Upland Sheep Farmers

Mark Williams Excerpts

Tuesday 23rd April 2013 Commons Chamber

[The Minister of State, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Mr David Heath)]

I am grateful to the hon. Member for Montgomeryshire (Glyn Davies) for securing this timely and important debate. It is also good to have so many colleagues present, expressing their concerns about the communities in their areas. We have heard from Members representing at least three of the nations of the United Kingdom. We have heard from the right hon. Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd (Mr Llwyd) and the hon. Members for Arfon (Hywel Williams), for Ynys Môn (Albert Owen) and for Llanelli (Nia Griffith) from Wales. From Northern Ireland, we have heard from the hon. Members for South Antrim (Dr McCrea), for Strangford (Jim Shannon) and for South Down (Ms Ritchie). From England, we have heard from the hon. Members for Bishop Auckland (Helen Goodman), for Penrith and The Border (Rory Stewart) and for Colne Valley (Jason McCartney).

They all expressed the point of view of their constituents: a sense of horror at what has happened and a sense of the need to do everything we can to support a very vulnerable group of people and a vulnerable industry, because the last few weeks have been a disaster for many farmers in England, Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland. To experience such severe spring snowfall is almost unprecedented. We have never seen 10-ft drifts this late in the year. The point that the hon. Member for Montgomeryshire was making, and others were reflecting, is that it hit some of our most economically vulnerable farmers at their busiest time, with the lambing season in full swing. No wonder there are people who are experiencing genuine trauma as a consequence.

As the hon. Member for Montgomeryshire said, in the past few days the weather has improved, but when I visited Cumbria recently I saw a lot of snow still lying in the affected areas. Until that clears, which may take a considerable time in the highest areas, we will not be able to quantify the damage fully, but we know that in some individual cases it will be enormous.

I should stress that this problem is very geographically limited. There are some farms next to each other, one of which has been devastated and the next hardly touched. It is remarkable that some farms were very deeply affected and others were not. But for those that are affected there will be, as we already know, many thousands of dead sheep and lambs. As the hon. Member for Arfon said, although he said it in Welsh and I shall not attempt to do the same, a lot of those will be hefted sheep. They have been bred for generations on some of the roughest, highest, most isolated parts of the fells and uplands, and the loss of those animals only adds to the weight of the blow. As the hon. Member for Montgomeryshire told the House, he has had first-hand experience of the emotional trauma and the financial pain caused by losses on that scale.

I visited the north-west of England 10 days ago, to see the damage for myself. It was deeply shocking to see the effect on individual farmers. There is a real sense of devastation and there are people with massive worries about the future.

[Mr Mark Williams (Ceredigion) (LD)]

That position was compounded by another point that my hon. Friend the Member for Montgomeryshire (Glyn Davies) made, about the burial arrangements and whether the EU burial regulations are robust enough to deal with those very exceptional circumstances. What is the Minister’s view on that?

[Mr Heath]

I will return to that, if I may, in just a moment.

I met farmers who have lived their entire lives in the uplands. These are not soft people. These are not weak people. These are some of the strongest, hardest men and women that you would care to meet in this country. They were feeling quite clearly devastated by the position they now find themselves in. As the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) knows, I was in Northern Ireland a few days ago as well, just talking to people about their experiences there—not my responsibility, as he will appreciate, in terms of the devolved settlement—and I heard exactly the same stories; exactly the same pain was being felt.