Upland Farming

Debate between Rory Stewart and David Rutley

Monday 1st June 2015 Commons Chamber

[Rory Stewart]

Rural isolation is a serious issue. Upland areas are, almost by definition, the most sparsely populated areas in Britain. People are trapped by barriers of distance. Traditionally, those are barriers of communication and barriers of roads, but increasingly they are barriers of technology, such as lack of access to superfast broadband. In addition, if one looks at an individual upland farm, one will find that the number of people working on that farm has decreased dramatically in the past 60 years. Farms that might once have employed two or three people no longer do so. Increasingly, that means that life in the uplands, if connected to the fact that the number of farms is falling because farms are getting larger, is increasingly lonely. As we know, an auction mart can provide an important way for farmers to meet each other.

That is not to say that we should be portraying upland farmers as victims. They are, as we all know, incredibly resilient and confident individuals who have chosen the life they love deeply and of which we are deeply proud. However, we need to be serious about the fact that isolated lives can be challenging: challenging for education and healthcare for farmers and their children, and challenging in terms of being able to diversify. We talk a great deal about getting people online, but if there is no broadband connection on one’s farm it is pretty difficult to diversify.

All these issues about isolation are important reasons why keeping incomes up through agri-environmental schemes is necessary. However, finding other kinds of infrastructure investment that we can put in place, whether it is for better roads or better broadband, will also be vital to the long-term health of those communities and the long-term life of the whole area, including those very species we want to protect. The whole idea of the countryside stewardship scheme is predicated, of course, on the existence of those countryside stewards, and as my hon. Friend pointed out, in this case the countryside stewards are the upland farmers themselves.

[David Rutley (Macclesfield) (Con)]

I congratulate the Minister on his contribution today; he has always made good contributions from the Back Benches and is now doing a fantastic job at the Dispatch Box. He mentioned the importance of broadband. I was on Hall’s Fell Ridge on Blencathra this weekend, looking down over his constituency, and I thought about the similarities between the upland farmers there and some of the upland farmers in my Macclesfield constituency, which is on the other side of the Peak district. Does he agree that it is vital to get these roll-out plans clearer, so that farmers can plan ahead to see whether they will be in the roll-out plan for the 99 percentile, or if they are not in that plan to have options to roll out into community-based solutions, which he knows quite a lot about from his own experience?

[Rory Stewart]

It is great to take a question from my hon. Friend. He is, of course, not just a fantastic local constituency MP but somebody who knows a great deal about this specific subject and has championed the outdoor industries, the uplands and the connection between the two, so he knows a great deal about diversification.

The point my hon. Friend made, which in grisly jargon terms we could call a point about transparency, is absolutely central. It is very important that rural communities know when they will get broadband and what kind of broadband they can get, so that they can make the relevant plans. There may be areas where broadband delivery may be more difficult, in which case people need to look at private sector providers or focus on the possibility of satellite or point-to-point wireless connections.

I will conclude my response to my hon. Friend the Member for Bridgwater and West Somerset. I say a very strong thanks to him for raising an issue that matters so much; in fact, this rather crowded House in the middle of an Adjournment debate is a testament to how much this issue matters to so many of us here.

We need to have a much more open conversation, and we need to recognise that one size does not fit all. That means that we need to learn from all parts of this House and from all hon. Members about what is working and what is not working in their constituencies. We need to be better at being challenged on issues such as burning on Dartmoor.

Natural England should be empowered to be much more flexible. We do not need a 300-mile screwdriver operating from here in Westminster to tell people what to do; such a situation should be resolved between a Natural England official and the farmer on the ground in Dartmoor. We ourselves must assess and reassess relentlessly the regulatory methods that we are putting in place; we have to free farmers to farm.

The contribution of my hon. Friend is vital in the process of championing the uplands. I am really pleased that this debate is one of the earliest Adjournment debates of this Parliament. His contribution is also vital in holding people such as me to task, to ensure that we listen, learn and act.

I will finish by speaking personally and saying that I find almost nothing in our landscape as precious or as moving as the contribution of upland farmers over countless generations. We owe it to our ancestors and our descendants, to our landscape and to our rural communities, to give upland farmers the support they require to do their essential work. I pay tribute to the work done by many, many people in this Chamber over the years in supporting upland farmers, but this evening I pay particular tribute to my hon. Friend for securing this very important debate.

Question put and agreed to.