Agricultural Transition Plan

Lord Cromwell Excerpts

Wednesday 1st February 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Cromwell (CB)]

My Lords, I declare my farming interests. I very much enjoyed the Minister’s upbeat presentation on the situation in agriculture, but I know that, from his own farming experience, he will empathise with the fact that any farming business is a complex series of ecosystems that interact with each other, and a decision on one will affect others in many different ways. Therefore, can he help me by explaining why the Defra strategy appears to be to drip out bits of the environmental programme, for example, piece by piece? One month it is soil, the next month it is hedgerows. Farmers, who are trying to feed the nation and improve the environment, find it impossible to plan a business when these bits of information are dropped out on a fragmentary basis, as I understand it, right out until 2025.

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

There are two reasons for that. First, we have a programme of tailing out the basic payment scheme and replacing it with ELMS. That requires us to manage the public money properly. Secondly, we want this to be an iterative—a wonderful Civil Service word—process that responds to our understanding of real life. We have had our tests, trials and pilots and have learned from them. In the autumn we had a serious tyre-kicking session on this, which drew some criticism. I can understand why; people were very nervous that we were going to do a screeching U-turn, but we have not. Out of that has now come the announcement of six, as opposed to three, new standards—because farmers wanted to know precisely what the noble Lord said.

It takes time to get this right because, as he says, it is about people’s livelihoods and businesses, and they want to be able to plan for the future. I think farmers much prefer that—or will in hindsight, when they look back on this era—to some big bang moment where we stop one scheme on 31 December and go into another on 1 January. By and large, when Governments have tried that across a whole range of different reforms in different departments, it has been a disaster. We have tried to do this over many years, and in time farmers will understand that they have been able to migrate from one system to another. As a farmer, that is certainly what I want; I understand if other farmers have different views. I want a Government who listen to farmers and change accordingly, and that is what we have tried to do.