Rural Communities: Prince’s Countryside Fund

Lord Mancroft Excerpts

Thursday 7th October 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Mancroft]

My Lords, it falls to me to congratulate my noble friend Lord Younger of Leckie on his excellent maiden speech. I do so wholeheartedly. He comes to your Lordships’ House with great experience of both rural Buckinghamshire and rural Scotland, as his speech revealed, and he has clearly picked up his late father’s political mantle effortlessly. He also comes to us with an enviable track record as a headhunter, so he will prove more than adequate in assessing your Lordships. We have appreciated and enjoyed my noble friend’s contribution today. I know your Lordships will, like me, look forward to many more speeches from my noble friend in the years to come.

The whole House is in the debt of my noble friend Lord Gardiner of Kimble for giving us this opportunity to debate rural matters—a subject that has been sorely neglected over the past few years. Indeed, it is splendid to see such a strong speakers’ list, reflecting the degree of expertise on the countryside that this House has traditionally had. I declare an interest as deputy chairman of the Countryside Alliance and chairman of the Standing Conference on Countryside Sports.

At the same time, we are being given an unusual but welcome opportunity to congratulate the Prince of Wales on the launch of the Prince’s Countryside Fund. The Prince comes in for a great deal of criticism, most of it undeserved, and not enough credit is given to him for the extraordinary, incredible network of foundations and charities that he has created, threading through so many areas of our national life. Over the years he has displayed a knack for identifying those issues and parts of society that have been abandoned by circumstances, or allowed to fall between two stools.

It is a fact of early 21st century life that for many people in Britain the countryside is a foreign country, in a way that it is not in most other European countries. The vast majority of our people have completely lost touch with their rural heritage. Although they seem to appreciate the country in the way that we appreciate a beautiful piece of art in a museum, they have no understanding of it as a living entity. In particular, we seem to have severed the connection between the food on our tables and the process by which it gets there. Farming and the rural way of life have become undervalued as well as misunderstood, which has led to many people who live in the countryside, particularly those working in agriculture and related industries, feeling that they are under siege in some way. In my village there is a young lad who works in the kennels but has college friends in London. He is a highly intelligent and articulate young man, but he told me that when he comes to London to a party with his old college friends, he lies about his job because they would not understand or would laugh at him. I suspect he is probably right.

Where I live, in Gloucestershire, is traditionally cattle country—both beef and dairy cattle. However, there are very few animals to be seen now. The older farmers do not want to get up to milk their cows at four in the morning, and their sons and daughters certainly do not. They have seen what happened to their parents. Milk quotas have therefore been sold and farmers approach retirement with no one to take on the farm. Unless we are careful we shall end up with farmhouses let or sold as weekend retreats, and the land simply ranched or used as toy farms for city dwellers’ recreation.

This year I have noticed more and more maize being grown as cattle feed—because it pays—but fewer and fewer cattle to eat it. I keep asking my farming friends why they are growing it, who buys it and where are the cattle to eat it, but I have not had an answer yet. This, I suspect, is farming as directed by central planning in Brussels, rather than in response to a local market. The growth in population and the pressure of climate change both mean that we cannot afford to allow our limited land space on this tiny island to go to waste. One of the reasons that this island is the envy of our European neighbours is because we have looked after our countryside so well. That has been achieved not by government diktat, but by the men and women who live on and farm the land.

By focusing on the problems of specialist farmers and farming communities, such as those in the uplands, and by identifying exactly what their most pressing needs are, and addressing them, the Prince’s Countryside Fund will help some of the most vulnerable farmers and farming communities in Britain, ensuring that the weakest but most important threads in the wonderful tapestry of rural Britain are strengthened and enabled to continue their work. If we ever lose that expertise, we shall never get it back, and as the pressure to produce grows in the years to come, we shall need that expertise more and more. At the same time, by connecting consumers to the issues that beset the countryside, the fund will, I hope, start to reconnect the British people to their rural heritage and help them to understand and appreciate its importance, as they used to naturally.

Rural Britain has had a pretty bum deal for the last few years. Foot and mouth disease was colossally mishandled by the previous Government. There have been bird flu scares; increasing and unaddressed bovine tuberculosis; the continual loss of rural services and amenities; rising unemployment; and a Government largely indifferent to these problems, but at the same time seemingly intent on imposing their own alien metropolitan agenda—even by means of the criminal law. Mr Blair’s confession in his recently published memoirs, that he knew the hunting ban was wrong but did nothing to prevent its passage, is quite extraordinary. The claim that he was personally responsible for the loopholes in the law is frankly just fantasy—an appalling and shaming example of government at its worst.

I hope that can now change. We cannot solve every problem overnight but what we can do is send a message to rural Britain that it has a Government who understand and care, and are prepared to listen and then act. As so often in so many areas of our national life, through his foundation of the Prince’s Countryside Fund the Prince of Wales has led by example. I look forward to my noble friend the Minister telling your Lordships exactly how the Government intend to follow his example.