Farming and Rural Communities

Lord Horam Excerpts

Thursday 3rd April 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Horam (Con)]

Unlike the noble Lord, Lord Carrington, I am afraid that I do not possess a great knowledge of farming. However, it is interesting how many noble Lords who do not possess a knowledge of farming have been drawn into this debate; it shows the concern that everybody has for farming and for what is happening as a result of the Government’s actions.

The nearest I got to understanding farming was when I was asked, a long time ago, to consider putting my name forward to become the Conservative candidate in the Monmouth by-election. Realising that Monmouth was a rural area with lots of farming, I rang my wife’s uncle, who was a farmer in England, and we had a useful half-hour discussion. When I got to the final of Monmouth, there were three people there—Evans, Evans and Horam—so clearly I had no chance. But I was mollified when the president of the Welsh NFU came up to me afterwards and said, “Mr Horam, I am sorry you were not selected because you do show a remarkable understanding of the problems of Welsh farming”. Little did he know.

However, I must not totally underestimate my knowledge of farming, because I was brought up in the Ribble Valley, which is very much a farming area. I was born there during the Second World War, when, of course, food security was of immense significance. We had rationing, which meant that there was no obesity as well as no malnutrition—although the downside was that the food was extremely stodgy and, as the official history of the Second World War states, there was a remarkable level of flatulence as a result of the food we were eating then.

As someone with that concern for farming, I was shocked and dismayed by the Budget and its effect on farming. I do not think that the intention was deliberate; I think it was rather accidental, because it was a Budget resolution. As my noble friend Lady Coffey remarked, the people at Defra are, in essence, urban MPs. The same can be said about the Members of Parliament in the Treasury: they are predominantly urban MPs and have little understanding of the effect on farming of taking a short-term budgetary view of what we have to do. This is another example of how taking an immediate fiscal framework, rather than a long-term view, has disastrous consequences. But it is certainly not accidental that the Government have followed that up with the closure of the sustainable farming initiative. Jenni Russell said in an article in the Times:

“It is a shattering betrayal of the farmers who trusted Starmer’s commitment to greener policies … As one prominent farmer and environmentalist … said: ‘In the context of everything farmers and society have been told since 2017, this is insane’”.


Those are strong words from the Times.

Curiously, this damaging approach to farming was not always a characteristic of Labour Governments. The Minister—who, as we know, is a very capable woman and very good at the Dispatch Box—was the former MP for Workington. She will remember one of her illustrious predecessors, the great Fred Peart, who was the Secretary of State for Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, as it was called at that time, not once but twice in the second Wilson Administration. He was much loved by farmers and had great experience and understanding of the farming community.

In addition, another MP during that period, Joan Maynard, was a representative of the agricultural workers. Because she was very left wing, she was called “Stalin’s Granny”—very affectionately—by the House of Commons. She would not have stood for all this nonsense and the effect on agricultural workers. So I appeal to the Minister, for whom we all have a high regard, to take her colleagues on a trip down memory lane, in order for them to realise that Labour once had real wisdom and understanding of community, and to persuade them to change their minds on these disastrous policies.