Farming and Rural Communities

Lord Teverson Excerpts

Thursday 3rd April 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Teverson (LD)]

First, I declare my interests as chair of Cornwall and Isles of Scilly Local Nature Partnership and as a director of Wessex Investors, which is involved in the development sector. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Roborough, for this debate. I know he feels very passionately about this area.

I want first to react and respond to the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of St Albans, who is a true champion of rural affairs, particularly as chair of the Rural Coalition, because the rural economy is often forgotten about. It is important. It is not just farming; it is coastal fisheries, all the SME environment and much more. There are big challenges there, as he said. We can take rural transport, which has declined hugely. It is a real challenge for young people to get to education facilities and for ordinary people to get to work. In the financial area, we have had a huge number of banks closing in urban areas within the countryside, leaving huge areas where people who want to talk to their bank manager find it almost impossible.

The noble Lord, Lord Kakkar, mentioned health. I remember when I first became a Member of this House going along to an all-party parliamentary group on health where there was one of the country’s experts on strokes. I said, “I live in rural Cornwall. What should I do about that challenge?” He answered very quickly, “You should move”. That is the dilemma of living in rural areas and the countryside today

On housing, as the noble Lord, Lord Best, pointed out, we have a serious lack of social housing. When we had the right to buy, we were promised that for every social housing unit sold there would be a replacement. That never happened, in practice. I have to say to the right reverend Prelates that in my own parish of St Ewe the church commissioners have put up for sale some land next to social housing that was built in the past by our village. The church has insisted that it goes out to the open market, despite the fact that, as a local community, we have said that we will pay the market price. It is still out there for anybody to buy on a public quoting system. If the right reverend Prelate would like to have a word with the Bishop of St Germans, I would be very grateful.

We have all these challenges in local communities: transport, housing, access to finance and even energy. The noble Lord, Lord Elliott of Ballinamallard, mentioned the issues in Northern Ireland. Of course, in rural communities we are not generally on the gas grid and have to pay much higher oil heating charges, and that is particularly the case in Northern Ireland. I have to say that a lot of those issues got considerably—and seriously—worse during the incumbency of the previous Government.

On farming, those who mentioned the SFI are absolutely right. I find it incredible that a government department somehow appears to be caught out in its budgeting on one of its major policy planks—not just on farming sustainability but on the growth of nature too. We come to a situation where, with no notice, the scheme ends, leaving many people in limbo. As far as I can see, government policy on nature restoration is also in limbo. Farms that have been on countryside schemes that are coming to an end this year—I think some 35,000 farms are coming to the end of Countryside Stewardship programmes—will have nowhere to go once those programmes are finished.

We have had some excellent specific instances from the noble Lords, Lord Bellingham and Lord Harlech. I spoke to a friend of mine who farms in north Cornwall. She made the point that she has been very enthusiastic about a holistic and sustainable approach to her dairy farming, but said, “What I can’t do now is trust that those schemes will be there for the future. Therefore, what do I do about all the work that I have done so far, while trying to keep my farm viable for the future?”

Back in the days of the European Union, the CAP was not good, but we knew pretty well for seven years that there was going to be consistent policy. We felt we were going to have that with the much better environmental land management scheme, yet now we have uncertainty ahead. Farming, including for biodiversity, is something that needs to be planned and consistent—not just over seven years but beyond that—but we have those uncertainties.

I was pleased that the noble Lord, Lord Grayling, talked about biodiversity corridors and everything that needs to be done there. One of the challenges we have now—I have mentioned this to the Minister before—is that Defra needs to move out of being in silos and be much more comprehensive. I will come to the Corry report in just a second, as it might solve that.

What concerns me is that while we have local nature recovery strategies now in England—48 separate ones that are, I hope, co-ordinated to a degree—at the moment we cannot use ELMS to tie up with them, and the planning process does not especially tie up with them. What we need is a much more holistic approach to biodiversity, to get to those wildlife corridors and everything else that we need to get somewhere towards our 30 by 30 targets. We need to make sure it is far better managed and focused than it is at the moment. Many of those schemes are good, but we need to make sure they can be effective.

The Corry report—I think it came out yesterday or the day before—is on Defra having to move forward in a number of ways. I welcome a number of areas of that report which are relevant to this debate. First, there is having one environmental organisation, out of the many in the Defra family, to lead on major planning issues, although I sometimes think that would be quite useful on smaller planning issues as well, particularly in rural communities where those developments are not so large. Another area is making environmental enforcement better and more practical; there are many other areas as well. I am not going to ask the Minister to say which of those 29 recommendations she will or will not follow, but will the Government take them seriously and start to implement them fairly quickly?

Lastly, I come on to trade, mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh, and others. Trade policy is very much in focus at the moment, and I have a concern. We have seen the very bad reaction that the farming community had to the Australia and New Zealand deals under the previous Administration. I understand that the Government are focused on future economic and trade relations with the United States. I get that, but what I would really like to hear from the Minister is that, rather than the fight between the trade department and Defra that we had under the previous Administration, we have a determination that we will not import food from the United States that is substandard in comparison with our own standards.

My only other question is: when will the SFI function again and can we have confidence that it will be a continuous programme, rather than stopping and starting?