Farming Road Map and Profitability Review

Victoria Atkins Excerpts

Wednesday 24th June 2026 Commons Chamber

[Victoria Atkins (Louth and Horncastle) (Con)]

I thank the Secretary of State for advance sight of her statement, and I repeat my sincere thanks to Baroness Batters for her thorough report.

The Secretary of State presents a document for farming for the next 25 years, but this Government will not last even 25 days. Instead of using their 14 years in opposition to create this document, they have dithered and delayed for the past two years, but they did not dither and delay in making life harder for rural businesses. One of the first acts of this Government, of which Labour Members are all so proud, was to target family farms and family businesses with their death tax. As Labour MPs and Ministers in the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs voted repeatedly for the family farm and family business taxes, DEFRA Ministers shut down farming payments without notice, including the SFI.

Sadly, the record of this Government is rising food prices and a record number of farms closing. They broke the trust of farmers, and they have only themselves to blame. Yet the Secretary of State stands here today wanting to be thanked by rural communities for producing a document that could be shelved quietly by whoever comes next, just as the Government seem to have shelved the 10-year plan for the NHS. For all the talk—[Interruption.] Mark my words! For all the talk of the new SFI scheme and budgets, the fact is that they have cut the farming budget by £100 million.

In another leap from reality, the Government’s negotiations with the EU get barely a mention in this document, despite the enormous consequences they will have for farming businesses. CropLife UK has estimated that this EU reset could drain £810 million from UK farms and sacrifice almost 9,000 jobs from our rural constituencies. The Food and Drink Federation states that the wholesale handover of our food laws to the EU will lead to at least 400 regulations needing to be changed. So how will the Government ensure that UK farmers, including our tenant and upland farmers, can compete against heavily subsidised EU farmers? This matters because food security is critical in this increasingly volatile world. What reassurance can the Secretary of State provide that the next Cabinet will prioritise farming and food production?

We Conservatives view DEFRA as a vital economic Department, so we agree with its efforts to recalculate farming and food producers’ contributions to the economy. By the way, I note that Reform calls itself the farmer’s friend, yet there is not a single Reform MP in the Chamber.

Had the Secretary of State attended Cereals 2026 at Diddly Squat, she would have seen for herself that the sector is already driving innovation. The Government are therefore playing catch-up, but we hope that the intention to work with the Department for Business and Trade to deliver reductions in compliance costs and to focus on innovation and technology will actually happen. The plan to bring DEFRA farming services into one integrated service is much needed, and this reflects Conservative calls for quangos and the Department to be overhauled.

There are many questions still left unanswered in this report, and I hope that the Secretary of State will try to answer them rather than deflect, because that has been noticed. The plan looks to double the funding for Environment Agency inspections. Why are this Government focusing on bureaucracy rather than helping farmers survive? What does she say to the tenant farmer of a well-run dairy herd who has been told by the Environment Agency that they must invest up to £750,000 to guard against a “risk” that there “may” be a pollution event in 50 years’ time. As that tenant farmer said to me, there will not be a farm there in 50 years’ time, as they simply cannot afford that payment.

There is also no mention of closing the flag loophole on food packaging to help our constituents to buy genuinely British food and to back British farmers. Why not? The report says there will be no cut to food production, but it also says there will be a reduction of 9% in the land available to produce food. How can the Secretary of State guarantee that our food production will be protected when key tools, such as gene editing to develop drought-resistant crops, are at risk in the negotiations with the EU.

In her final act in this Department, will the Secretary of State please advise the right hon. Member for Makerfield (Andy Burnham) that the first thing he must do is axe the family farm and family business taxes completely? Otherwise, sadly, this will be a road map to nowhere for struggling farmers and food producers.

[Emma Reynolds]

Oh, gosh, how do I follow that? Well, the first thing to say is that that the shadow Secretary of State is not in charge of reshuffles on the Government side of the House.

Let me outline where I do agree with the shadow Secretary of State. I agree that DEFRA is a really important economic Department of Government, and I have been focused on that since I was appointed to this role on 5 September. I also agree that Reform Members do not seem to care about agricultural farming, because they do not even bother turning up to such an important statement. So there are some things that she and I agree on, but that is probably where they end.

The shadow Secretary of State accuses us of dithering and delaying for two years, but her Government dithered and delayed for 14 years. We did not see any action such as this road map during the whole time that the Conservatives were in office. They sold farmers down the river with their Australia and New Zealand trade deals, and they could not be bothered to spend their own farming budget on the farmers who needed it, so I will take no lectures from the right hon. Lady.

The SFI scheme will reopen next week. I am proud that we have taken forward the recommendations in Baroness Batters’ review on reforms to SFI, including making it simpler and more cost-effective, and introducing a minimum hectarage requirement. We on this side of the House are serious about engaging with the farming sector, and we commissioned Baroness Batters, who has such great expertise—that was never done under the previous Government—to advise us on how to make the sector more profitable.

The shadow Secretary of State asks about the sanitary and phytosanitary deal, and I say to her that we are working very closely with the National Farmers’ Union and other farming stakeholders, because that deal is all about bringing down the barriers put up by the previous Government at the border that make it so much harder both to export raw ingredients and food, and to import.

I thank the shadow Secretary of State for what she said—this is one thing we do agree on—about both Baroness Batters and my saying that we must make sure the farming sector is more accurately measured. I think we need to reassess that, so that we do not just assess what is done on farm, but look at this from farm to fork, and therefore see the vital role of the farming sector in our economy.

The shadow Secretary of State asks about the Environment Agency. I will make no apologies for increasing the funding of the Environment Agency, which was so harshly cut under her Government. I will also make no apologies about having a plan, in this document and more broadly, for how we work with farmers to ensure that agricultural pollution is a problem we tackle together.

The shadow Secretary of State asks about gene editing and the SPS deal, and those negotiations are ongoing. However, we want to ensure that our farmers are able to use the best technology. We lead in agricultural technology in our country, and we want to make sure that it is harnessed by our sector. That is why there is such a big emphasis in the road map on the importance of innovation, and why we are dedicating Government funding to innovation, and on farmers sharing best practice so that they can become more profitable over time.