Farming

Greg Smith Excerpts

Monday 4th March 2024 Commons Chamber

[Greg Smith (Buckingham) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Selby and Ainsty (Keir Mather), although I will stay out of the minor internal argument between him and the hon. Member for Mid Bedfordshire (Alistair Strathern) about who is more rural. Although I have no technical interest to declare, I once more remind the House that members of my family are farmers, and that I have the privilege of chairing the all-party parliamentary group on farming.

Let me be clear from the outset: our farmers are the very best in the world and produce the very best food that it is possible to produce. That is important across my constituency, which enjoys an agricultural economy. To put that into sharp focus, 90% of the land in my constituency is agricultural land.

I welcomed the speech by my right hon. Friend the Prime Minster at the National Farmers Union conference last month. As an aside, I welcome the new team at the NFU of Tom Bradshaw, David Exwood and Rachel Hallos, who have been mentioned. David Exwood in particular was so helpful and supportive as I piloted my private Member’s Bill—now the Equipment Theft (Prevention) Act 2023—on preventing the theft of agricultural equipment through Parliament last year. Of course, I salute and pay tribute to Minette Batters for her many years of excellent service to the British farming community as she steps down from her role.

It is vital that we back our farmers. We must maintain food production as the primary focus. To add a little more cross-party consensus to the debate, I thought that the comments by the right hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr Carmichael) were good. He gave the example of milk production, but the production of food and drink, full stop, is a public good, and we should see it as such. If we did not have food and drink, we all know what would happen.

The announcements on the doubling of the management payment for SFI to up to £2,000 and on its extension to new countryside stewardship mid-tier agreements were extremely welcome. Likewise, we have the biggest ever package of grants, with the £220 million productivity and innovation scheme supporting things such as robotics, and a new round of the farming equipment and technology fund. That is all good news. Indeed, I have seen the value of such funding streams in my constituency, including at the partly Government-funded 300-cow Addingrove dairy between Long Crendon and Oakley. It is the most incredible custom-build, future-proofed robotic dairy with its own pasteurisation room, as well as its own vending machine—one that does milkshakes made from delicious Buckinghamshire milk, as my children have discovered to the cost of my wallet. That dairy will ensure a bright future for farming on that land for many decades to come.

However, it is not all about robotics and grand innovation, important as those things are. We must also get the basics right. We must ensure that all farmers are able to access the support that they need to do the thing that they most want to do and that that nation needs them to do: produce food. That comes with a number of challenges, but critically, it has the public’s support. Recent polling shows that 94% of people say it is important that the Government back British farming and food production, and 81% prefer British food to imported food—why that figure is not 100%, I do not know, but it is still a very high statistic.

The first step in getting the transition from CAP to SFI and ELMS right is the physical process. Too many farmers I speak to have not yet even attempted an SFI application. Some do not believe that it will be worth it, some are just waiting to see, and others just want to get on with farming, not endless paperwork. I look to my hon. Friend the Minister to update the House, when he winds up, on the overall uptake of SFI applications, and more importantly on what steps are being taken to make the process easier. As a warning, I will be sitting in on an SFI application in the coming weeks, so I can assure him that I will be ready with feedback of my own.

The second point is that we need a clear goal for what we are trying to achieve on food security domestically. The new UK-wide food security index is extremely positive, but it needs to come with a realistic target that is higher than the one we have now—something achievable to aim for that shifts the dial upwards from the current 60% figure. Only then can we have a sensible, cross-Government conversation about the value we place on food production as part of the many competing demands on land, because I guarantee that one way to achieve the opposite of increased self-sufficiency is giving over vast swathes of agricultural land to ground-mounted solar installations, battery storage and other large-scale developments. I entirely support moves to make it easier under the planning system to develop old barns or other redundant farm buildings into something more useful, or perhaps build a second farmhouse, a farm shop or a restaurant. Likewise, I support barn-top solar—on roofs, where solar should be—but the thousands of acres of farmland being actively built out for solar, or proposed for solar or battery storage, in my constituency alone is depressing and wrong.

The latest 2,100-acre abomination in the Claydons, known as Rosefield, would dwarf the geographic size of the town of Buckingham and devastate the landscape forever, and for what? Those 2,000 acres will power approximately 50,000 homes on current usage, when a small modular reactor needs just two football pitches to power a million homes. Solar is not a good use of agricultural land, and to those who try to say that protections exist for the best land, that is just not the reality I see in practice. There is land being taken for this purpose that is deemed to be 3b, even though it will often produce a 10 tonne per hectare wheat harvest. Furthermore, the system is far too often gamed by developers: they take land tests from the headland, which will obviously produce a lower grading after testing. For food security, for the beauty of our countryside and for real science, the Government need to end this ground-mounted solar nonsense for good, and do so now.

That neatly leads me on to the impact that infrastructure projects have on our farmers. My constituency suffers from the horrors of 19 miles of HS2 construction. I have spoken many times in this Chamber about that impact, but for the sake of this debate, it is vital that DEFRA steps up and plays its part in protecting farmers from that state-sponsored infrastructure project. HS2 Ltd and its contractors have no idea what they are doing when it comes to agriculture, yet their actions have a huge impact on farming, from robbing farmers of their topsoil to causing flooding to neighbouring fields in crop, cutting farms in two—making it impossible to move large equipment or animals—and failing to properly compensate for land taken or loss of profitability. For example, cattle loss has blighted numerous farms as a result of poor soil treatment and management by HS2’s contractors, which are often operating right next door. One farmer has quoted a total loss of over £37,000 as a direct result of HS2’s shoddy practices. How is that morally justifiable for this project? How can a hard-working farming family be left with such heavy losses?

Then there is blackleg, a disease in cattle that is caused by bacteria released from disturbed soil. I am aware of at least one case in my constituency that the farmer has attributed to HS2’s malpractice—it is noteworthy that farmers in this area have never seen a blackleg case before. No prizes are available for guessing how much compensation has been offered, but for the avoidance of all doubt, it is zero. We need all parts of Government to wake up to the devastating impact these projects have on real people, real farmers and real businesses, and put proper processes in place to support and compensate them. I gently urge the Minister to ensure that DEFRA plays its part in that.

The land take for state projects more widely must stop, not least in my constituency. The determination of the Ministry of Justice to compulsorily purchase a farm adjacent to HMP Spring Hill and HMP Grendon to build yet another mega-prison is universally opposed by all the local communities that surround it, and by me. Again, DEFRA must get more involved in stopping this nonsense, which will take away farms and further hit our food security.

Earlier, I referred to rural crime. I am assured by police that my private Member’s Bill—now an Act—to prevent agricultural equipment theft will make a difference, but farmers are suffering on a daily basis from thefts and other rural crimes. I urge DEFRA to do more to work with the Home Office and our police forces to combat those crimes. My own local force, Thames Valley, is leading the way: its rural crime taskforce is doing heroic work every single day of the week, and our police and crime commissioner, Matthew Barber, has ensured that the force has the resources to double the number of officers in that team in the 2024-25 financial year. However, more needs to be done.

I have probably spoken for too long. There are many more subjects that I could cover, including trade deals; flooding; water quality; the excellent points that my hon. Friend the Member for North Herefordshire (Sir Bill Wiggin) made, and which I entirely endorse, about the need to keep the badger culls to prevent further outbreaks of bovine TB; mental health; and the RPA. However, I will conclude by saying that we must get all the points that I have mentioned right, but we must also be positive about the future of British agriculture. We must celebrate our farmers as the very best in the world. They are the custodians of our countryside who maintain its beauty, but most of all they are the producers of what we all love to eat.