Farm Support

Lord Kirkhope of Harrogate Excerpts

Thursday 16th November 2017 Grand Committee

[Lord Kirkhope of Harrogate (Con)]

My Lords, this is the first time that I have had the honour of appearing in this particular location. I am very pleased to be here to support my noble friend in her debate. I have nothing relevant to declare on the register or elsewhere, other than my deep respect and support for our farmers and the rural communities that support the enterprises around farming. There is a bit of a Yorkshire mafia here today. I had the pleasure and privilege of representing Yorkshire in the other place and in the European Parliament for getting on for nearly 30 years before I came here. The importance of farming to the economy of Yorkshire, as to the rest of the United Kingdom, should never be underestimated.

I have two things to say. First, planning is essential in most of the things that we are involved in, but it is particularly important for farming communities. While, of course, five-year, 10-year and 25-year plans are more likely to be seen in socialist state-controlled economies, nevertheless the Government a little while ago was talking about a 25-year plan for agriculture. That is a long time; it is an awful lot longer than the plan we have in place, or are putting in place, for leaving the European Union. That just underlines a simple fact—that farming cannot plan for two or even five years, because it is all about things such as crop rotation, inheritance, viability, diversity, food prices, volatility in marketplaces, and trying to determine how to invest to keep your farming successful. It is a profession; it requires the adoption of interest in farming by young people, through the education system as well as through their families. Keeping young people on farms is now a particularly difficult problem. I was interested to hear my noble friend Lord Cameron speaking about communities and keeping farming on the land—and enough farmers. I fear that that will be an even greater problem if we cannot give sufficient certainty to farming communities that they will continue to receive not only financial but political support in the years ahead.

In that sense, I mention a social aspect. Farming is a highly pressured occupation, even without some of the uncertainties to which I refer. I pay tribute to the National Farmers’ Union for its support of the farming community, but I pay tribute too to the Farming Community Network, a charity set up to support farmers who have such pressures. Interestingly, mental illness and those sorts of things are much more prevalent in rural communities than in urban ones, and therefore that support seems very worthy, as is the Royal Agricultural Benevolent Institution, which has stepped in on many occasions to give good and useful advice to farmers when they have had pressures—mostly of a financial nature but nevertheless pressures. The Addington Fund and other organisations have been involved as well. I hope that a similarly friendly and beneficent approach can be continually adopted by our banks. I hope that it can also be adopted and maintained by our Governments.

Great challenges lie ahead. One is simply to make sure that the children in our cities start to know that when they eat meat, it has something to do with farming and animals. Surprisingly few do. Support for farming has to come from an understanding of it and its contribution to our economy both by the Government, as I have said, and by society as a whole. I hope that in our debate we will make that quite clear and that my noble friend will be able to respond to those social aspects of farming, which, in many ways, are just as important as the financial ones.