Farming

Tim Farron Excerpts

Monday 4th March 2024 Commons Chamber

[Tim Farron (Westmorland and Lonsdale) (LD)]

It is an honour to follow the hon. Member for Buckingham (Greg Smith), who made a series of very good points about his own constituency and agriculture in general. It is my great privilege to represent around 1,100 farms across Westmorland and the rest of my very beautiful constituency in the lakes and the dales. When I talk to those farmers, it is clear that they feel a sense of deep anger at the situation they currently face. I pay tribute to them for providing our food, being the custodians of our countryside, protecting our towns and villages from flooding, and maintaining the backdrop to an outstanding and world-class tourism economy worth £3.5 billion a year.

My views on how wise it was for the United Kingdom to leave the European Union are a matter of record. Having said that, as many of us will acknowledge, leaving the common agricultural policy strikes me as one of those rare things: a potential Brexit benefit; a silver lining to a deep, dark cloud. However, the Government have managed to botch it. Pretty much everybody in this House got behind the general principles of the environmental land management schemes—public money for public goods—but my great fear is that the Government have failed in the delivery of those schemes, for two obvious reasons. The first is the accidental nature of the transition and the things that they have predictably got wrong; the second is the design of the schemes themselves.

On the accidental part of it all, the Government promised to ringfence £2.4 billion for agriculture in England, and they have not spent it. Over the past two years, they have underspent by £270 million. We do not need a mathematical genius to work out how that has come about: if the Government predictably take away big chunks of the basic payment every year—£500 million has now gone out of farmers’ pockets—and then introduce the things that replace it in a haphazard manner, to the tune of just over £200 million, of course people are left with less money and money is taken out of agriculture. We have heard about the difficulties people face in getting into the SFI, so 100% of those who are in the BPS will have lost half of that money by the end of this year, while only one in eight farmers is in the SFI. That was all totally predictable, yet the Government apparently did not foresee it.

Various people have talked about the iterative process of bringing in the SFI scheme. Of course DEFRA is going to develop new schemes and improvements along the way, but because that is happening, many farmers are holding back; they are not applying, because they think something good might come around the corner. Meanwhile, they are losing their basic payment and getting more and more desperate, and the consequences are really awful. One consequence is that many farmers I speak to, including some I spoke to last week, are making the decision against their better judgment to massively increase their livestock numbers. I spoke to one farmer who was more than trebling their livestock at their Lakeland farm just because they thought it was the only way they could manage to pay the rent—the only way they could keep their head above water—even though they know that very act will undo the good work that they and their family have done for 20 or 30 years beforehand. It is heartbreaking and counterproductive to our aims to increase and improve nature as a consequence of these plans.

The other consequence is even more awful, however: farmers facing complete and total ruin. People who have farmed their farm for generations—perhaps the fifth, sixth or seventh generation—are now looking down the barrel of a gun, realising they could be the one who loses that farm. Many people have talked about the great threat of mental health crises facing farmers. I have never seen anything as frightening as what is facing farmers at the moment when they see not just the loss of their business and income, but that great sense of shame that they are the one who will lose the family farm, even though it is no fault of theirs; it is the fault of this botched transition. For upland livestock farmers this has meant a 41% decrease in income in the last four years, just during this Parliament. People who were poor to start off with and were working at below the living wage are now earning even less.

We have heard scathing remarks about the Welsh Labour Government, justified I am sure. I am told this is merely a consultation, but what Conservative Members are accusing the Welsh Labour Government of doing top down they have already done bottom up in England. They have done exactly the same thing, taking land out of food production and impoverishing farmers.

Farmers will be pushed out of farming and that will reduce the number of hands available in the countryside to deliver environmental goods. We could have the best environmental policies on the planet, but they will achieve the square root of zero if there is nobody there to deliver them. If we take farmers off the land, we have nobody to introduce and implement our green policies.

Perhaps the most obvious thing that reducing the number of farmers will do is reduce our ability to feed ourselves. This is an absolute nonsense: we have a range of public goods and none of them seems to include providing food for the people of Britain. At a time when we have war in eastern Europe, trade routes disrupted in the Red sea, and climate change rendering land around the world unfarmable, it is utter madness to be taking land out of active food production and reducing our ability to feed ourselves.

It is also environmentally counterproductive because we will still eat, I assume, so what will we do? We will import more food from overseas and that in itself is damaging to the climate because of the food miles involved in getting the food here. Also, where will that food come from? If we do not rear cattle in the United Kingdom, where will we get our beef from? It will come from cattle reared on pastureland in South America that used to be rainforest.

Britain feeding itself is important for the environment locally and globally, but there is also a major moral reason why Britain should feed itself. We are, relatively speaking, a wealthy country and will probably, war and disruption aside, be able to feed ourselves, so where will we go to feed ourselves? We will raid and put pressure on the commodity markets where the poorest countries in the world also go for their food. We will impoverish and take food out of the mouths of some of the poorest people in the world. To feed ourselves is not just intelligent and about security, and is not just environmentally sensible, but there is also a very strong moral imperative as to why we should do it.

We have heard reference to the trade deals and the reality is that, yes, the UK has the best farmers in the world, but the reason why we have the best farmers is because of the model of the family farm—the culture that underpins the way we farm in this country. That means high standards, and if we trade away those standards not only is that wrong because we undermine the importance of animal welfare and environmental standards, but we throw our farmers under a bus, which is what this Government did in the Australia and New Zealand trade deals. I am not saying those on the Front Bench think this at the moment, but many in the Conservative party, including a former Prime Minister, take the view that it is far better for us to be buccaneers on the international trade market and that, through the free market, we will feed ourselves by cheap imports so we do not really need to grow our own food here.

Fairness is vital to food security on trade deals. The Groceries Code Adjudicator is a wonderful potential referee, but it needs cards, red ones in particular. It needs the ability to investigate all parts of the supply chain, not just the retailers. It needs the freedom to be able to take referrals from the likes of us—Members of Parliament—the NFU and others, and not just rely on a farmer dobbing in the person he or she sells his produce to, because that is not going to happen very often. The GCA should be given more powers and more reach and be able to take referrals from anyone.

Grants were discussed. One of the things the Government are doing as part of ELMS is grant support for farmers. That is very good, but many farmers need money in the bank in the first place to prove that they can fund the other part of the infrastructure project they are funding and bidding for grant support for. That means many farmers will have to be wealthy in order to bid for a grant in the first place. That is not acceptable.

I want to make a few remarks about tenants. Fairness in the food chain, and in farming in particular, has to focus on the deep unfairness in our land around the country, particularly in the design of the Government landscape recovery programme. I was up Kentmere on Thursday morning with farmers who are in a landscape recovery project and doing really good work—woodland pasture and keeping a flock on the fells, a good example of how this can be done well. However, those farmers said to me that they are a rare example of it working well, because the problem is there are not enough people working in Natural England to help farmers into those schemes, either the higher tier scheme or landscape recovery. As a result, only the large farmers with sufficient resources and enough time on their hands to be able to get into the schemes are doing so. Smaller farmers, owner-occupiers and tenants are not getting into those schemes, and the environment is suffering as a result, and the farmers are suffering because of the lack of income as they lose their basic payment with nothing really to replace it. I am deeply concerned about the impact on tenants of the reality of what is going on out there.

I was just outside Kirkby Stephen on Friday morning, speaking to a group of farmers, most of them tenants, and what they reported and what I have heard from other sources is deeply chilling. Landlords are riding roughshod over tenants, using landscape recovery as a means to do so, and it is utterly appalling. We are seeing tenants being evicted and being pushed to give up AHA—Agricultural Holdings Act 1986—tenancies, and we are seeing large landowners putting pressure on smaller landowners to evict their tenants as well so they can form part of a wider landscape recovery system.

Baroness Rock put together an excellent report and review with 70 recommendations, and the Government have not enacted them. I am seeing tenants in our communities in Cumbria being forced off the land. We are referring to it, justly I am afraid, as the Lakeland clearances, all because of the way the Government have designed this scheme and are allowing it to work. We desperately need the recommendations of the Rock review to be in place now. I ask the Government, and the Minister in particular, to pay particular attention to this outrage. We have Government money—public money, landscape recovery money—going into the hands of wealthy owners, including City financial institutions. There is no doubt whatsoever, as farmers tell me this up and down Cumbria, that less and less money is going into the hands of fewer but wealthier farmers, and all because the Government will not ensure—this is something we are allowed to do now we are no longer in the EU—the farm budget goes to active farmers.

Natural England needs more resource, but it also needs to learn from its actions and the mistakes it made over the Dartmoor debacle, because many farmers facing the roll-over of higher-tier schemes are being held to ransom by Natural England. They are being told they have to reduce 25% or more of their stocking numbers despite there being no evidence of what good this will do to the environment—no evidence is being put out there at all.

Our communities in the Lake district were awarded world heritage site status just a few years ago. In the report UNESCO presented when we got that status it gave as much credit to the farmers as to the glaciers. We saw Liverpool lose its world heritage site status the other year, which is a reminder that it can happen. Natural England is pushing farmers, not on new schemes but on the roll-over of existing schemes, to reduce their stocking numbers on the basis of no evidence whatsoever, and we are putting our world heritage status at risk due to this massive overreach.

I believe the Government have fallen for that nonsense that there is a divide between food production and environmental protection. There is no such thing. Farmers are the custodians of our environment, and they are the ones who feed us. The greenest thing this Government could do is keep farmers farming so they can deliver those environmental schemes, and the most intelligent thing this Government could do is set a real target for how much food we will produce in this country—up from 60% to at least 70%—to make sure they do what their first principle must be: ensure that every single home in this country has enough food to eat.