Agriculture (Delinked Payments) (Reductions) (England) Regulations 2026

Lord Carrington Excerpts

Monday 27th April 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness McIntosh of Pickering (Con)]

My Lords, I would like to pay a personal tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Curry of Kirkharle. Along with my sponsor, the late Lord Plumb, of Coleshill, he has long stood out as being so knowledgeable about farming and the countryside. He has given immense and dedicated service to this House over so many years, and he is a local lad who has done his county proud. We shall all miss him greatly, and we thank him for his great service.

I also pay tribute to the outgoing hereditary Peers and their knowledge, which passes through generations, as we have heard from the noble Earl, Lord Devon. I am probably the first and last member of my family who will enter Parliament or politics, so I am in awe of those who have served with such longevity. They have all made a massive contribution and will be greatly missed.

I echo the thoughts of the noble Lord, Lord Curry of Kirkharle, on the impact that the clean energy proposals will have on farming and the countryside, taking probably about 10% of land each year out of food production. As we heard from my noble friend Lord Redwood, farming is essential. We are only 60% self-sufficient in this country, and in certain fruit and vegetable cases we are only 55% self-sufficient, so it is a diminishing asset if we lose the land to clean energy proposals.

Last week the Minister responded to a Question from me on the SFI and whether farmers would benefit. I am not entirely convinced that she grasped the point—just made by the noble Lord, Lord Curry of Kirkharle—about recognising this as a public good and rewarding farmers for temporarily storing floodwater on farmland. We cannot expect them to do it; they are not operating as a charity. They are trying to make money in very difficult circumstances—we are potentially facing another drought this year, given the rainfall this month—so we need to have a defined understanding of how their contribution will be recognised through the SFI.

I have particular concerns about these regulations, and I am delighted that my noble friend Lord Roborough brought the amendment for debate. I am concerned about two aspects in particular. First, before 1 January 2025, approximately 83,000 farm holdings were receiving the basic payment scheme before the change to delinked payments in England came into effect. After 1 January 2025, there were 32,200 active SFI agreements, with a growing number of businesses having more than one agreement due to how the scheme is administered by the RPA. That immediately demonstrates that there are probably fewer farmers with SFI agreements than even that number suggests. My second concern is about the lack of clarity we can expect when SFI 2027 comes into effect. The Minister is very aware of rural issues, given her previous constituency representation. There will be real hardship, as my noble friend Lord Roborough indicated, and I will address that.

I represented quite a large upland area for the last five years I was in the other place, and I am currently patron of Upper Teesdale Agricultural Support Services. I make a plea to the Minister to be as absolutely clear as the Government can be as to how the schemes will apply for common land, to upland farmers and to tenant farmers. In north Yorkshire in particular, about 48% of the farms are tenanted and, when a solar panel scheme takes a big chunk of the tenanted farm out of production, that leaves them with very little area on which they can claim. I hope that the Minister, in summing up, will look carefully at the gap between the existing schemes remaining in force, and the fact that if you are in an existing scheme, you are probably unable to apply: you are locked out of an environmental scheme until early 2028 at the earliest.

The pace at which basic farm payments are declining and the rate at which the new schemes are coming into effect will pose very real issues of hardship for farmers. I hope that that is an aspect that the Minister will address when she sums up the debate on these regulations.

[Lord Carrington (CB)]

My Lords, I cannot compete with the noble Earl, Lord Devon. First of all, I declare my farming interests in Buckinghamshire and Lincolnshire, and my receipt of delinked payments.

The first Lord Carrington, the third Lord Carrington and the sixth Lord Carrington were all Ministers of agriculture. The most famous of them was the third Lord Carrington, a Liberal, who introduced a policy of smallholdings for farmers during the Boer War and the First World War. That policy seems to be the guiding light for what the Government are currently doing on the SFI payments—concentrating on the small farmers with 50 hectares or less, rather than the larger farmers, who will be capped, if they get money at all, at £100,000.

I am speaking very much as a working, hands-on farmer, and I must say that I have never seen anything quite like it in all the 50 or more years that I have been involved in farming. I want to just bring to the attention of the House some of the real horror stories that are going on, even as we speak. They are based on what we are doing on our farm. We have decided for the first time ever not to plant spring crops, because we cannot risk the weather remaining as dry as it is, and therefore the crops not germinating. We are having tremendous trouble not so much in getting fertiliser, as the noble Lord, Lord Redwood, mentioned, but in getting red diesel. The price of red diesel is the real crucifier of most farmers in this country at the moment. Then, of course, we have the prices for the commodities that we are producing, all of which make leaving the land fallow the best option for us.

In East Anglia, in Norfolk, I gather, crops of wheat are currently being irrigated. That is a very expensive exercise for a crop that is not going to produce a great deal of money. We grow potatoes, and we have reduced our potato acreage considerably due to prices. We had a very good harvest last year, but prices worldwide are terrible. Now we have the potential problem of the SPS agreement. Under the SPS agreement, certain chemicals are going to be banned. If you buy a packet of crisps, that crisp will actually have been taken from a potato three years ago, and the chemicals that will have been used will be banned under the new SPS agreement, unless the Government get a waiver. That means, of course, that those potatoes will go straight into an anaerobic digester, if they cannot be sold.

A similar problem exists for sugar beet. Sugar beet is very susceptible, as everyone knows, to virus yellows; it is estimated that 60% of all sugar beet grown in this country is affected by virus yellows. There are very few other profitable break crops, which means that the following year you will not be able to get the yields you want out of wheats, and so on and so forth. So it is a pretty drastic situation out there.

I am a very lucky farmer, as we are fortunate to live in the murder capital of England. We have filming for “Midsomer Murders” going on even as we speak, and that is much more profitable than a crop of wheat. I am also in a part of the country where we can grow houses. I am lucky, but others are not so fortunately placed in the farming world.

All this, of course, makes the Government’s byline, “Food security is national security”, almost worthless. I am therefore going to ask just one question of the Minister. It is driven by the fact that farmers need to plan, and what we are getting at the moment is not nearly sufficient to enable us to plan for the future. Can the Minister reassure the House on how Ministers and the department are supporting farmers to business plan now by providing forward plans of the SFI and countryside stewardship higher-tier schemes, as they are offered in both 2027 and 2028? Only with that information can we make sense of our farming.

Like everybody else, I thank noble Lords very much for all the support they have given us hereditaries. I will still be here, but sitting on the steps of the Throne rather than in the Chamber.

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

My Lords, I rise to declare my interest as a member of a farming company and also involved in the fertiliser industry, which was mentioned a little earlier. Fertilisers and fuel are farmers’ most expensive costs, and we see unprecedented increases ahead of them, on top of three bad harvests in a row.

I want to dwell for a moment on the SFI and the capped payments. What capped payments do is reward inefficiency; they militate against investment, efficiency, productivity, progress and scale. All the things that farming over many generations has contributed to this nation are at risk of being thrown away carelessly by the capped payments that these regulations will impose.

The noble Lord, Lord Curry, mentioned the land use framework. It is going to be a disaster for farming and terrible for food security. It contemplates in table 1 that fully 1.7 million hectares of productive land will be removed from agriculture, out of a total of 9.6 million hectares. That is about a fifth—and, at £2,000 per hectare gross income, which is what, on average, a mixed farm would hope to gain, it represents a £3.4 billion hit to the rural economy. We cannot afford this in terms of food security and we cannot afford it economically. That £3.4 billion loss is out of a £13.9 billion total gross value added from agriculture. It is between one-fifth and one-quarter of the entire economic output of agriculture in our islands, in all its forms: arable, livestock, fruit, veg, grains and so forth. It is a fantasy to think that somehow, magically—it is magical thinking—we are going to have a 20% efficiency improvement. This adds to further insults with the APR/BPR issue, and the fact that farmers can have their land compulsorily purchased from under them, under the NSIP regime for solar, destroying the credibility and capacity of farms already under pressure: pressures aggravated by the cash flow problems from SFI.

It is hard to get fertiliser as it is in this nation—it is my trade; I know how difficult it is to secure the cargoes, fighting off the rest of the world—yet this Government, by choice, are going to make it even harder to get fertiliser delivered to this nation to support our farmers and underpin our food security with the introduction of insane carbon taxes that will add rocket boosters to the food price inflation that is already barrelling down the tracks.