the first phase of the ELMS programmes with the SFI pilot last year, from which they will draw information before they begin the scheme properly this year. In December, the Government produced a policy paper on how they will expand the scheme over the next few years, but that information is too late for farmers to change their plans. What is clear is that the scheme will require a huge amount of land. For example, the Committee on Climate Change has a target for 30,000 to 50,000 hectares of forestry to be planted every year between 2024 and 2050—an enormous amount of land.

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[Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown]

I am delighted to have the support of the hon. Lady. Given the number of times that we have debated in Bristol and been at odds, to have her support is somewhat amazing. I was on a programme the other day agreeing with the right hon. Member for Hackney North and Stoke Newington (Ms Abbott) as well, and I have never agreed with her before, either. The Whips must be getting worried that I might defect soon.

Even for a global trading nation—this goes to the heart of the point made by the hon. Member for Bristol East (Kerry McCarthy)—shocks can expose real fragilities in any reliance on imports. The current severe spike in energy price is a result of an increasing reliance on imports; we became vulnerable to the global squeeze on energy and gas supplies last year, and going into this year. With technical and geopolitical issues impacting on supply across Europe, we have been hit hard for a number of reasons, including our storage capacity, which is one of the lowest in Europe, and our demand, which is among the highest.

Imports will always play a critical role in our food system, but I say to the Minister that the Government must take our own self-sufficiency more seriously. It is stagnating, and the public will not thank us if there is ever a world food shortage, prices rocket and supermarket shelves are emptied of certain commodities. Although the nation is encouraged to be healthier and eat more fruit and veg, our domestic production of those products falls below our potential. We are only 18% self-sufficient in fruit, 55% in vegetables and 71% in potatoes. The figures for veg and potatoes have fallen by 16% in the past 20 years, despite the sector demonstrating sustained investment. The entire economy is aiming to build back better and greener from the covid-19 pandemic. British farming can be central to that green recovery. We have a golden opportunity to place food security fairly at the centre of our food system and become a global leader in sustainable, high-quality food production.

The Government have a crucial role to play. Food security should be at the heart of Government policy, and there needs to be an annual system of reporting to Parliament to ensure that we do not allow our domestic food production to diminish. UK farmers are best placed to implement many of these environmental schemes, while at the same time maintaining the countryside to the high standard that the public have come to accept. I do not think the public are going to welcome the look of countryside that is going to waste growing brambles and shrubs. It feels highly counterintuitive to have such high environmental standards here that food production becomes unprofitable enough that we need to import more.

Not only does physically importing food produce greenhouse gases, but by relying on farmers from the rest of the world to produce food for us in the UK, we are simply exporting our environmental problems and responsibility to other countries with lower plant and animal standards. The public place real value on high standards of animal welfare, environmental protection and the climate ambition of British farmers. We cannot guarantee or enforce those high standards on farmers from other countries around the world. It would be morally unjustifiable for a UK farmer to be put at a competitive disadvantage by imported food with lower standards—a point made by the hon. Member for Bristol East.

The innovation I have seen from UK farmers throughout my lifetime, working towards ambitious environmental goals, has been incredible. The NFU has been working with its stakeholders to outline the policy mechanism for agriculture to reach net zero by 2040, which is a critical goal. I believe that the best way to reach our environmental targets is by supporting British farmers, not by making food production an unsustainable economic model.

The second of the key issues in the report from the National Audit Office—a highly respected institution—on which the Public Accounts Committee inquiry majored is that, without subsidies, most farms in England make an average profit of just £22,800 a year, after labour costs and investment, and a third of all farms would not make any profit at all. That makes the sector pretty financially vulnerable. For small and tenanted farms operating on wafer-thin margins, there is a real fear that many will go out of business. The consequence would simply be that the average size of farms would increase and the environmental benefits they provide would be lost. ELMS should provide advice and funding to help those small farmers diversify.

The future farming programme for England, which will replace the direct payments with a new scheme based on public money for public goods, will see small farms have their direct payments reduced from December 2021, and 50% will be lost by 2025. There is a real concern that some of the ELMS options will be completely unprofitable, given the amounts available, and too complicated; and that many farmers will simply not take them up, especially if they do not have the administrative capacity to negotiate the complicated bureaucracy. That could mean that only large institutional landowners, such as the National Trust or the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, benefit from these Government schemes. It would be quite wrong if such landowners received a bigger and bigger share of the agricultural subsidy cake when they provide less and less food each year. ELMS should have a part to play in protecting small, tenanted farms and upland farmers—I class small farms as less than 100 acres—alongside their significant environmental aims.

The final problem I would like to take up with the Minister is the average age of farmers, which is currently 59. My own farming situation has been discussed here; my farm is in north Norfolk, in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for North Norfolk (Duncan Baker). I am delighted to see him here today and I have issued an invitation to him to come and visit my farm. I know from my own farming situation that my son, who is in his thirties, is much more adaptable than I am to new technology, which would have two key effects of increasing productivity and innovation. ELMS should have a structural element to help young people who wish to enter agriculture, particularly those who are leaving education, because agriculture tends to be a highly risky, capital-intensive business, combined with very low returns.

DEFRA is providing money to councils, landowners and county farm estates via the new entrant support scheme, to support young people joining the sector with access to land, infrastructure and support for successful and innovative businesses. My own farming business, to which I have referred, provides an opportunity for three different businesses to get on to the farming ladder. Chris is my long-term farming contractor; Ben runs a successful outdoor pig-breeding business; and we are currently discussing an arrangement with a lady who has a rotating ewe flock of sheep, to graze our increasingly over-wintered green cover crops. Existing farmers could do more to help young people into agricultural employment and business.

All in all, if farmers are to survive, they must produce better returns, either from increased productivity, Government subsidies or increased prices from the market. Otherwise, many will simply not survive. The consequence will be that the average farm size increases, employment in agriculture falls and social cohesion in rural areas is lost. The Government are formulating a new policy on ELMS, and we need to see much more detail before it is launched in 2024. I appreciate that a lot more was published at the beginning of the year, but I still do not get the full sense of where the Government’s aims for ELMS really are.

As I have said, we cannot become over-reliant on other countries to fulfil our food needs. We have the means to produce food here in more sustainable and smarter ways, but to do that we must support farmers across the country, and not make the industry so unprofitable that only the largest farms survive. The Government should be much more ambitious with their aim of producing food in the UK. Well over 60% of the food we eat should be produced by UK farmers. That would well and truly put the “F” back in DEFRA.

[Geraint Davies (in the Chair)]

I call the Member behind the green mask.

AUKUS: Impact on Anglo-Chinese Relations

Debate between Geoffrey Clifton-Brown and Geraint Davies

Wednesday 20th October 2021 Westminster Hall

[Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown (The Cotswolds) (Con)]

Thank you, Mr Davies, for allowing me to take part in this debate. I would like to thank the Minister; she and I have not always agreed on everything, but we have moved on, and I am glad to see her here. I give sincere congratulations to my hon. Friend the Member for Shrewsbury and Atcham (Daniel Kawczynski); his was one of the highest-quality speeches that I have heard in this Chamber. This is an incredibly important debate, and I am sorry that it is so thinly attended.

You have given me about six minutes, Mr Davies, so I will motor on, but I want to make one or two important points that were not in my speech, but that arise from what my hon. Friend the Member for Shrewsbury and Atcham said. Perhaps the most important thing he said was that now that we have freed ourselves from the straitjacket of European Union trading arrangements, we need to participate fully in the Indo-Pacific tilt and its trading arrangements. He is quite right that it is one of the fastest-growing regions in the world. It is certainly growing much faster than the European Union, which is, if anything, retrenching in terms of percentage of world GDP; he is 100% right on that. I hope we succeed in our CPTPP negotiations. He is also 100% right to talk about naval bases. Ironically, that is exactly what the Chinese are doing; they are expanding their naval bases those in Sri Lanka and Djibouti being just two examples. China is doing exactly what he urges us to do. At Diego Garcia and Guam there are two very significant American bases, which will be maintained at full strength.

My hon. Friend is also right to say that we should reduce our dependency on Chinese investment in this country. Unprecedentedly in my 29-year parliamentary career, I have called for an urgent question. It is on the Chinese purchase of Newport Wafer Fab. It makes our highly sophisticated microchips, which are extremely difficult to make; we have some of the world’s best technology, and we are selling it to the Chinese. These microchips are the basis of every piece of electronic equipment. It was crazy to allow this, and I still appeal to the Minister to look at this again, because it was not very sensible.

I have been actively engaged with members of the Chinese Government at the most senior levels for the last 20 years or so. I am also deputy chairman of the all-party parliamentary China group, so I can claim to have some insight into the Chinese psychology. What one really needs to look into is: what is the psychology driving China when it takes an action? How will it react to this trilateral security pact? Since 2010, the relationship between the UK and China has been pragmatic and often mutually beneficial. For example, the UK was the first western nation to join the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. It is still one of the largest foreign countries trading renminbi. I think we have to be pragmatic. I do not think we should cut off our trade with China; I just think we should diversify it.

I totally agree with Members who have mentioned the serious human rights violations in China, which we in the UK abhor and rightly express our concerns about directly with China. That does not mean that we should not be friends with the Chinese on a people-to-people level; nor should it prevent our Governments from having responsible dialogue. China is too big and strategically important not to engage with. The message I want to leave this House with is that if we stop engaging with China, we stop having any influence with it. It is absolutely essential to engage, and we have done throughout history. We have engaged with people whom we do not like and do not approve of. We do not approve of their human rights violations, but we still engage with them. That is what we ought to be doing with the Chinese.

The People’s Republic is extremely strategic and long-term in its thinking—as my hon. Friend the Member for Shrewsbury and Atcham said, it has a 1,000-year strategy. When it sets out to achieve something, it invariably does. I would like my hon. Friend to focus on this line: while it might protest about AUKUS publicly, privately it will respect the fact that the west is standing up to its imperial ambitions. There is no doubt that China wants to become the dominant superpower in the world in regards to political, economic and military influence. We must accept that, but that does not mean we should stop dealing with it. We need to find a sensible way to work with China.

The Chinese are spending huge amounts of money on upgrading their submarine, space and ballistic missile capabilities. According to the Financial Times, in August they tested a nuclear-capable hypersonic missile, apparently to the surprise of the US and western intelligence. Why it was a surprise, I do not know, because we have known for several years that they have been trying to develop these weapons. Such demonstrations show the advanced capabilities of China’s modernised military.

We have witnessed the deterioration in Australian-Chinese relations and the bullying attitude to Australia over trade, which, of course, has spurred Australia on to spend a significant amount of its GDP upgrading its submarine capability to a nuclear-powered capability, so that it can spend more time at sea, hopefully undetected.

I fully welcome the AUKUS pact. I think it is the right thing to do. Hopefully, the UK as well as the US will take part in the production and technology of those submarines. AUKUS has been, to many, a bold step. We are pushing our global Britain credentials with a bigger role in the Indo-Pacific region. Importantly, as my hon. Friend says, we are working closely with our allies—something talked about in the integrated review. He mentioned the number of countries in the CPTPP partnership. One important country he did not mention, and which I would like to mention on the record, is South Korea. We have a trading agreement, and a good relationship, with it. It is one of those countries north of the South China sea that is also troubled by Chinese incursion.

There are still many areas that require productive and sensible China-Anglo dialogue. COP26 is an important milestone for the future of the UK’s climate change agenda and ambition. The UK produces around 1.1% of the world’s emissions, whereas China emits around 28% and accounts for almost two thirds of the growth in emissions since 2000. Clearly, we can set a good example to other countries to decarbonise more quickly and make a real difference to climate change, but we need alliances with other countries, so that they can do the same. We need China to come on board with that agenda. Any fallout over AUKUS will have consequences for other matters, as I have demonstrated with COP26, but I would like to think that it is of benefit to both the UK and China to continue with a constructive dialogue.

While we will always have our differences, and I do not hesitate to articulate our views vociferously to the Chinese when I talk to them, particularly over human rights, overall it is in both sides’ interests to have a realistic but frank dialogue in the future. The idea of breaking off all dialogue with China, as some would advocate, is simply cutting off our nose to spite our face. Worse still, as I have said, we would lose the chance to influence Chinese thinking on issues such as climate change.

This has been an important debate. I hope that my right hon. Friend the Minister will be able to take something from it: that while we want to stand up to China, we want to have a dialogue with it; that its human rights activities are unacceptable; and that we should start to reduce our reliance on Chinese investment.

[Geraint Davies (in the Chair)]

I will call the Front-Bench spokespeople at 10.28 am, so Mark Logan has just under eight minutes.