Farming and Food Security

Debate between Tim Farron and Andrew Murrison

Tuesday 8th October 2024 Commons Chamber

[Dr Murrison]

I am following the hon. Gentleman’s remarks with a great deal of interest. Does he agree that the vast majority of people in this country, given the choice, would rather buy British food? Certainly, all the surveys that have been done would bear that out. However, one of the principal problems is the information they are provided with by the supermarkets and, I am afraid, the cynical way in which many of those supermarkets approach the labelling of food, suggesting it is British when in fact it is not. What does he suggest we do to give consumers, who have not yet been mentioned in this debate, the genuine choice they are seeking and to help our farmers along the way?

[Tim Farron]

The right hon. Member is absolutely right. I support the NFU’s call for accurate labelling that is enforceable, and he is right to say that.

To move on, if we are losing farms and losing farmers, which we are as we speak, not only are we losing our ability to feed ourselves as a country, but we are undermining our ability to deliver for the environment. Let us not fall into the mistake of thinking that this is a debate between caring for the environment and producing food; we either do them both or we do not do them at all. Some 70% of England’s land mass is agricultural, and the figure would be greater across the UK as a whole. If we think we are tackling the climate and nature crises without farmers, we are kidding ourselves. The greenest policies in the world will just be bits of paper in a drawer if we do not have the farmers on the ground to put them into practice.

Health and Social Care Levy Bill

Debate between Tim Farron and Andrew Murrison

2nd reading
Tuesday 14th September 2021 Commons Chamber

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

I probably agreed with at least three quarters of what the hon. Member for Basildon and Billericay (Mr Baron) just said. One thing I did not agree with him on was his belief that the Government have grasped the nettle. I believe they have walked past the nettle, barely nodding at it, and the people who will be stung are the people still in social care, the people working in social care, and the people who will disproportionately pay for what the Government are proposing.

Conservative MPs and the Conservative press are concerned about the Prime Minister breaking his promise on taxation, but the promise he has most definitely broken is the one he made during the leadership contest in 2019, when he said he would

“fix the crisis in social care once and for all”.

He has done no such thing; that proposal is not before the House today. There was a promise not to raise taxes. If the Government chose to break that promise, I would be happy to provide them with cover for that. Labour may have dodged the issue, but I am clear that we should raise income tax so that this is paid for by people who have the wealth and ability to pay for it—not by national insurance, which often will disproportionately fall on younger working-age people. What do those people tend to have in common? They cannot afford a home, or at least a house that they own. What will we be asking them to do? To fund those who have a home to have the right to leave it to those who come after them.

Nobody should be forced to sell their home to pay for care. Just a few weeks ago, I was talking to a friend of mine who sadly has cancer. This was a terrible thing to say, but he said, “I feared cancer and I feared dementia, but I’ve got the least bad of the two.” He is living with cancer now. The reality is that, for many reasons, his care is paid for, but for those like my father-in-law, my grandfather and others who suffer from dementia, that care is not provided for. So it is right to have radical reform of social care, but this is not it. It is right that all the parties should get together to ensure we have a common approach to this, but this proposal has been dreamt up and issued as a press release—it is not the reform of social care we need.

This reform of social care does nothing to tackle the 120,000 care assistant vacancies in our country, or to give social care staff the pay and esteem they deserve. One reason there is a crisis is that wonderful people can earn more money stacking shelves than they can caring for our loved ones, of whatever age. This plan will do nothing to give local authorities the money they need to backfill the terrible backlog and black holes that the Government have left them. Again, they are taking unpaid carers for granted and—the hon. Member for Arundel and South Downs (Andrew Griffith) rightly mentioned this earlier—not addressing the needs of those in care who are not of retirement age but significantly younger. This is a massive missed opportunity that will be paid for by people who have the least.

In my community in Cumbria, we are about 10 years above the national average age. We have a smaller working-age population and a disproportionately large population in need of care. We have colossal staffing shortages as things are. This measure does nothing to meet the needs of the people in my community, because it does nothing to invest in the quality and standard of the care that they will receive.

[Dr Murrison]

I am loth to give the hon. Gentleman an extra minute, but I must ask him how much he would put on income tax. I know that his party was famously keen on putting a penny on income tax, but he has just made a whole load of spending commitments—particularly raising incomes for care staff. I assume he has costed that. If so, will he say how many pennies on income tax he proposes to burden our constituents with?

[Tim Farron]

We would need to raise income tax to do what the hon. Gentleman’s Government say they need to do in the short term to get through, and then we would have a ring-fenced, bespoke tax that would deal with social care. If people had lived to the age they do now when Lord Beveridge, the fine Liberal who came up with the welfare state and the NHS in the first place, wrote his plan, there is no doubt that social care would have been part of that package, and we would be paying more tax now as a consequence. I say we should be doing what we were doing around Dilnot a few years ago, when we were moving in the right direction, sworking often across the House, and coming up with a package that we would pay for. In the short term, though, we would immediately raise a tax that is affordable and fair and does not just clobber those people on low wages and people of working age. That is the right thing to do.

That is why this measure is not just the wrong way of going about this but a colossal missed opportunity. We were promised something like the Beveridge report, and we ended up with something written on the back of a fag packet. We need something that means people will look back on this generation the way people still do on the generation of politicians post war who built the welfare state in the first place.

Future of the National Trust

Debate between Tim Farron and Andrew Murrison

Wednesday 11th November 2020 Westminster Hall

[Dr Murrison]

The hon. Gentleman ought also to look at English Heritage’s 2013 publication on broadly the same subject. He may wish to compare the quality of that report with the National Trust’s report and form his view as to whether it is appropriate to associate some of our national figures with slavery, as the title of this particular contribution does.

The hon. Gentleman is right to say that it is legitimate for organisations to explore history and present material in a balanced, measured and considered way. The judgment we all have to make is whether the National Trust has achieved that. I suggest to him that, against the standards of other organisations, such as English Heritage, the National Trust in that respect has fallen well short. Indeed, any reasonable appraisal of the material would suggest to me and many others a corporate culture at odds with its membership. I would argue that it is also at odds in important respects with statute that underpins the National Trust.

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

I congratulate the right hon. Gentleman on securing this very important debate; I also join him in offering congratulations to our new Chair.

The National Trust obviously employs a vast number of people in the Lake district; the jobs of many of them are now at risk, which is deeply concerning. It also owns a huge amount of land and acts as landlord to dozens and dozens of important hill farmers, who are essential in maintaining the heritage of our landscape. Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that the National Trust should do everything it can to act as a landlord that encourages succession on those farms, rather than turning the buildings into second homes or holiday lets? Likewise, does he agree that it should encourage the Government to make sure that, in transitional terms, the payments coming into the farming industry from January onwards encourage the maintenance of the family farm and not a move to ranch-style farming?

[Dr Murrison]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for making that point; I feel sure that he is more expert on upland farming than I am. I would always encourage a landlord to be responsible, especially a big one, and in particular a massive one such as the National Trust. I would be distressed if it was tempted to sell off properties for them to be turned into second homes or holiday homes. That seems entirely the wrong thing for the National Trust to do, and I would argue that it is probably contrary to the 1907 legislation that founded it. The idea behind the National Trust is conservation, and it is difficult to see how selling off property in the way that he has just described would service that end.

Much of what we have had from the National Trust in recent times is entirely commensurate with the fears expressed by many that what it is doing, in its own terms and the terms of the leaked documents we have seen, is to “dial down” its role as what it calls a “major national cultural institution”. We see the corporate upper lip curling at an “outdated mansion experience” that is of interest only to what it calls a “niche audience”, which is apparently “dwindling”. It is a “niche audience” that was on the rise before lockdown and that is bigger even now than the population of the Republic of Ireland, but it is one that the trust’s clairvoyants anticipate will have moved on, as the trust seeks to

“flex its mansion offer to create more active, fun and useful experiences that our audiences will be looking for in the future.”

I have “fun” every time I go to a National Trust property —that is the whole point of going—and it is not clear to me what “useful” means, but we do learn that

“Everywhere…we will move away from a narrow focus on family and art history.”

This has been pejoratively described as the triumph of the “trendies” over the “tweedies”. What it means in practice is that professional curator posts will fall from 111 to 80. There will be a new curator and it will not surprise right hon. and hon. Members to learn that that curator will be called

“curator of repurposing historic houses”.

But out will go actual curators—those internationally renowned experts and scholars, who are specialists in one of the world’s greatest collections.

I suspect that most of the membership, like me and my family, flock to National Trust properties to admire an elegant pile of bricks or a beautiful landscape before going for a nice cup of tea and a slice of cake—job done, and happy days. It is leisure, it is breathing space, it is succour for the soul and a welcome break from the remorseless hectoring about this and that, to which, as citizens, we are subjected day in, day out.

There are those, particularly on the hard left and perhaps within the trust’s hierarchy, who will say that an organisation makes a political statement every time that it does not advance an opinion—that silence is violence. But the National Trust needs to be a politics-free space, a great mediating institution, and not an organ for promulgating a particular world view, whether one sympathises with that view or not. That, surely, is the service that it renders to civil society.

My parents liked to drag me and my brother around National Trust properties when we were younger. Fifty years on, they all merge into a perpetual search for ice cream, but I do have one abiding recollection, and it is not some politically correct right-on narrative, misspelt on a piece of slate. It is inequality. Those great houses stand as silent witness to an unequal past. We do not need to be force-fed that by the trust’s high command; it is there and it is in your face. It is also plain to most visitors that the wealth required to throw up those mini-palaces did not often come from a post office savings account. Some of that money was highly questionable—some of it very dirty indeed by today’s standards and even by the standards of the day. But here we are in 2020, with the public—on whose backs, to a greater or lesser degree, those palaces were built—possessing them. That is a triumph and a restitution.

I mentioned that I did not want to be misconstrued or misunderstood, and it is therefore with trepidation and in anticipation of a wall of hate mail and trolling that I come to the document—the trust’s slavery and colonialism report. It is a catalogue of its properties that have some links to those subjects, but much of it is flimsy and tendentious. In 2013, English Heritage published “Slavery and the British country house”, which is a serious, thoughtful, measured contribution to a subject of significant public interest, in contrast with the National Trust’s colonialism and slavery report, whose title, which conflates two things as a common evil, gives the game away. The conflation gets worse because, wittingly or not, it by association diminishes towering figures in British history, notably Winston Churchill. The trust speaks of context, but where is the context for a man who, more than any other, stood against fascism, racism and antisemitism? The best that could be said of that piece of work is that it is plain shoddy. Otherwise, we are left to conclude that it is indicative of the trust’s corporate mindset.