Environmental Land Management Scheme: Food Production

Richard Holden Excerpts

Tuesday 1st February 2022 Westminster Hall

[Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown (The Cotswolds) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered food production and the Environmental Land Management Scheme.

I begin by drawing attention to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests: I am an arable farmer. It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Davies. I am delighted to have been able to secure this debate today on food production and the environmental land management scheme. I thank the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs; the Minister for Farming, Fisheries and Food, my hon. Friend the Member for Banbury (Victoria Prentis), who is here today; and the Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, my hon. Friend the Member for Taunton Deane (Rebecca Pow), for addressing us at the highly successful launch of the UK agriculture partnership at the Royal Agricultural University in the heart of my constituency last Thursday.

As more and more land is taken out of food production for environmental schemes, we face the dangerous consequences of becoming reliant on importing larger and larger amounts of food. In short, this debate is all about putting the “F” back into DEFRA. Food should be at the heart of ELMS policy and should be classed as a public good with public money under the scheme. I am aware of the 2021 UK food security report, but it is largely full of dry facts and we are looking for some policy to underpin it.

This is a timely debate because the Public Accounts Committee, of which I am deputy Chair, carried out a detailed inquiry into ELMS and published a report on its findings at the beginning of the year. Now that we have left the European Union, we have a once-in-a-lifetime chance to completely replace our agricultural support system with an ambitious post-Brexit agricultural policy that supports the Government’s ambitious 25-year environmental plan.

Our environmental policy should be joined up with agricultural policy that encourages sustainable food production here at home. Alongside sustainability, we need to help the agricultural sector’s competitiveness and resilience in the macroeconomic, trade and regulatory context. At the heart of ELMS are the changes to the mechanism for distributing funding—that was previously done via direct common agricultural policy payments—to a system that will launch fully in 2024, where farmers will be encouraged towards environmental and productivity improvements.

The Government have stated that all the objectives of ELMS will be delivered for just £2 billion. During our hearing last October, the Public Accounts Committee pointed out that that was a highly ambitious target. As we all know, there are three key elements to the project: the sustainable farming initiative for all farmers to be paid to manage their land in even more environmentally friendly ways; local nature recovery, for more complex and collaborative projects; and landscape recovery, for large-scale projects such as afforestation, rewilding and re-wetted peat.

However, there are clear structural and timetabling issues in ELMS implementation, because details are still not as comprehensive as we would expect by this stage in the scheme. It is not apparent what the aims, objectives or metrics are for supporting more than £2 billion of public funding, whether the schemes will provide good value for money, or how they will help in achieving the Government’s 25-year environmental plan and net zero by 2050. Some farmers are concerned about the practicality of implementing schemes on time. Because of the natural cycle of animals and plants, such schemes can take two years or more to implement, and that is why timely information from DEFRA is so vital.

The Government trialled the first phase of the ELMS programmes with the SFI pilot last year, from which they will draw information before they begin the scheme properly this year. In December, the Government produced a policy paper on how they will expand the scheme over the next few years, but that information is too late for farmers to change their plans. What is clear is that the scheme will require a huge amount of land. For example, the Committee on Climate Change has a target for 30,000 to 50,000 hectares of forestry to be planted every year between 2024 and 2050—an enormous amount of land.

[Mr Richard Holden (North West Durham) (Con)]

I thank my hon. Friend for securing the debate. One concern that my farmers in North West Durham have, especially as they look to diversify and specialise in their production, is that forestry has to be only part of the solution; it cannot be a replacement for food production. As with gas and heating recently, food security will be so important in the future.

[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.

--- Later in debate ---

[Luke Pollard (Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is a farm mask made by my little sister, who is a farmer. I declare an interest in that my two little sisters are farmers in north Cornwall; I am very proud of them and what they do. I thank the hon. Member for The Cotswolds (Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown) for introducing the debate so well, with his fervent focus on the future of British farming, which is not as secure as it once was. On one hand, the changes being made by Government could be positive, but, on the other, they could be disastrous. The problem is that very few people in this room, including probably the Minister, know which way it will go. That is why it is so important to have parliamentary scrutiny of the proposals and for Ministers to bring forward more information.

The spirit behind the environmental land management scheme is good. It enjoys cross-party support and I welcome it. Even as a remainer, I was not a fan of the common agricultural policy or the common fisheries policy. Frankly, they were rubbish, but we need to replace them with something better—not just better soundbites, but better detail and support for our long-term objectives. As ever, the devil is in the detail, and the problem is that we cannot see the detail because so little has been published. We need to convince the Minister to accelerate the publication of the detail of the scheme, so that farmers can make better decisions about how to farm in the future, and so that parliamentarians can scrutinise the proposals to ensure that they deliver what we need.

There is simply too much uncertainty around future funding for farmers, and particularly for south-west farmers, whose farms tend to be smaller than those on the east coast. Those farmers are worried that the direction of travel favours fewer smaller farms and fewer farmers; that it favours larger farms, more technology-intensive farming methods and more equipment and machinery, which cannot fit down smaller lanes in the west country; and that it will mean greater reliance on food imports to sustain our food needs—with many imports produced to lower standards than those for UK farmers—and less food security.

On top of that, one of the key aims of the environmental land management scheme is to reduce carbon impacts. Yet having supply chains that span the world and relying on food from Australia, Brazil, New Zealand, Canada and America, rather than farms in England, seems an odd way to reduce our carbon impact. The carbon in that maritime shipping is not yet counted, but it will be. What is the point of investing and locking ourselves into an import system whereby the carbon intensity of that food—and, therefore, the future cost—is not counted now, but will be hugely costly down the line?

There is often a sense that the Government’s strategy of larger farms and fewer farmers—in particular, fewer small and tenant farmers—is because of lack of interest, or because Ministers have not quite thought it through. However, in my view, that is not right. It is a deliberate strategy. Hon. Members present from every party need to make it clear that that deliberate strategy is not right. It has the potential to devastate UK farming. Ministers should think again about that high-level strategy.

The hon. Member for The Cotswolds raised one issue with the scheme: the funding. Since we left the European Union, the Treasury has taken large chunks out of the farm support budget. As of December, farms that previously received £150,000 a year in direct support have seen their support cut by a quarter, while those receiving between £50,000 and £150,000 have seen it cut by 20%. I suspect that will continue. Farmers cannot see what ELMS will do to replace it, so they cannot invest in that method of farming to ensure they receive that subsidy in the future. That matters. The hon. Member for The Cotswolds very effectively described it as the effect on the sustainability of farm businesses, and he is right. It has the ability to undermine small farming in England in a way that no Government have done since medieval times.

It also undermines the character and spirit of our farming. I worry about the impact on the mental health of our farmers, in particular. We know that farming is a tough business. New figures from the Royal Agricultural Benevolent Institution show that 47% of farmers are experiencing some kind of anxiety at the moment, while some 36% are probably or possibly depressed. We must consider the mental health of our farmers in these policy changes. The uncertainty that is created around this area is not just for policy wonks, but applies to farm businesses up and down the country, with people worried about how they will pay the bills; how they will make rent, if they are a tenant farmer; and how to ensure that their business will be there to pass on to their children. As parliamentarians, we need to take that much more seriously.

I would like to see funding addressed, but it is not the only hole in the ELMS proposals. The scope of the schemes is not ambitious enough. Of particular concern are tenant farmers, whom I would like the Minister to pay a bit more attention to in the proposals she is looking at. I am not certain what role they will be able to play in all the schemes, and that is a problem Ministers should address early. In many cases, tenant farmers are more at risk because they do not own the freehold on their land and are subject to rent charges. They are at risk from absent landlords who might see the benefits of getting more support by using their land for forestry or rewilding schemes and using that to grow the rental income on those lands, putting further pressure on tenant farmers.

Finally, I want to turn to food production. We need to be much clearer that Britain should grow more of its food in Britain. This is not just an argument about jobs in rural areas—although it is about that—or supporting our rural communities, and the fact that smaller farms are more likely than larger farmers to employ people in the local area. It is about our national security. The 1945 Labour Government classed food security as part of national security. A lot has changed in the intervening period, but the privatisation of thinking about food to supermarkets, in particular, that we have seen over the past few decades has done a disservice to our food security. We need to support an agenda to buy, make and sell more in Britain, but that means growing more in Britain. It is not about an outdated “dig for Britain” nostalgia, but protecting our supply chains and jobs and, importantly, taking the risk out of a future economy that will be much more reliant on the carbon intensity of production. If we get rid of our lower carbon production farmers, to rely on imported food produced with lower standards but often with greater carbon intensity, we need to build into that a massive allowance for the increased carbon cost, which will have a pound, shilling and pence effect in the future—at the moment it does not, but it will do.

[Mr Holden]

Does the hon. Gentleman agree that there is absolutely no point trying to do some of those things if all we are doing is offshoring our carbon emissions elsewhere? All that potential benefit is then eaten up in transportation costs, especially in sectors such as shipping and aviation, at the back end of decarbonisation at the moment.

[Luke Pollard]

I thank the hon. Member for his point. Whether it is a farmer in North West Durham, in Gedling or in the south-west, this matters. The Government are making a strategic error in their trade policy. I realise the Minister is not responsible for trade policy, and is merely the recipient of all the silage coming from the Department for International Trade in this matter, but the lack of a joined-up Government policy on food is part of the problem. We need to make sure that future trade deals match our agricultural policies, environmental policies and policies on rural employment.

All that speaks to what type of country we want to be. I think Britain should be a force for good. We should maintain high standards, support people entering those sectors, decarbonise and support nature recovery. We cannot do all those things if we do not have the information about what an ELM scheme will look like, if we rely imports produced at lower standards and if we lock ourselves into the risk of a supply chain spanning the world at a time of greater international instability. This is a really important debate; I congratulate the hon. Member for The Cotswolds on bringing it to the Chamber and I hope the Minister listens carefully to the speeches.