Oral Answers to Questions

John Glen Excerpts

Thursday 19th December 2024 Commons Chamber

[John Glen (Salisbury) (Con)]

Last year I visited the Game and Wildlife Conservation Trust’s Allerton project in Loddington. May I commend the contribution that it can make to defining sustainable intensification of agricultural food production? Perhaps it would be a suitable place for a DEFRA ministerial away day early in the new year, to help with the use strategy.

[Daniel Zeichner]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for his suggestion. I am a great admirer of the Allerton project and have been meaning to visit it for a long time. My officials are working on a visit, and I am really looking forward to engaging with those people, because they do great work.

Storm Bert

John Glen Excerpts

Monday 25th November 2024 Commons Chamber

[Steve Reed]

I am sure that my hon. Friend will welcome our proposals to review the formula so that we can look at nature-based flood management in the way that he described. I will ask the Environment Agency to contact him with an update on what is going on in his constituency, and what further action is being taken as the river continues to rise to ensure that his constituents are kept safe.

[John Glen (Salisbury) (Con)]

I thank the Secretary of State for his statement. I also acknowledge the enormous work done by Philip Duffy in the Environment Agency. He came down to visit my constituents in Britford in the first quarter of this year and made an enormous impact. In addition to the £30 million, for which the people of Salisbury are very grateful, for the Salisbury river park scheme that has just completed, it is important that smaller schemes, driven by parishes such as Britford parish council, are given licence to combine both their own precept and investment from the Environment Agency to come up with bespoke schemes. Will the Secretary of State ensure that attention is given by the EA to how it can give as much flexibility as possible, so that small schemes can also move forward at parish level?

[Steve Reed]

I echo the right hon. Gentleman’s comments about Philip Duffy at the Environment Agency and all his colleagues, who are doing an incredible job—they always do, every time storms hit. The right hon. Gentleman makes a very important and interesting point about how we can better tie up different approaches to funding. I will take that back and discuss it with the EA. I will ensure that he receives a full written response.

Oral Answers to Questions

John Glen Excerpts

Thursday 14th November 2024 Commons Chamber

[Emma Hardy]

I was delighted to speak at the Association of Drainage Authorities conference yesterday, to champion its work and to announce that, after listening to it very carefully, we will provide £50 million over two years—[Interruption.] In answer to the chuntering, the first part has already been spent.

[John Glen (Salisbury) (Con)]

Many of my constituents who live south of Salisbury are concerned about the interaction between flood risk assessments and new house building. Will the Minister assure the House that her work is fully integrated with the Government’s house building plans so that people can be reassured that, when land is designated for building new homes, flood risk is properly taken into account so that house building is restricted if there are no mitigations in place?

[Emma Hardy]

The right hon. Gentleman is right about the importance of ensuring adequate flood protection when we build new homes. Yesterday, we announced a review of the flood funding formula. We will be looking at nature-based solutions and sustainable urban drainage systems, so I hope that offers him some reassurance.

Rural Affairs

John Glen Excerpts

Monday 11th November 2024 Commons Chamber

[Steve Reed]

We are looking at that, and we will be able to make proposals in due course. I know that the hon. Lady will be interested in taking part in a conversation about them when we do.

I am talking about the changes we are making more widely for rural communities. We will open new specialist colleges and reform the apprenticeships levy to help agricultural businesses and farms to upskill their workforce, and we will recruit 8,500 more mental health professionals across the NHS, with a mental health hub in every community to tackle the scourge of mental ill health in our farming and rural communities.

[John Glen (Salisbury) (Con)]

I welcome what the right hon. Gentleman is saying about mental health, but may I take him back to what he said about the Environment Agency? There is concern about the arbitration over whether Natural England or the Environment Agency has authority. South of Salisbury, in the Avon valley, there is a massive issue. The Environment Agency has done a great deal of work, but there is always a concern that Natural England will come in and overrule it. The arbitration over who is sovereign in such circumstances is a massive issue across the country, and I would be grateful if he could turn his attention to it.

[Steve Reed]

I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for raising that point. I have appointed Dan Corry to lead a review of regulation across the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, precisely so that we can iron out such anomalies.

I am keen to ensure that we crack down on antisocial behaviour, fly-tipping and GPS theft through the first ever cross-Government rural crime strategy, and we will improve public transport by allowing authorities to take back control of their buses to meet the needs of their communities.

--- Later in debate ---

[Victoria Atkins]

You couldn’t make it up, could you? This is what is so worrying. This is why, at the beginning, I talked about a Labour Government who do not understand and do not care, and it is exactly this attitude from the Government Front Bench that farmers and their families are seeing. In answer to the hon. Member for Boston and Skegness (Richard Tice), I say as a former Treasury Minister that if there is evidence of abuse, of course the Treasury and the Chancellor must go after that, but given the way the Government have designed this policy, it is going to go after the hard-working families that look after our farms in our great county.

[John Glen]

My right hon. Friend and I have been Treasury colleagues. Officials often put forward this reform in the run-up to fiscal events, and she, like me, has resisted them. Will she reflect on the fact that significant landowners will have sophisticated tax planning regimes in place, that a large number of very small hobby farmers will be excluded, and that those who will be hit are modest family farmers? Even when those family farmers need to raise a relatively modest amount over 10 years, the impact of securing that funding is beyond them, given the margins they get from farming. Will my right hon. Friend reflect on the fact that this is, without doubt, a Treasury hit-and-run? The Secretary of State flatters himself to think he has secured the overall budget, but he has left farmers in a far worse state. [Interruption.]

[Victoria Atkins]

My right hon. Friend makes an important point about our experience as Treasury Ministers. Labour Back Benchers are shouting “Give way!” because they do not like hearing the truth. They made this choice; we chose not to go down this route.

There are many ways in which we can support our family farmers, and I have had the pleasure of having a cup of tea with many of them around their kitchen table after they have shown me their farm. Labour Front Benchers lack such experience, because their constituencies are all situated in the city.

Budget: Implications for Farming Communities

John Glen Excerpts

Monday 4th November 2024 Commons Chamber

[Daniel Zeichner]

The hon. Lady is absolutely right that farming is very tough right across the country and very difficult in Wales. It is a devolved issue, so I will not comment on specific schemes in Wales, but I point her back to the Treasury figures that show the number of people who made claims for APR. It is relatively few, and I would say it is probably relatively few in Wales.

[John Glen (Salisbury) (Con)]

I spent most of the past six years looking at Treasury figures and I have a great deal of sympathy for the hon. Gentleman. I fear he is a victim of a hit-and-run exercise by the Treasury on the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs budget. He would do well to think about the lessons learned from the pasty tax, because if he is not careful this measure will be of a similar dimension for this Government.

[Daniel Zeichner]

I am very grateful for the right hon. Gentleman’s concern, but I have to say I do not agree with him.

Food Security

John Glen Excerpts

Tuesday 30th July 2024 Commons Chamber

[Sir John Hayes]

I anticipate disappointment, but I would not go so far as to say I share it. My hon. Friend has been a resolute champion for his constituents in respect of both food security and resisting developments that they simply do not want. If we believe in the devolution of power and in empowering communities to have a greater say in their futures, we cannot simultaneously snuff them out when they disagree with Government priorities—ignore them and disregard their perfectly proper concerns. That is something that my hon. Friend would never do. Where I disagree with him is that I have hope. There are those who will say that the new Minister is not up to the job, but I do not agree: I have worked with him previously, and I know that he is a diligent and decent man who will take these matters very seriously. I would not want to entirely write off the prospect that we will make an argument that is sufficiently persuasive to affect Government policy, even if we cannot change it entirely.

[John Glen (Salisbury) (Con)]

Does my right hon. Friend agree that in a situation where there are competing priorities between environmental stewardship, food production and house building, there needs to be clarity from the Government about how they evaluate and prioritise the relative distribution of the high-quality land that my right hon. Friend has spoken about? Without some real teeth around what food security means through national security legislation, there is a wide range of interpretations that leave the cause he is speaking to in a vulnerable position.

[Sir John Hayes]

This is why the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Grantham and Bourne (Gareth Davies) was so powerful, because, as my right hon. Friend has just said, there are competing imperatives. Energy security and food security must not be allowed to contradict one another; both can be pursued with the right approach and with a sensitive treatment of where different applications are located. My argument tonight is that that sensitivity—that precision—is not currently prevailing. Indeed, the scale of the applications we are talking about in Lincolnshire alone is over 2,000 acres in some cases, eating up vast swathes of highly productive agricultural land. Once that land is eaten up, one suspects it will never return to agricultural production.

There is a myth about wind turbines. Those who have been in this House for a long time and those who followed my career even before they became Members of this House, as I know many did, will remember that I have been campaigning against onshore wind since the time I got to this place. That is not only because of the aesthetics of onshore wind—as all men and women of taste would acknowledge, they are grim—but because the concrete used to anchor the wind turbines will never leave the ground, even when they have ceased to serve their purpose. Nobody seriously believes that there will be a commercial interest in removing that concrete, which will fill valuable growing land—spoil the soil, if I can turn a phrase that might last and make an impression on you, Madam Deputy Speaker, and on others too.

The issue is the Government taking forward their priorities in a way that is consistent but, as I said before, also sensitive to the imperative of food security alongside that of energy security. There are 14 solar applications in Lincolnshire constituencies that are nationally significant infrastructure projects—by definition, those are large projects. In other words, more than 50% of nationally proposed solar plants are in Lincolnshire, Leicestershire or Rutland, which cannot be sensible. Of course we should be pursuing renewable technologies, but surely solar belongs on buildings. Every large commercial building, every warehouse—they are springing up everywhere —every office block and many more houses could accommodate solar panels and deliver solar power, yet we are allowing developers to make applications on the best growing land in our country, often for no better reason than their own self-interest. I cannot accept that this Minister believes in that, or that he is going to allow it. When he responds, I hope he will say that he will not.

There is another threat facing my constituency, and it has an effect on food security too. That is the immense number of pylons that are proposed—87 miles-worth of huge pylons, along the whole of the east coast, neither wanted nor needed by local people. I say “not wanted” for self-evident reasons, but they are not needed, either, because there are better ways of transmitting power. As Lincolnshire county council has argued, the offshore grid is a much more suitable way of transmitting power. Pylons are yesterday’s technology, yet we face the prospect of them filling the big skies of Lincolnshire. We either care about the glory of our landscape or we are careless of it.

Leaving the EU: the Rural Economy

John Glen Excerpts

Tuesday 17th January 2017 Commons Chamber

[John Glen (Salisbury) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to make a contribution to this debate. As somebody who grew up in a horticultural environment in Wiltshire, I see agriculture and horticulture as absolutely key to the rural economy. This is a time of uncertainty. If a business was told that 50% to 60% of its current income was to end in three or four years’ time, it would feel a degree of uncertainty. Against that, in all the conversations that I have had with farmers over the past seven years in and around Salisbury, there was extraordinary frustration with the way that the CAP operated. Every time I met farmers, I heard about a difficulty that had not been overcome. Ministers in Whitehall were unable to effect the changes that they wanted to see.

We must now grasp the opportunities that exist—and considerable opportunities do exist. We must remember that 60% of all food eaten in the EU comes from this country. Some 70% of the UK landmass is managed by those working in the rural economy, and the rural economy contributes £100 billion to the British economy each year, which is a significant sum. We need to be ambitious about the sorts of reforms that we bring to the new funding mechanisms. We have given assurances for the next three years, but we also need to have a bold vision for the future of agriculture and the rural economy that not just delivers more, but demands more. We need to say to those who are frustrated with underfunding and the under-delivery of rural services that we can do more in return for a more productive sector.

I wish to mention the matter of access to the right skills. The problem was clear to me when I visited a fish-gutting plant outside Downton last year. The signs on the wall were not in English, but Polish. Everyone who worked there was bussed up from Southampton. We need to be clear that we nail this issue well. Despite excellent agricultural colleges in Hampshire and Wiltshire, we are not providing the supply of skills to the industry from local home-grown youths. We need to be clear that we answer the question that many farmers are asking, which is how we ensure access to the skills that are needed in this vital sector. This should be a time of optimism for the industry, as we are releasing the burden of all those issues that have been so difficult for farming for so long.

Oral Answers to Questions

John Glen Excerpts

Thursday 24th November 2016 Commons Chamber

[Andrea Leadsom]

If I may say so, that was nonsense. Food prices have been dropping after peaking in 2008, and they do move up and down. On the hon. Lady’s point about the resilience of the food and drink sector, exports this year are well up on last year and growth in the sector is booming. We are doing everything we can on food innovation and getting young people into apprenticeships in increasingly high-technology jobs. This is a well-organised sector with great potential.

[John Glen (Salisbury) (Con)]

In several conversations with the National Farmers Union and farmers in south Wiltshire, complaints have been made to me about how the Rural Payments Agency has been working. Edward Martin and Will Dickson complain of unilateral changes to agreed eligibility calculations. What will the Minister do to ensure that such issues are sorted out so that I do not have any more complaints from my farmers?

[George Eustice]

Having ironed out some of the difficulties we encountered in 2015, we are in a stronger position this year. The RPA reports that over 80% of basic payment scheme claims were submitted online, meaning that the number of cases requiring manual data-entry was significantly reduced. If my hon. Friend would like to give me further details of those two cases, I will ensure that they are investigated and will personally get back to him.

Rural Communities

John Glen Excerpts

Thursday 9th January 2014 Commons Chamber

[John Glen (Salisbury) (Con)]

It is a great privilege to be able to speak in the debate. I represent Salisbury, which I always think of as a constituency of two halves: one half is a suburban area; the other is full of rural communities. The two work closely together. I echo the remarks of my hon. Friend the Member for Carmarthen West and South Pembrokeshire (Simon Hart). He hit the nail on the head when he said that it is unhelpful to make too clear a distinction between the interests of rural and urban communities.

I want to focus today on the challenges to rural businesses. Those businesses in Salisbury and south Wiltshire are growing, and they form a vibrant and wholly necessary part of the economy, which is now doing better. The jobs that they provide are also really welcomed by members of the local community. Those people tell me that the most significant challenge they face is what the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee report calls a “key barrier to growth” for the rural economy—namely, the lack of superfast broadband provision. As other Members have said, it is no longer a luxury but a necessity for everyday life, and certainly for everyday business life.

Significant challenges relating to flows of information have still not been overcome. We wholly welcome the substantial investment to ensure that 95% of households will have access to superfast broadband, but there is a real sense of frustration among those in the most rural parts of my constituency about when that is going to happen and whether they will be included. If they will not be included, what alternatives exist?

I want to mention the Dun Valley Broadband Group, a well organised and well motivated group located primarily around the village of Pitton. Members of the group first approached me more than six months ago, when they were unsure whether they would fall within the zone or which phase of the roll-out they would be included in. We have had meetings with Wiltshire council, which has been excellent in trying to move things forward and pressing BT for more clarity. The maps and the postcode check-up have been mentioned today, but we have found them quite inadequate for identifying specific communities. People do not want general answers about 95% coverage; they want specific information on whether they will be able to access superfast broadband and when they will be able to do so. Those communities that are unable to access it want to be able to take steps to move forward with alternatives. This particular group has been working with Gigaclear, a wholly commercial scheme, and it has been challenged to reach a certain threshold of applicants.

As the report states, the biggest challenge faced by smaller companies is the ability to meet up-front costs. I am also concerned about the challenge to poorer households that fall outside the 95%. What will they do if a well motivated group reaches the threshold for alternative provision that is outside the protection of the regulator in regard to the escalation of costs in subsequent years? They will have no option but to sign up and go along with the alternative provision that the rest of the community has put in place.

My hon. Friend the Member for Thirsk and Malton (Miss McIntosh) suggested that we should start by concentrating on the communities with the greatest eligibility. I am not an expert on these matters, but I would urge caution with regard to the “spidering out” process. As I understand it, BT will work out the logical location for hubs, stations and bases. If any of that were then skewed according to deviations of speed within those communities, there could be a massive escalation in costs, which could undermine the end result for the community.

The information flows should be improved, so that communities can get organised and find alternatives. It is important that those who are outside the current intervention areas should have access to a superfast service, but that must not be at the expense of those who cannot afford to pay an additional subsidy. If the smaller schemes are to be commercially viable and accessible to the whole population, we need to look at how public subsidy can effectively address the initial costs for small businesses and poorer rural householders.

The other thing I wish to mention is my concern about the plans to extend to 95% coverage for superfast broadband by 2017. My local authority is concerned about not wasting time planning for that when there is a lack of clarity about whether and when the money will be delivered, and how it will be delivered. Wiltshire council has invested considerable time and money in an outstanding programme, but it wants clarity about what is going to happen. It is keen to extend its existing contract arrangements with BT so that it can bring more households into the remit of the roll-out, but it does not want to spend hours of council time and lots of resources on tendering, and it does not want to spend months dealing with the state aid issues and so on. We need to ensure real clarity and that things do not get lost in conversations which seem to go quiet when we get within 12 months of a general election. We must be clear about what local authorities can expect until 2017, so that rural communities in my part of Wiltshire know what is going to happen.

There is no doubt that local authorities and villages are working hard to secure superfast broadband. It will be the measure of the Government’s success or otherwise when going into the next election. Small businesses will not be able to function reliably without it. If they need to transfer lots of data to clients abroad or in London, there must be no doubt about the quality of the provision in their rural business. I welcome the steps that have been taken so far, but I hope that the Minister will address the point about the resources that will be available. I hope that he will also address improved information flows and the point made earlier by my hon. Friend the Member for Carmarthen West and South Pembrokeshire about commercial confidence and sensitivities, which prevent a good deal of progress from being made in the most rural areas. I hope we can ensure that this happens because this is all that rural businesses want to talk to me about, and I am anxious to ensure that we deliver.

Agricultural Wages Board

John Glen Excerpts

Wednesday 24th April 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hanson]

This issue certainly matters to people across the whole of the United Kingdom because, even though the AWB is for England and Wales, its abolition will have an impact throughout the UK.

In my constituency, 235 businesses are involved in agriculture and farming, and more than 11% of my constituents work in the agricultural sector. The market town of Mold in my constituency depends not only on the cattle and agriculture markets to bring people in, but on the wages of people who work in agriculture to maintain its shops, business and rural community.

[John Glen (Salisbury) (Con)]

I have a great deal of respect for the right hon. Gentleman, but the National Farmers Union briefing states:

“The Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (ASHE) for 2010 showed that 90% of workers employed in agricultural trades received gross pay above £6.50 an hour”,

which I think was the minimum set by the AWB. If he is seriously concerned about wage levels in the agricultural sector, how does he respond to that review of actual pay levels?

[Mr Hanson]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his question. I am genuinely worried that wages will fall when the AWB is abolished, and I am not the only one: the Farmers Union of Wales, which I will come on to later and which represents the bulk of farmers in my area and other farmers in Wales, supports the official Opposition’s stance against the abolition of the AWB. There is a division of opinion and we need to expose it.