Food Inflation

John Glen Excerpts

Thursday 15th January 2026 Westminster Hall

[John Glen (Salisbury) (Con)]

May I say what a pleasure it is to serve not only under your chairship, Dame Siobhain, but on the Treasury Committee with you and the hon. Member for Hornsey and Friern Barnet (Catherine West)?

I first became engaged in this subject during my first Parliament, when I joined the all-party parliamentary group on hunger and food poverty with the late Frank Field. He taught me a great deal, and we worked together on a cross-party basis to produce a report on hunger and food poverty. I was drawn to this topic by the fact that the Trussell Trust was founded in Salisbury by Paddy and Carol Henderson, who were taking food into Bulgaria at the time. In 2000, the first food bank was opened in Salisbury, and we now see food banks across the country.

While I will address what the hon. Lady spoke about, it is also important that we reflect on some of the deeper challenges that exist with food inflation, which is running at a much higher rate than the prevailing level of inflation. In preparing for this debate, I examined the facts carefully and read briefings from UKHospitality, the Food and Drink Federation, the National Farmers Union and the Trussell Trust, all of which provide helpful analysis. Over the five-year period up to August 2025, food inflation was about 10% higher than the prevailing general level of inflation. As the hon. Lady set out, that has had a massive impact on the poorest in our communities, who in different ways spend a higher proportion of their income on food.

We in this Chamber can all attribute different weightings to different aspects of this issue, including international global agricultural prices and the clearly significant disruption to the supply chain after the invasion of Ukraine. The Bank of England would assert that domestic labour costs and high pay growth is a key factor, particularly in sectors such as horticulture, where there is a degree of mechanisation. However, we are never going to remove the reliance—I speak as the son of a horticulturalist—on the hard work of people being paid to do a manual job.

In a written answer published just last week, the Economic Secretary to the Treasury spoke about the Government’s intention to set out the food inflation gateway to examine all the different drivers of inflation. I acknowledge the work the Government are doing, and I am sure the Minister will follow up on that to reset somewhat the relationship with the EU. Business rates are also a factor, but if we look across milk, sugar, cheese and flour—some of the most basic staple foodstuffs—we see significant increases over the last five years, which range from 19% for flour up to 56% for sugar and 46% for milk. We have to be honest about all the different regulations and obligations that we put on those who supply our food and prepare it for us in restaurants. The input-cost pressures need to be carefully weighed against one another.

I mentioned the significant increases in labour costs, and the agricultural sector’s reliance on labour, but it is also about energy costs. Our energy costs are 45% higher at this point in time than those in France and Germany. That is a cost that many of the food processing industries just cannot avoid. The Government will assert that they are on a transformational journey, but until that we reach the destination, the costs are incredibly high and difficult to bear.

Animal welfare is an important issue for many in the Chamber and across the House. If we look at how farming works, we see that there is actually a lower density of poultry and beef, which leads to different costs for producing some of those things. We want to have it all, including the extended producer responsibility—a whole life-cycle responsibility for packaging. When we take all these things together, simultaneously, in a five-year period of global disruption, the outcome is very worrying. It would be remiss not to mention the impact of climate change on crops such as coffee, cocoa and palm oil.

The net effect is that food is too expensive for the most vulnerable and the poorest in our communities. That has really difficult consequences. It is a massive part of our economy. UKHospitality covers, I think, 123,000 venues, and 10% of all UK jobs. The sector generates £54 billion in tax receipts, so the changes that we make to its input costs will have enormous consequences. We have to be honest about which changes we are prepared to prioritise and which changes we cannot afford at this point in time, because they will have an impact.

I want to make a few observations about food poverty. Just last week I visited Maria Stevenson, who manages the Salisbury food bank, which used to be a Trussell Trust food bank and is now independent. She does an amazing job of analysing those who use the food bank—those who go occasionally or on a recurring basis—to try to give them additional support and make interventions, such as supporting them to secure the right benefits or helping them with other things in their lives. We have to grasp that.

None of us want to see food banks grow. We should have pride in what Paddy and Carol Henderson did all those years ago, but not in seeing food banks grow as they have over the last 25 years. We have to be honest about the situations people are in. Next Monday, we will have a financial wellbeing workshop in our guildhall in Salisbury, where the Money and Pensions Service is inviting people to open up and talk about cost of living pressures, so that we can find solutions.

I do not expect the Minister to be able to go through all the input costs today and give an analysis of how they are going to be reduced—although I recognise that there were some hopeful signs at the end of last year on both food inflation and general inflation, albeit from a higher base than I would have liked to have seen. We must also look into people’s wider financial wellbeing and the circumstances they find themselves in.

Inflation is insidious. It removes the buying power of our constituents. One of the wealthiest countries in the world has people who do not have enough food to eat. We must all redouble our efforts to tackle that, so that we can be proud of what we have achieved by the end of our time in Parliament. My experience is that, given their complicated circumstances, those experiencing food poverty need more than just a handout.

--- Later in debate ---

[Dame Angela Eagle]

I was thinking, when I attended his funeral a few years ago, what an effect he had at a grassroots level with his vision for getting stuff done. There are many hundreds of thousands of people up and down the country who, even though they might not know it, owe him a debt of gratitude.

The actions we have taken start with easing cost of living pressures and raising living standards. It is obvious, as many colleagues on the Government side of this Chamber have said, that one of the basic causes of food insecurity is the price of food, but it is also people’s inability to have enough income to do one of the most basic things in life: putting food on their family’s plates—or their own. Analysis demonstrates that that difficulty particularly affects those with children and those who have disabilities or other issues around being able to earn a reasonable amount of money if they are in work, so that they can cover basic costs. The Trussell Trust demonstrated, as my hon. Friend the Member for Alloa and Grangemouth (Brian Leishman) said, that a third of those who attend food banks for emergency food parcels are in work.

I found it interesting to hear Opposition Members say that increases in the national minimum wage or in the money that people earn for working were actually part of the problem. Those who do low-wage work also have to eat. Although the increases add a cost, we have to appreciate that maintaining a very low-pay society will not help us get out of this problem.

[John Glen]

I hear what the Minister says, but does she not recognise that if the prevailing increase in the national living wage is 6.7% and inflation is about half that, and given the other costs mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for Keighley and Ilkley (Robbie Moore), many employers will not be able to take on any casual extra staff? They may even need to release some members of staff, which surely does not help anyone.

[Dame Angela Eagle]

The right hon. Gentleman is correct at the margins, but I am also correct that having a very low-wage economy and not increasing the national living wage does not have a positive effect. As with all economic analysis, some of this is about the balance and which effect comes out top. We have tried many years with chronic low pay and very few rights at work, so we are now going to try something different. On the Government Benches, we think that people deserve a living wage for doing a full-time job. That is how we will get out of this situation.

The Government are taking a strategic, joined-up approach to tackling the cost of food to build a more resilient and fairer food system for the long term. I hope to reassure the hon. Member for Keighley and Ilkley (Robbie Moore) that we are joining up across Government and it is not just DEFRA talking about this. Just this morning, I joined my hon. Friend the Member for Kingston upon Hull West and Haltemprice (Emma Hardy) at a food poverty conference hosted by the Department for Work and Pensions, which brought together representatives from local authorities, the third sector and civil society. That is where we can forge local, practical solutions to some of the problems that we have all perceived in our constituencies. The Government’s job in that circumstance is to try to facilitate and empower those things to happen, rather than have a top-down approach that mandates what to do. There are certain things that we can have an effect on, and there are others that we need to use empowerment to bring about.

We are working together across Government to tackle this issue head on. That includes the child poverty strategy to boost family incomes and cut essential costs. It also includes the 10-year plan from the Department of Health and Social Care to tackle the link between poverty and obesity, which is an extremely important aspect of these debates; and the expansion and improvement of free school meals by the Department for Education. I personally believe that we must break the link between poverty and obesity, and get good nutritional food to everybody in the country. It is often cheaper to eat good nutritional food, but many people live in constituencies where there are food deserts or where, as my hon. Friend the Member for Hornsey and Friern Barnet said, there is a poverty premium on getting to good nutritious food, and we have to work with the industry to try to deal with that.

We are co-ordinating across Government to deliver real change and to break the cycle of sticking-plaster politics that preceded us. From April, the value of Healthy Start will increase by 10%. The weekly value will increase from £4.25 to £4.65 for pregnant women and children aged one to four, and from £8.50 to £9.30 for children under one. We will continue to work with retailers to expand access to healthy, affordable food, which we at DEFRA are particularly interested in bringing about. The expansion of free school meals will benefit about half a million more pupils, save families up to £495 per child per year and lift about 100,000 children out of relative poverty by the end of this Parliament.

We are extending the holiday activities and food programme, with £600 million to support children during school holidays. That was particularly welcomed by the local activists at the food poverty conference that I attended this morning. Our free breakfast clubs will be rolled out nationally, starting with 750 schools, ensuring that no child starts the day hungry for food. I have visited some of those breakfast clubs in my constituency; seeing children eating, playing naturally and being ready to learn as school starts is a real boost.

At DEFRA, we are introducing the food inflation gateway to ensure the impact of regulation. Opposition Members have been through some of the issues that they worry about with respect to that—none at greater length than the hon. Member for Weald of Kent (Katie Lam). The food inflation gateway is there to ensure that the impact of regulation on food prices is properly assessed before implementation and is looked at cumulatively. Together, those actions are preventing the chaotic and unsequenced policymaking that characterised a lot of the chaos of our predecessor Governments.

We know that food price inflation is just part of a wider challenge on the cost of living, and our approach goes beyond tackling the cost of food alone—from energy bills to childcare. That is why this Government are taking action on all fronts: raising the minimum wage—I recognise that we and the Opposition have a bit of a political disagreement about the effect of that—extending the £3 bus fare cap to keep transport affordable, ensuring that Best Start in Life family hubs can be present in every local authority, backed by £500 million of funding, and removing the cruel and ideological two-child limit on universal credit to ensure that families receive support for all children, thereby helping to lift an estimated 450,000 children out of poverty. That is a serious and ambitious series of actions to tackle the pressures that families face.

I am also acutely aware of the pressures that farmers face, which is why we are looking to see what we can do—as the Batters report suggested—to strengthen the fair dealing regulations for farmers to ensure that they get a fair price for the food they produce. Building on the Food Strategy Advisory Board established by my predecessor, we are collaborating across the entire food chain to deliver a system that works for everyone. We have a great deal of work to do. It is not simple, but we are determined to get on with it.

Farming

John Glen Excerpts

Thursday 13th March 2025 Commons Chamber

[John Glen (Salisbury) (Con)]

I am grateful to the right hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr Carmichael) for securing this afternoon’s debate. I want to make three points.

Salisbury, my rural constituency, has farming at its heart. The universal feedback that we have had from farmers is that since this Government have come in they have been very, very disappointed. The changes to the APR and BPR have catastrophic implications for succession planning, and despite making really sensible suggestions the NFU has been completely rebuffed. Farmers are in absolute despair. That came before we had all the changes to national insurance and to the national living wage. The overall context for operating small businesses, which is what farms are, has been transformed. The level of exposure that farmers feel to these combined pressures is enormous.

Then yesterday we had the announcement of the suspension of the SFI—a key part of the environmental land management scheme. A number of farmers rang me up yesterday and said, “This is the end. What are we going to do?” One farmer I spoke to yesterday afternoon, who operates 27 farms, works with an agent to prepare documents to apply for grants, but those had not quite gone in, so he now faces grave uncertainty—a real black hole. This needs to be addressed urgently. The combined effect of the changes in the Budget and last night’s announcement has had a massive impact on the industry across the United Kingdom.

I want to use my remaining time to focus on where we need to go now. This is a debate about the future of farming, after all. I recognise that, post Brexit, we need serious thinking and leadership about reconciling food production incentives, environmental management and getting in place the right arrangements for trade. Transitioning from where we were before 2016 is not straightforward. But I urge the Minister to put some defined objectives into the public domain and make his officials accountable for delivering on them. That would help the Government to set a clear road map going forward and help famers know what food security really means from his perspective.

Flooding

John Glen Excerpts

Monday 6th January 2025 Commons Chamber

[Emma Hardy]

Again, my hon. Friend is right to point out how devastating flooding is. I would of course be happy to meet him and discuss the situation in his constituency, but just to reassure him, we will spend £2.4 billion in the next two years to strengthen, improve and maintain our flood defences.

[John Glen (Salisbury) (Con)]

The £13 million investment in the Salisbury river park scheme is a fantastic intervention, but I urge the Minister to continue working with the Environment Agency to find mechanisms with which parishes can work collaboratively with it to develop smaller schemes. Beyond the crisis management that she and the Environment Agency are working on at the moment, does she recognise that there is concern about inadequate scrutiny of the increased flood risk around new developments? If we are to reassure our constituents when more housing is put into the mix, it is important that there be proper consideration of the effect on flood risk. Many people in Salisbury remain concerned about those outcomes.

[Emma Hardy]

The right hon. Gentleman is always welcome to urge me to do many things. His proposal on how the Environment Agency works with local parishes is an interesting one, and I would be happy to hear more of his thoughts on it. To reassure people about new homes, we have committed to building more high-quality, well-designed and sustainable homes, and to ensuring that they do not increase flood risk and are not at risk of flooding. If alternative sites are not available and developments need to be in locations where there is a risk of flooding, they must be flood resilient and resistant for their lifetimes, and must not increase overall flood risk.

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.