Leaving the EU: Upland Farming

Simon Hart Excerpts

Tuesday 26th June 2018 Westminster Hall

[Helen Goodman (Bishop Auckland) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Pritchard. I congratulate the hon. Member for Carmarthen East and Dinefwr (Jonathan Edwards) on securing this very important debate.

My constituency includes Teesdale, which is part of the north Pennines area of outstanding natural beauty. I represent 400 sheep farmers, most of whom are on the uplands. Teesdale is a unique natural environment. A couple of months ago, I got up at 4.30 am to see the black grouse lekking, and we had a tour of the area to see the fantastic bird life. There were lapwing, curlew, snipe, oyster catchers and partridges. There were also mad March hares boxing. The biodiversity is absolutely spectacular, but it is fragile. If we do not get a good post-Brexit solution for the farming community, those species could collapse in 20 years. If they do, we will not be able to bring them back.

[Simon Hart (Carmarthen West and South Pembrokeshire) (Con)]

I must visit the lovely place that the hon. Lady is describing. Does she agree that some of the attributes she mentioned are down to the passion with which rural communities pursue their country sports in those areas?

[Helen Goodman]

In Teesdale, we have achieved a balance between shooting and hill farming that the community is happy with.

From a farming perspective, the land is extremely marginal. Tenant farmers have an average annual income of about £14,000, which means that, when we change the subsidy regime, we need to bear in mind that their income cannot fall.

Three things matter. The first is the trade regime, about which I think I have asked the Minister 39 times since the Brexit referendum, and I have still have not had a proper answer. As the hon. Member for North Devon (Peter Heaton-Jones) has said, the EU is our biggest market, so we have to be able to continue to sell into Europe. That means staying in a customs union and maintaining the current regulatory standards so we have regulatory alignment. It also means that we do not want the Department for International Trade to negotiate a flood of cheap lamb imports from New Zealand and Australia. It is DEFRA’s responsibility to make it clear that that is a red line.

If we lose our domestic market and do not have our European markets, we will not be able to secure the environmental benefits we want, because farming must be sustainable as a business. One of my constituents has written to me to point out that other World Trade Organisation members have already made a formal complaint about the proposed EU-UK split on agricultural import quotas, so it will be interesting to hear what the Minister has in mind on that.

The second important thing is the support mechanisms, because we obviously do not want to see a cliff edge. A switch to public goods is fine in theory, but it will be fine in practice only if the amount of money paid is sufficient to keep farmers in business. I have already pointed out that people are on low incomes that they cannot afford to see cut; they need to see their incomes rise.

I am worried by the proposed cap on payments to individuals, which is aimed at the landed aristocracy. The only way that Ministers can avoid it is if they start paying tenant farmers directly without—this brings me to my third point—increasing Rural Payments Agency bureaucracy, which is a long-standing problem of which the Department is well aware. Obviously, we do not have a lot of scope for deregulation in the farming community, on animal identification and so forth, because we have to maintain our access to the European market.