Environmental Land Management Scheme: Food Production

Debate between Geoffrey Clifton-Brown and Richard Holden

Tuesday 1st February 2022 Westminster Hall

[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.

[Mr Richard Holden (North West Durham) (Con)]

I thank my hon. Friend for securing the debate. One concern that my farmers in North West Durham have, especially as they look to diversify and specialise in their production, is that forestry has to be only part of the solution; it cannot be a replacement for food production. As with gas and heating recently, food security will be so important in the future.

[Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend. He could have rewritten my speech; if he is able to stay for the end—I know that he has other engagements—he will hear me say almost exactly that.

At our PAC hearing, top officials from DEFRA were certain that ELMS would promote increased efficiency on the remaining land that is not going into environmental schemes, but they were not able to tell the Committee how much more food would need to be imported as a result.

In 1984, the UK’s self-sufficiency in food was 78%, but by 2019 it was down to 64%, according to National Farmers Union data. However, according to Government statistics, just 55% of the food consumed in the UK was supplied by the UK—this being the result of subtracting UK exports from domestic production. In 2019, we imported £11.5 billion-worth of fruit and veg and exported just £1.3 billion, and we imported £6.6 billion-worth of meat and exported just £2.1 billion. From a balance of trade point of view, it is critical that we reverse that trend, bolster our home production and find opportunities to export more of our excellent, high-quality British food.