Lord Elliott of Ballinamallard (UUP)

My Lords, I welcome this debate and I declare an interest as a farmer and a landowner. First, I want to touch briefly on the national insurance contributions increase. This will be increased on the employers, but who will really pay for it? The people who will pay for are the consumers, the people who use the services and buy the goods, because the employer is going to pass that on. So what is it? It is really a tax—another tax on the individuals and the people of our community. That is what the additional national insurance contributions are. I move on to the inheritance tax and the APR: damaging, unfair, destructive—we have heard all these terms for the last couple of months around this policy, and that is exactly what it is. It is going to do exactly the opposite of what I believe the genuine intention of the Government is. So there is bound to be a way around it. Look at the active farmer issue: safeguard those active farmers and the small family farms and hit the bigger corporations, because those are the people who will ultimately gain out of it now. We need to produce food here in an environmentally safe way, that is good for the consumer, and that has better welfare standards than importing it from those countries that do not have the same welfare standards as we do in the United Kingdom, which we pride ourselves on. So, please, let us not throw the baby out with the bathwater here. I say to the Government: make sure that you protect those family-run farms in the United Kingdom that can produce that good food. I just believe that this is an unfair picking on the family farm that will ruin that sector, and all it will do is provide more land and more income for the big, commercialised people.