Environmental Land Management Scheme: Food Production

Neil Parish Excerpts

Tuesday 1st February 2022 Westminster Hall

[Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend. He could have rewritten my speech; if he is able to stay for the end—I know that he has other engagements—he will hear me say almost exactly that.

At our PAC hearing, top officials from DEFRA were certain that ELMS would promote increased efficiency on the remaining land that is not going into environmental schemes, but they were not able to tell the Committee how much more food would need to be imported as a result.

In 1984, the UK’s self-sufficiency in food was 78%, but by 2019 it was down to 64%, according to National Farmers Union data. However, according to Government statistics, just 55% of the food consumed in the UK was supplied by the UK—this being the result of subtracting UK exports from domestic production. In 2019, we imported £11.5 billion-worth of fruit and veg and exported just £1.3 billion, and we imported £6.6 billion-worth of meat and exported just £2.1 billion. From a balance of trade point of view, it is critical that we reverse that trend, bolster our home production and find opportunities to export more of our excellent, high-quality British food.

[Neil Parish (Tiverton and Honiton) (Con)]

The Department for International Trade, along with DEFRA and the Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board, could do a real trade drive to get experts across the world to promote great British food. At the moment, we are not getting our act together fast enough.

[Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown]

I could not agree more with my hon. Friend, the excellent Chair of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee. He is 100% right: there are a lot of opportunities all over the world for us to export our produce.

As an island nation, it is vital that we are able to feed our population. Considering that we have such a temperate climate, which is well suited to agriculture, we have all the means to increase our self-sufficiency. There is also an argument that we have a moral duty to maintain our food security. With a growing global population leading to increased food demand, alongside climate change, which will have a disproportionate impact on certain countries, it is imperative that we ensure that our own needs are met, rather than being more reliant on other countries around the world.

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[Neil Parish (Tiverton and Honiton) (Con)]

It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Davies. It is a great novelty that you are in the Chair and I can be the recipient of your rulings. It is an interesting world.

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for The Cotswolds (Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown) for outlining very well the position of agriculture and food. Let me say to the hon. Member for Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport (Luke Pollard) that the EFRA Committee will look into mental health in farming and rural communities because there is a real problem at the moment. May I also say to the Minister for Farming, Fisheries and Food that I very much respect and enjoy working with her? She has done detailed work on farming, water, animal transport and all sorts of issues that come out of DEFRA and, dare I say, need sorting out. That is the whole reason we are here this morning.

I do not intend to go into the detail of what my hon. Friend for The Cotswolds said, because he did a very good job. I want to wax lyrical about where I think farming and food is going in this country and where we are not exactly getting it right. I think we all agree that the direction of travel is right, but we are not getting to where we need to go, for the simple reason that the payments coming forward are too small. They will not encourage farmers into a lot of extra bureaucracy and administration, and £20 a hectare for the first scheme under the sustainable farming incentive will not pay for the extra work needed. The Minister could well argue that many farmers are already doing that. That is great, but the whole idea of the scheme is to get those farmers who are not doing it into that place. Eventually, we might get all sorts of sticks to get them into that place, but the carrot will be so much more effective than the stick.

I declare an interest, as a farmer, and as a farmer who is older than the average age of farmers—perhaps I should put that on record. To be serious, we have an opportunity to get this right. None of us here, whether remainer or Brexiteer, wants to go to war to protect or maintain the common agricultural policy, but the one thing it did do under the basic farm payment, for better or for worse, was deliver a good, strong payment into farmers’ bank accounts. Some of the big, wealthy landowners—I have often waxed lyrical about, the barley barons of East Anglia, because I do not represent them—may have been able to take the basic farm payment, put it away in their bank accounts and farm without it. But I tell you what, most of the average family farms depend hugely on that payment.

I would say to our Minister, and, if he were here, the Secretary of State, who I also work with—I work very well with all the Ministers in DEFRA; they are very co-operative—that we have not done enough work on the effect of taking the payment away and how many farms will be viable afterwards. We have gone from having our heads in the clouds, “This is the new policy, isn’t it great?” to a bit of reality. By 2024, half of the basic farm payment will be gone. How will farmers replace that?

Prices are good at the moment; costs are high. There will be a lot of farmers out there who will try to maintain production, and who may even try to enhance their production, which is perhaps not the way the Government want farming to go. That is why the level of payment must be got right.

It is very laudable to plant forest, but it is also very good to have all that carbon held and sequestered in permanent pasture. Our hill farming, our permanent pasture farming and our small family farms are doing an excellent job. Let us be clear: it will be at least 20 years after a tree has been planted that it gets anywhere near holding the carbon that permanent pasture holds. It also is great to rewet peat. All those things can be done, but let us have some food security. Let us make sure that the food we eat comes mainly from Britain. Lots of people struggle to buy food, and these policies will reduce food production: make no mistake about it. That is where we will find that food prices may rise even higher, which would be wrong, not only for farming, food production and food security, but for the people of this country.

Let us look at the landscape. We want some good forests, but do people go to the forest a great deal? No, they do not. They like to enjoy the British countryside. They like to see copses in the fields and enhanced hedgerows. They want agriculture to take perhaps a slightly more organic route, but still produce very good food. We may actually need more land, not less, to do that.

Today gives me an opportunity to say that what we are doing is not wrong, but we need to take a raincheck. We need to get DEFRA out there, talking to the farmers more. I say quite bluntly to the Minister that there are a lot of staff in DEFRA, but I am not convinced I know what they are all doing. We know the proverb, “One boy’s a boy; two boys be half a boy, and three boys be no boy at all.” I do wonder sometimes. I am not criticising any particular individual—all I am saying is that having more staff in a Department does not necessarily make it more efficient.

Let us go back, not to fundamentals, but we have the right policies, wrongly implemented, with farmers not knowing where they are going and losing a lot of money. Should we not look again at the overall cake and say, perhaps, we need more for farming, more for competitive and environmental farming, covering slurry stores and the like? Do we need to slightly tweak the amount that is going to large forests so that we do not, as my hon. Friend the Member for The Cotswolds said, just hand it over to big institutional landowners? If not, the family farms, which are the core of this country’s food production and environment, will be the losers.

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[The Minister for Farming, Fisheries and Food (Victoria Prentis)]

It is a delight to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Davies, as it always is under the chairmanship of my hon Friend the Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Neil Parish). I should declare my farming interests, which are well rehearsed in this House. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for The Cotswolds (Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown) on securing the debate. I greatly enjoyed visiting his constituency last week for a challenging and thought-provoking afternoon, when we discussed water and nutrient pollution. I thank all the farmers in the country for producing the food that we enjoy eating—at least three times a day in my case.

Farmers produce food. That is their job, and that will not change as a result of the future farming policy. My hon. Friend the Member for Stroud (Siobhan Baillie) put it extremely well when she said, “Food, food, food.” I am very much looking forward to encouraging the nation to join a national conversation about food in the White Paper, which is shortly to be published by the Government. There will be much more to say about that in the coming months.

The pandemic has reminded us how important food security is. Under the Agriculture Act 2020, where food definitely features right at the beginning, we have a legal responsibility to review food security every three years. Our first report, which I recommend to those present, was published just before Christmas and highlighted the resilience of our food supply chain. Our production-to-supply ratio remains high when judged against historic levels. We must not forget that the figure was about 30% in the late 19th century and about 40% just before the war. I take the challenge from the hon. Member for Cambridge (Daniel Zeichner) to commit to 60%.

[Neil Parish]

I am delighting in the ancient history lesson, but can we be serious about the fact that we ought to judge production from after the war and from where we were in the 1970s and 1980s? We need to get that production up. While I respect the Minister’s views on ancient history, we need to move forward slightly.

[Victoria Prentis]

Fair enough. This is an important issue, and the clever statisticians are always reluctant for Government to commit to an absolute figure. That is not because of any theological argument, but because we cannot stop people eating, for example, rice or bananas, and nor do we want to. The important measure to look at is food that can be produced here.