Agriculture: Government Support
Debate between Sarah Gibson and Richard Foord(1 day, 4 hours ago)
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Richard Foord (Honiton and Sidmouth) (LD)
I beg to move,
That this House has considered Government support for agriculture.
It is a pleasure to serve under you in the Chair, Mr Turner. It is good to have the Minister in her place. I hope she will forgive me if I take a direct tone. It was a direct tone that members of the National Farmers’ Union in my area of Honiton and Sidmouth took with me when we met last Friday in Devon.
Food security is fundamental to our national resilience. At a time of global instability, farming underpins the rural economy, although we tend to take the produce for granted.
Sarah Gibson (Chippenham) (LD)
Farmers across Wiltshire, especially in my constituency of Chippenham, say that Government support is not working. They are disappointed that Labour is compounding the damage left by the Conservatives, with an underspend of millions in the farming budget. Shockingly, the Government’s own statistics say that in 2023-24, between 17% and 29% of farming families did not turn a profit.
Sarah Gibson
Absolutely. I just wanted to ensure that my colleague agreed with me that we would like the Minister to consider farming.
Richard Foord
My hon. Friend rightly mentioned farming profitability. Minette Batters, the former president of the NFU, conducted a review of farming profitability in December and came up with more than 50 recommendations. It would be interesting to hear from the Minister the Government’s reflections and progress on fulfilling some of those.
NHS Dentistry: South-west
Debate between Sarah Gibson and Richard Foord(1 year, 5 months ago)
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Richard Foord
I agree that emergency care should not suddenly become the routine. It is there for the most critical cases, but we have not seen that, given the drying up of NHS dentistry provision in our towns and villages.
Sarah Gibson (Chippenham) (LD)
Does my hon. Friend not agree that part of the problem is that we are only talking about emergencies? The Secretary of State, in his first week in the job, talked about working hard to look at preventive medicine. That should apply to dentistry as well. Does my hon. Friend not agree that we need to look at a serious timeline for reviewing the dental contract? We cannot only talk about emergencies all the time.
Richard Foord
My hon. Friend makes an excellent point. Prevention is clearly cheaper than dealing with the problems down the line. There is no better example than offering check-ups for children’s dentistry.
NHS Dentistry: Rural Areas
Debate between Sarah Gibson and Richard Foord(1 year, 5 months ago)
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Richard Foord
My hon. Friend is making an excellent speech. She has mentioned ICB commissioning. I wrote to the Minister to ask whether there were set criteria for knowing where a patient is on the waiting list, and I understand that that is entirely in the gift of individual practices. Does my hon. Friend think that it ought to be for ICBs, or for NHS Devon in my case, to determine where people are on the waiting list for NHS dental care?