Future of Farming: Somerset

Debate between Ian Liddell-Grainger and Kerry McCarthy

Wednesday 18th March 2020 Commons Chamber

[Mr Liddell-Grainger]

That will teach me to watch the time more carefully.

I have asked a lot in this short debate. In the weeks and months ahead, farmers will become more important to us all. We will rely on what they produce in ways that we have probably never considered but now need to because we are in a national emergency.

[Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)]

I have read that Somerset County Council has sold off nearly two thirds of its agricultural land in the past decade. The Agriculture Bill Committee is looking at how we can better support county farms, which the Government have promised to do in the past. Does the hon. Gentleman think it is a real shame that the council no longer owns those farms, which often provided an entry to farming for people who could not afford to buy huge swathes of land themselves?

[Mr Liddell-Grainger]

The hon. Lady knows me well—she tempts me, and I will rise to the bait. Yes, it is appalling that the council sold them off. I was totally against their being sold off. County farms were the way that young people got into farming—the way people could get on the farming ladder. The farms were not big—they were comparatively small—but they gave people a chance. Any county that sold them off is an absolute disgrace. Yes, of course, I know that they wanted the money, but we have stopped an entire generation of young people going into farming. I am 61, and the average age of farmers is my age. How long can we sustain real farmers? I do not think that the Government can be blamed for that—although I would probably quite like to blame them, they cannot be blamed—because it was done under many different Governments over many years. Places like Somerset, the old county of which we were all part in the old days, had a huge amount of farms, and they were enormous and did such a good job. They have gone over a long time, covering three generations—basically since 1945—but the hon. Lady makes an absolutely fair point and I agree with her.

I have one final appeal to the Minister. Sedgemoor auction centre is crucial to farmers, as it is—believe it or not—to all of us here. Whatever our party, whatever our age and however much we are at risk, just being here shows that we are still in session. We must support that and stay in business here, and that goes for our farmers, too: they want to stay in business there.

Flooding

Debate between Ian Liddell-Grainger and Kerry McCarthy

Wednesday 6th January 2016 Commons Chamber

[Kerry McCarthy]

The Secretary of State will say that it is ultimately a decision for local people, but we need to look at the broader picture. For one local authority to say, “It’s okay to build on a floodplain”, perhaps ignores the impact on communities in the surrounding areas. We need an overarching approach.

[Mr Ian Liddell-Grainger (Bridgwater and West Somerset) (Con)]

As the hon. Lady is well aware, being from Bristol, the Somerset Rivers Authority, which we have set up, is working well. We have the money we need for flood defences. We have had everything we require. This is a county-wide development receiving money directly from the Government to do the necessary work. I am pretty sure she understands that, but I just wanted to make sure.

[Kerry McCarthy]

I am well aware of the work being done on the Somerset levels, but it is a slightly different picture there because of its basin geography, which perhaps makes it more isolated from surrounding areas. Elsewhere, as we have seen in the north of England, one community after another can be hit.

Badger Cull

Debate between Ian Liddell-Grainger and Kerry McCarthy

Wednesday 5th June 2013 Commons Chamber

[Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)]

As a west country MP, I can tell the House that there is widespread opposition in the west country, in Gloucestershire and in Somerset to this badger cull going ahead. I have had a huge number of e-mails and I also know that there is a diverse, vocal and determined coalition of groups, ranging from non-governmental organisations and environmental charities to people involved in farming and ordinary members of the public.

[Mr Ian Liddell-Grainger (Bridgwater and West Somerset) (Con)]

rose—

[Kerry McCarthy]

I will not give way, because I only have six minutes and the hon. Gentleman will get his chance to speak.

There has been very vocal opposition and public meetings, and a lot of lobbying. I am sure that the Minister of State, who is the Farming Minister and is also a west country MP, is well aware of that. I invite the Secretary of State to come down to those areas and meet some of the people who have been involved in the campaign so far.

I want to focus on a few issues, the first of which concerns estimating badger populations. As has already been mentioned, the persistent difficulty of knowing how many badgers are in the cull areas has not been satisfactorily resolved and could still make the culls unworkable. We know from the randomised badger culling trial that the only circumstances in which the spread of the disease can be slowed slightly—and even that reduction was only by 16% over nine years—would be if more than 70% of the badgers in an area were eradicated. If the reduction were any less than that, the spread of TB to cattle could increase.

The difficulty of knowing how many badgers there are in an area has been raised many times, including by Lord Krebs and others. Last year, the Government delayed plans to cull badgers as they could not work out how many badgers there were in the cull areas. I understand that according to the Government’s own figures, farmers in Gloucestershire must kill between 2,856 and 2,932 badgers, but according to Professor Rosie Woodroffe at the Zoological Society of London, the estimate of the population ranges much more widely, from 2,657 to 4,079, and there is a 40% chance that the figure for the real population lies outside that range. Professor Woodroffe has concluded that if the real population is below the minimum cull target of 2,856, farmers could kill every badger in the area, breaking the strict condition of the licence that forbids local extinctions while simultaneously failing to kill enough badgers to satisfy the terms of the same licence. The situation is similar in Somerset.

I would be interested to know from the Minister whether the estimates of the number of badgers in the area factor in the number of badgers killed illegally by farmers. A study from the universities of Bangor, Kent and Kingston this year found that approximately one in 10 livestock farmers in Wales had illegally killed a badger within the previous 12 months. In Gloucestershire, there have been press reports of allegations that at the Forthampton estate, an area of 3,000 acres near Tewkesbury that will be one of the main staging points for the cull, badger setts have been illegally filled in. If those allegations prove to be true, the estate may have to withdraw from the cull, which would affect the number of badgers killed and therefore the effectiveness of the cull, as I have explained.

My hon. Friend the Member for Wakefield (Mary Creagh) mentioned the humaneness of the killing. The Humane Society International UK recently obtained from a freedom of information request the heavily redacted document that will be used to monitor the humaneness of the badger cull. I would like to take up the concerns voiced by the society. Will the Minister make public how wounded animals that retreat underground will be included in the humaneness assessment? That is not mentioned in the document. The document admits that no shooter will have prior experience of shooting badgers. My office spoke to Pauline Kidner from the Secret World wildlife rescue, which is based in Somerset and has worked with badgers for many years. She said that badgers are not an easy animal to shoot, and when injured will always go back to their sett. So free shooting is likely to result in a slower death as a result of secondary infections and starvation from reduced mobility, and that will prolong the pain and distress suffered by badgers.

As the Secretary of State will be well aware, Gloucestershire Wildlife Trust has been involved in looking at the bovine TB issue for over 30 years, and in 2011 was the first non-governmental organisation in England to launch a badger vaccination programme on seven of its nature reserves. I would be interested to know what assessment the Government have made of that vaccination programme so far.

The chief executive of the trust says:

“Bovine TB has had a devastating impact on farmers in Gloucestershire and unfortunately there is no single, cheap or effective fix.”

He goes on to say that the Government have “overlooked” the benefits of a sustained programme of vaccination, and that:

“Vaccinating badgers could play a much larger role in controlling bovine TB while a cattle vaccine is developed and licensed.”