Rural Affairs
Richard Tice Excerpts(1 week, 5 days ago)
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Victoria Atkins (Louth and Horncastle) (Con)
I thank the right hon. Gentleman for holding this important debate, and for welcoming me to my new role. From the arable fields outside my front door to the cattle and horticulture that stretch from the fens, the wolds and the marshes to the coast, my constituency feeds the country. I am delighted and determined to bring some of my county’s common sense and love of the countryside to this important portfolio. On Armistice Day, I pay tribute to the fallen, and particularly to the farmers who stayed behind to feed the nation in wars gone by.
This is a critical time for our rural way of life. After years of unforgiving weather, rising commodity prices and more crop and livestock diseases, our farmers now face a new threat: a city-dwelling, socialist Government who do not understand or care for the rural way of life. The evidence is there in Labour’s first Budget, for which it had 14 years to prepare. [Interruption.] The Back Bencher who is waving his arms around may want to listen to this. In this Budget of broken promises, the Chancellor laid careful plans to break the farming sector, the wider rural economy and our food security. Farmers look after 70% of the UK’s land. They are the keystone of our rural communities. When they struggle, our rural economy is weakened and our food security is put at risk.
Today, as the consequences of this Budget are becoming clearer, I will focus solely on the rural economy, but I make this promise to the Secretary of State: in the future, I will be pressing him and his Government on rural infrastructure, flooding, crime, healthcare, broadband and mobile signals, the solar and wind industries and other matters that affect our countryside, because the impact of this Budget and the choices Labour has made will be felt for years after his expensive wellies have worn out.
I am going to focus on three broken promises by Labour; I am going to make it simple for them. The first broken promise for farming families is the removal of the tax relief that has meant families can pass on their farms to the next generation: agricultural property relief and business property relief. These are not loopholes, as they were described by the city-dwelling Chancellor, but careful tax policy planning developed over many years to prevent family farms and businesses from being split up and sold off. Of course we support efforts to root out abuse of the tax system, but the way in which the Chancellor has designed this policy means that it is tenant farmers and farmers in the middle who will struggle, not the very wealthiest.
This morning, I asked farmers on social media to send me details of how the policy will affect them and their businesses, and it makes for anguished reading. Farmers are furious, anxious and even distressed about the changes. They feel that the Government are coming after them and their families’ livelihoods, when all that they and their ancestors have done is work hard, follow the rules and feed us. I have been inundated with messages about tenant farmers, whom the Government seem to have forgotten. A Welsh landowner has contacted me to say that this change in policy will mean that he must tell six multigenerational farming families on his land that he will have to sell their farms to pay Labour’s family farm tax. As he put it,
“they will lose their homes, businesses and their children’s futures”.
In winding up the debate, can the Minister please explain what those six tenant families are to do when their farms are sold?
An example of how the measure will affect landowning families is provided by a family who have worked their 500-acre farm for four generations. The farm is owned by the mother, who is in her 70s, and her two sons, who are in their late 40s and early 50s, their father having died a few years ago. They make an annual income of around £45,000. When the mother dies, the sons will face an inheritance tax bill of at least £870,000. There is no way in which they can pay that bill without selling their farm. Could the Minister advise the House how that family are to pay Labour’s tax bill without selling their farm?
Richard Tice (Boston and Skegness) (Reform)
The right hon. Lady has obviously had lots of letters and emails. Has she had a single one from any farmer who thinks this is a good idea? I have not had any from my constituency of Boston and Skegness.
The Minister for Food Security and Rural Affairs (Daniel Zeichner)
We have—plenty!
Richard Tice (Boston and Skegness) (Reform)
We all want growth, but growth requires investment. Investment requires confidence, but confidence among rural communities is collapsing, including in Boston and Skegness. Since the Budget, one farmer has cancelled a £1 million expansion plan for his strawberry-growing business. I know another farmer who has cancelled a £300,000 investment in equipment. Just yesterday, I heard from a hospitality entrepreneur in my constituency who has cancelled another investment in a new pub. It means less growth, fewer jobs and less incentive for young people to stay in our rural communities. That is the reality.
Confidence in the Environment Agency is also collapsing. Just yesterday afternoon, I was on the riverbank at Wainfleet and saw the consequences of failed management, the failure to dredge our rivers and the failure to protect our riverbanks. Again, it means that local farmers and entrepreneurs will not have the confidence to invest. Confidence is such a critical word, but confidence in this Government is collapsing in rural communities. It seems the Government want to blight our countryside, including in my constituency, with thousands of ugly pylons and thousands of acres of solar farms. That will not provide food security.
The Government are determined to set course on this ridiculous farm tax, but I urge them to have the humility to listen and to look at the results. If investment is down, jobs are down and family farms are down in one or two years’ time, they should accept that they were wrong and reverse it.
Future of Fishing
Richard Tice Excerpts(2 weeks, 4 days ago)
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Richard Tice (Boston and Skegness) (Reform)
It is a pleasure, Mr Efford, to serve under your chairmanship, and I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Great Yarmouth (Rupert Lowe) on securing this debate.
Boston has a long and rich history in fishing; indeed, fish landed in Lincolnshire ports constituted about 20% of all fish eaten in Britain in the 20th century. However, my fishermen in Boston have been let down by decades of European Union membership—they were delighted to leave the EU—and by over-regulation. In fact, they are deeply concerned about the regulatory pressures from the Environment Agency and from inshore fisheries and conservation authorities, which frankly seem designed more to strangle what is left of our fishing industry than to enhance it.
So 2026 is an opportunity for the great reset—an opportunity to take back control of our waters properly and to start again. We all know that the previous Government, under the leadership of Theresa May and then Boris Johnson, failed to secure the promised good deal for fishing, in the same way that they failed to secure a good deal for Northern Ireland.
In business, we all know that no deal is better than a bad deal, and that must be the starting position for the negotiation. EU members are desperate to start negotiating as soon as possible, but as the hon. Member for Aberdeenshire North and Moray East (Seamus Logan) rightly identified and as the Minister may know, there is a serious risk that they will use the renegotiation of the energy deal, which ends at the same time, to create unacceptable pressure and leverage for the fishing deal. It is therefore vital that the two elements are decoupled and that we work on the basis that no deal is better than a bad deal. Frankly, that is true for both those renegotiations, but they must not be linked, otherwise we will end up with a bad deal. I urge the Minister and the Government to start from that position.
Torcuil Crichton
I fear that the hon. Gentleman and his party might be targeting the wrong people when they blame the EU for the lack of fishing in British waters, because half of England’s fishing quota is ultimately owned by Dutch, Icelandic and Spanish interests. The problem is not access to waters; the problem is the concentration of ownership of the quota we already have. The way to revive communities, such as those in his constituency and Great Yarmouth, with which we have historical herring fishing connections, is to redistribute that quota and to make sure that the quota we have—that additional quota—is given to fragile fishing communities. It is about not keeping foreigners out, but making sure that the wealth of the seas is distributed fairly.
Richard Tice
I thank the hon. Gentleman for that interesting intervention. The key to securing any distribution is having the quotas; then we can talk about distribution—and, yes, that can take time. But I repeat that no deal is better than a bad deal. If we allow ourselves to go into the negotiation on the basis that we must do a deal, we will end up with a bad deal. We have been there; we can do so much better. This is a great opportunity, so let us grasp it.
Caroline Voaden
I absolutely agree. Funnily enough, Brixham was quite a Brexit-supporting community. As a proud remainer, I had hesitations about Brixham as part of the constituency at first, but as I tour the constituency, I find it astonishing how many people in the local fishing community openly tell me that they feel betrayed and that they were lied to with promises that could never have been met. We must be honest about the challenges that have arisen and acknowledge that our departure from the EU has not yielded the benefits that were claimed.
Sadly, the hon. Member for Clacton (Nigel Farage), who seems to have strayed quite far from his constituency this week, failed to stand up for the fishing community when he apparently represented it in Brussels—he attended only one of 42 European Parliament Fisheries Committee meetings in three years. Far from the EU gutting the UK fishing industry, the industry did not have a chance of being properly heard during that time, because the hon. Gentleman was not in the room.
As we look towards 2026, we have a responsibility to chart a new course with the renegotiation that prioritises the interests of all our fishing communities. We need a strategy rooted in three essential principles: fair access, sustainable management and economic support for growth in the UK seafood sector.
We would all agree that we need fairer access to our waters. Under the trade and co-operation agreement, we will have a significant opportunity to redefine access to UK waters, although I fear that we are not starting from a strong position, given recent history. Access to EU markets is crucial.
Richard Tice
That is the key point; this is the moment for the great reset. We are in agreement: the hon. Lady rightly highlighted that many of the problems arose not from leaving the European Union but from the failures of the previous Government. We are critical of them for negotiating a bad deal and of civil servants for implementing it with unnecessary regulation. Would she agree that this is the opportunity?
Caroline Voaden
I agree that we have an opportunity to renegotiate, but I do not think that renegotiation will be successful if we start from the position that the EU is the enemy. We have to go into it with a positive mindset and be willing to co-operate with our closest neighbours if we are going to get any kind of resolution.
Budget: Implications for Farming Communities
Richard Tice Excerpts(2 weeks, 5 days ago)
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Daniel Zeichner
The right hon. Gentleman has raised an important point. We will be addressing it through the land use framework, which will be delivered in the next couple of months. Of course there are trade-offs. There are a range of pressures on our land, in respect of housing, food, energy and so many other things. We need to have a rational way of making those decisions, and that is exactly what we will introduce.
Richard Tice (Boston and Skegness) (Reform)
Are the Minister, the Secretary of State and the Chancellor aware that so serious are the consequences of this policy that the heads of farming families in their 80s and 90s are seriously considering committing suicide before it comes into place? [Hon. Members: “Shame!”] Shame on you! [Interruption.]
