Environmental Land Management Scheme: Food Production

Tim Farron Excerpts

Tuesday 1st February 2022 Westminster Hall

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

It is a real pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Davies. I want to say a massive thank you to the hon. Member for The Cotswolds (Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown). This is an important debate and he introduced it really well. I pretty much agree with everything he said.

Like the hon. Member for Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport (Luke Pollard), my views about the wisdom of the United Kingdom leaving the European Union are on the record; people know what they are. My views on the common agricultural policy are also on the record; if I could find one glimmer of hope or a silver lining about leaving the EU, it is leaving the CAP. That is one of the reasons why I am so frustrated that we are not taking the opportunities that leaving the CAP provides.

In principle, the environmental land management scheme—ELMS—is good. It is good that we should pay farmers with public money for producing public goods. I have no argument with the principle. However, we surely cannot ignore the fact that producing food and being able to feed ourselves as a country is a public good. Also, if we do things that lead us to being able to produce less food, that is a public bad and we should seek to avoid it.

Over the last 20 years, we have seen a 10% reduction in our capacity to feed ourselves as a country. Clearly, that is something that Governments of all colours are responsible for, and that this Government, which now has more power than previous ones to do something about it, should seek to address.

However, given where the Government are going over the transition to the new payments system, my fear is that that will make the situation worse—in fact, it will clearly make it worse. If we lose farmers, we lose our capacity to produce food. By the way, those who think that there is some kind of a challenge or contest between farming and the environment do not understand either. The bottom line is that nobody can achieve good environmental policies without farmers. We could come up with the most wonderful environmental schemes through ELMS, but they are bits of paper in a drawer if there are no farmers out there to operate them. Farmers are the frontline warriors in the battle against climate change and the battle to establish biodiversity.

We value our farmers and it is important that we do so. They are often wrongly blamed for climate change. Seventy per cent. of England’s land is agricultural, but only 10% of our climate emissions come from agriculture. Let us remember that our farmers are our friends and allies in tackling the climate catastrophe, and not blame them for it.

My fear is that the Government’s policies seem set to eject farmers from the countryside, partly by accident and partly by design. By accident? The transition from basic payments to ELMS feels like it is being thoroughly botched. In December, we saw the first loss of the basic payment scheme—BPS—to farmers. Farmers will have lost between 5% and 25% of their basic payment in December, and virtually none of them has access to an alternative scheme. ELMS may be available by 2024, but it probably will not be fully available until 2028.

We have seen a poor take-up of the sustainable farming incentive, or SFI. As the hon. Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Neil Parish), Chair of the Select Committee, indicated, that is largely because the SFI is unattractive. Therefore, we have not got people into the scheme and, consequently, what will they do? They will either go bust or go backwards. They will decide to do things that are not environmentally positive because they cannot get into the SFI scheme, so they will think, “Why bother? Let’s just pile ’em high instead and go farming”, as people sometimes say. The reality is that if we do not get people into those schemes, they will either be lost to farming altogether or they will certainly be lost when it comes to trying to deal with the environmental challenges ahead of us.

In total, 85% of the profitability of the average livestock farm is basic payment. If any of us were in a situation where we were progressively losing massive chunks of our income, year on year, with no alternative to replace it for up to seven years, we would go bust or we would think of something else to do.

That is the situation that the Government are creating and it is why I call upon them to peg basic payment at its current level. I know that the Minister will need to have a word with the Treasury to achieve that, but the Treasury should care about farming and food security. We need to peg BPS at its current level until ELMS is available to everybody.

Farmers are leaving farming and they will continue to leave, which will reduce our capacity as a country to feed ourselves and undermine the Government’s stated environmental objectives. Without farmers, who will deliver those environmental goods?

As I have said, I feel that the SFI is an accidental mistake. I wonder whether it is perhaps down to the fact that hill farmers and small family farmers in particular do not have time to leave the farm and take part in consultation exercises. So is DEFRA just listening to the big boys? That is my worry, because it is easy to listen to them; they have staff who can leave the farm and talk to Ministers. I do not say that Ministers are being deliberately biased; it is just natural that many smaller farmers, including many of my farmers, simply do not have time to leave the farm to lobby Ministers or make their voices heard in other ways. I pay tribute to the NFU and the Tenant Farmers Association, which are doing their best to make farmers’ case known. The Government’s policies on the transition are pushing farmers out of farming and reducing our capacity to produce food—partly by accident, but partly by design. It almost looks as though some aspects of ELMS will deliberately kill farming and our rural communities.

I have been in many Westminster Hall debates, and when we were in the EU, I would have a go at Ministers of different parties about the fact that money went to the landlord and not the farmer, and the Minister’s response would be, “Well, we’d do something about this, but it’s all the EU’s fault.” Now it is down to us. We could do something about it, but the Government are designing schemes that will incentivise big landlords—some institutions and some private individuals—to kick out tenant farmers, turn the house into a second home, and let the place go to seed. They then brag at their Hampstead dinner parties about doing good for the environment, but they are actually killing rural communities, ejecting tenant farmers and destroying the landscape.

What matters is not just food production, but the heritage of our environment and our landscape. I am proud to represent the lakes and the dales. The Lake district became a world heritage site relatively recently. It will lose that status if farms become wilderness and are not carefully managed.

I ask the Government to think very carefully, and not botch the transition by making the same mistakes the EU did in handing wads of cash to wealthy landowners, who kick out the tenant farmers who are the backbone of our farming economy. The Government’s plans are morally unjust, and would destroy our rural communities, remove the Government’s key partners in the delivery of environmental schemes, wreck our landscape and our landscape heritage, and cut food production. It is no surprise, then, that many people in the countryside think that this Government take them for granted. I would love Ministers to react and prove me wrong.