Victoria Atkins

Oh, I would not do that if I were you. We have heard about a rebel force of Labour MPs who are going to stand up to the Government on the family farm tax. This debate is their chance to show their support for their farmers, but where are they? A total of 10 Labour MPs have turned up and six have spoken—that is 1.4% of the parliamentary party. The Labour Government’s farming fiasco policy can be summarised in three points: they will remove, without warning, farming and environmental schemes that help farms thrive and on which farms build their business cases; they will permit the state to seize farmland without consent or market value; and, if family farms manage to cling on despite that, Labour will tax farmers for dying. Let us deal with the first point: the abrupt halting of the sustainable farming incentive and the massive cut to delinked payments. The Government sneaked the SFI decision out late on Tuesday night, before being dragged to the Dispatch Box by us yesterday. That is a chaotic and inept way for a Government to treat taxpayers, businesses and families. Yesterday, the Minister kept using the figure of £5 billion for farming over two years—2024-25 and 2025-26. Of course, the funding for the first year, 2024-25, was set by the previous Government, including the £300 million that was rolled over from the previous year. It is for Labour Ministers to set the budget for 2025-26 after the spending review. Will the Minister confirm that the DEFRA budget will not face substantial cuts in the spending review, given he has relied on that figure so much? If he cannot confirm that, then those figures are meaningless, as Ministers are counting money for 2025-26 that could be removed at a stroke by the Chancellor. The decision on SFI has consequences, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Salisbury (John Glen) and my hon. Friends the Members for Mid Norfolk (George Freeman), for Sleaford and North Hykeham (Dr Johnson) and for Kingswinford and South Staffordshire (Mike Wood) have made clear. David from Gloucestershire, a farmer, asks the Minister whether he should simply plough up his farm and turn his back on 25 years of farming with an environmental focus. He says: “We are a small family farm…I won’t be able to afford environmental principles, everyone loses but the environment mostly.” We have heard from hon. Members about how farmers have contacted them because they face a financial crisis as a result of this decision, yet the no-farming Minister told them that they should be celebrating—well, the tractors outside do not seem to be tooting in celebration at his announcement yesterday. Let us move on to delinked payments, which were cut in the Budget. Tens of thousands of farmers who are not signed up to SFI in any of its iterations are still being subjected to a 76% cut in their delinked direct payments, leaving many in cash flow crisis, including tenant farmers. That was not mentioned at all by the hon. Members for Shrewsbury (Julia Buckley), for South West Norfolk (Terry Jermy), for Cannock Chase (Josh Newbury), for Suffolk Coastal (Jenny Riddell-Carpenter), for St Austell and Newquay (Noah Law) or for Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland (Luke Myer). An urgent issue facing the industry is the importance of biosecurity to the future of farming. The second case of foot and mouth disease in Europe is alarming, but we have heard nothing from the Government on that. Will the Minister confirm whether funding for Dover Port Health Authority has now been agreed, outline how he is preventing the rising trend of bushmeat being sold over social media platforms and explain why the Government continue to ignore our calls to increase funding for the redevelopment of Weybridge? I can reveal what the Secretary of State and the Farming Minister have been prioritising this week. They have issued a consultation not on SFI, the family farm tax or cuts to delinked payments, but on how to carry a chicken. I am sure everybody thinks that really is the national priority for farming at the moment. Let us turn to the Government’s plans to undercut property rights and force farmers to sell their land at below market value. This is a policy that goes against the fundamental British principle of land ownership and puts food security and prices at risk—my hon. Friends set out the case on that. We then move on to the points made about the family farm tax, which the hon. Member for North Somerset (Sadik Al-Hassan) criticised as being a distraction. The hon. Member for Suffolk Coastal seemed to be arguing for more taxes on farmers, but at least those Labour Members mentioned the family farm tax. The hon. Members for Shrewsbury, for South West Norfolk, for Cannock Chase, for St Austell and Newquay and for Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland did not see fit to mention it, because they are ignoring the facts of life on this. As Conservative Members know, this policy is having a genuine emotional and economic toll on farmers throughout the United Kingdom. One farmer told me: “I’ve stopped encouraging my daughter to spend time on the farm so I don’t have to have the conversation of why she can’t take over in the future.” This Government are robbing the next generation of farmers of their future, and this is also having a devastating impact on elderly farmers. It was shared in the Senedd this week that a farmer declined cancer treatment months before his death as he wanted to make sure that he died before these changes came into effect. That is desperately harrowing, yet we are being told this week in, week out by farming organisations, all because the Chancellor—who, by the way, refuses to meet farmers—is destroying British farming with her taxation policy. This is not just about the family farm tax: it is about the family business tax, the national insurance hike, the fertiliser tax and the double cab pick-up tax, which were all set out by the hon. Member for Upper Bann (Carla Lockhart) and my hon. Friend the Member for Sleaford and North Hykeham. You name it, the Government will tax it. That is why my hon. Friend the Member for Sleaford and North Hykeham said that farmers see no future in farming under this Government. In the words of one mid Devon farmer: “At no time in all these years have I felt so deflated with the job.” To the farmers despairing at this city-dwelling Government: please know that we Conservatives hear you, support you and will work with you to mend the outright assault on the countryside that this Labour Government are carrying out. Together, we will build a bright future for farming.