Environmental Land Management Scheme: Food Production

Siobhan Baillie Excerpts

Tuesday 1st February 2022 Westminster Hall

[Siobhan Baillie (Stroud) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Davies. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for The Cotswolds (Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown), my constituency neighbour; we are both vociferous campaigners for farmers across the Cotswolds and my valleys and vale. I also thank the Minister, who took the time to come to Stroud, speak to famers there, and visit our mighty Frampton country fair. It is incredibly important that we have a DEFRA team that is stocked with farmers and people with real-life experience—the same goes for our fantastic Select Committee Chair, my hon. Friend the Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Neil Parish)—because it gives confidence that there is thinking, knowledge and experience behind the policies. However, as we have heard, and as the Minister knows, there is more work to do. I think we would all agree on that.

I could just say today: “Food, food, food; security, security, security,” and sit back down. Ultimately, those are the key points that farmers feel that this place—both green carpet and red carpet—often forgets when creating fancy-pants policies to improve on and replace the common agricultural policy, which we all know needed to go. However, in this increasingly uncertain world, if we do not get the farmers and the public to understand the importance of food production, and do not get the country standing on its own two feet and feeding itself, we will be in a difficult place when sudden shocks hit. Hopefully nothing like the pandemic will happen again, but if it does, we must be ready and able to look after ourselves.

Our farmers earn a pittance. Jeremy Clarkson has done a good job of highlighting, to people who have probably never looked at the agricultural world before, that real stretch. They understand that he toiled seven days a week, and his earnings at the end were quite difficult. For those who are out on the farm every day, working the land, there is no time for paperwork or bureaucracy, and definitely no time to try to understand which scheme to apply for, or whether to hold their horses and go for the next one that might be coming up. There is quite a lot of nervousness, and I understand that.

Farmers are the custodians of our environment. They have been looking after our countryside for years; they were thinking about the land, the trees, the environment, the species and biodiversity long before it was fashionable to do so around city-centre dinner tables, as was highlighted by the hon. Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale (Tim Farron). If we do not get this right, we will damage the pillars of food production and security, and we will put farmers out of business. That will hinder our ambitions on water quality, biodiversity, climate change adaptation, air quality, natural food management and coastal erosion mitigation—all things that we in this place want, as do DEFRA, the Government, and our environmental groups in Stroud, but they will not happen.

On a practical point about what farmers are dealing with, the NFU surveyed all its members, and 84% of farmers and growers were very clear that they were interested in applying for ELMS. I have regular meetings with my farmers and the NFU, and at my last meeting I was in Slimbridge. The farm there is diversifying, and the farmers are working really hard, but there was a lot of hesitation, and many concerns about the practicalities and the waiting game that they feel they are in. My anecdotal take from that was that the general lack of organisation and support around the ELMS has put off many farmers from engaging with it. More needs to be done to make sure that the schemes are attractive to farmers, so that they engage. They are busy people; if they do not engage, nobody wins—that is the crux of it.

Some farmers have already dropped out of the sustainable farming incentive pilot due to the lack of timely information from DEFRA and the Rural Payments Agency. Food security needs to be considered part of these schemes, and that should be vocalised, or we are asking farmers to ignore the reason why they farm, which is to feed the country. Farmers have asked me for details of the support scheme that the Secretary of State explained to me was available when I raised this in the Chamber last year. There is still a lack of understanding about what is available to farmers. I again highlight that they are busy people, out there doing their job.

Putting on my all-party parliamentary group for wetlands hat, I am very proud to have the Slimbridge Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust in my patch. We know that trees and forestry are definitely not the only gig in town for carbon capture. Indeed, wetlands can do far more than a lot of what is planted. I have spoken to farmers; they have seen the carcases of trees that they have planted with plastic tubes around them. They get funding to plant the trees, but then there is nothing to support their maintenance. They are nervous about that. We need clear thinking about wetlands, and all the options that are available that may do more good—notwithstanding the fabulousness of trees. I am not an anti-tree person.

Finally, I am very lucky to have the chair of the NFU next generation forum, David Ratcliffe, in my patch. With the help of young farmers, ELMS could be a big source of resilience for farming business while delivering environmental outcomes. However, when farmers are in the early stages of their career and are trying to grow, they are at their most vulnerable to price volatility. There is price movement at the moment; for example, fertiliser is at about £600 plus per tonne, whereas it was £250 per tonne previously. That has to be thought through with our young entrants. I have spoken to the Minister before, and she has kindly spoken to David. The problem is with funding; with loans not being available to new entrants; with tenant farms going; and with rich people buying up land that would historically been available for farming. I thank the Minister for all she does. I know she cares deeply about the issue, and that she will do everything in her power to make things better. However, the practical elements need to be fixed very quickly.