Agriculture, Fisheries and the Rural Environment

Lord Cavendish of Furness Excerpts

Thursday 2nd November 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Cavendish of Furness (Con)]

My Lords, I join others in thanking my noble friend Lord Lindsay for securing this timely debate and for an excellent opening speech. In taking part in this debate, I need to declare personal interests; they are rather considerable and I therefore refer noble Lords to the register.

It is a special privilege and pleasure for me to be present at my noble friend Lord Plumb’s final contribution in your Lordships’ House. Important milestones on our journey through life often have aspects of sadness and nostalgia. These are not negative sensations; on the contrary, as with today, they accompany the admiration, affection and gratitude that so many of us feel towards my noble friend as he brings down the curtain on the parliamentary phase of such a distinguished career. I join others in wishing him well.

I felt it was almost a tribute to my noble friend when I saw the NFU’s recent paper, Farming’s Offer to Britain: How Farming can Deliver for the Country Post-Brexit. It opened:

“Farming is Britain’s backbone. It matters to everyone. Leaving the EU creates a defining opportunity for British farming. For too long the success of our sector has been determined not in Britain, but in Brussels”.


I do at some point part company with the NFU, in so far as I find ever more compelling the ancient doctrine of free trade. Even then, I accept that free trade can result in concentrated losses that must be set against the large but distributed gains that free trade bestows. If Britain were to adopt a unilateral free trade policy, as we have done in the past and as other countries have done more recently, the benefits would favour especially the poorest and most vulnerable in our society. It would also favour the poorest and most vulnerable in the developing countries with which we trade.

While I believe that the ultimate aim should be free trade, in today’s complex world, special consideration is owed to our farmers. For nigh on four generations, our farmers have been denied—often for good reason—the one thing that they need: the ability to look to the long term. To a large extent, they have had little or no contact with their marketplace and have been told what to produce and how to produce it. Sensitivity and imagination are now required to assist farmers as they face the biggest upheaval probably in living memory. In the more settled times that one hopes lie ahead, literally nobody knows what our farmers will be capable of when they find themselves operating in conventional market conditions. My own hunch, for what it is worth, is that our farmers can and will rise to almost any challenge put in front of them.

I spent yesterday morning following with great interest on the parliamentary website the Secretary of State for the Environment taking questions upstairs from the EU Energy and Environment Sub-Committee. A number of the committee members are speaking in this debate. I was not only much reassured by the Secretary of State’s command of his brief, but felt strongly that his instincts in respect of our countryside and rural enterprise are completely in tune with the times that we live in. He highlighted innovation as one of the most important challenges facing agriculture and the countryside generally and I understood him to say that there may be merit in underwriting in part the risk arising from innovative investment, which will be crucial as we aspire to greater productivity.

Many of the historic problems faced by rural Britain are already identified: the skills shortage; the housing shortage and the hugely damaging defects in the planning process; complex and burdensome regulation, which has been spoken about a lot and is the main complaint of farmers and SME managers; the poor quality of connectivity and low-quality broadband; the miserable underinvestment in infrastructure, and high taxation. These shortcomings must be addressed if we are to have a prosperous future.

For any sector to prosper there needs to be investment and, therefore, a willingness to accept risk. I hope that my noble friend the Minister recognises that today’s fiscal regime impacts on margins to the point where investment is becoming less and less attractive. I am among those who believe that Brexit, with all its short-term problems, will open unimaginable opportunities—it is a question of grasping them.