Oral Answers to Questions
John Glen Excerpts(1 week ago)
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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(1 week, 3 days ago)
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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.
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(2 weeks, 3 days ago)
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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(3 months, 3 weeks ago)
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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.