Jerome Mayhew

The hon. Gentleman is entirely right. One of the beauties of the environmental land management scheme brought in by the last Government is that it has three stages. There is the in-field sustainable farming incentive, countryside stewardship, which has the in-farm elements, and the landscape recovery tier, which anticipates exactly that—I would describe them as in-valley projects. It is right that we should look right across a watercourse in those discussions, but it needs to be done in consultation with farmers, who should not have this imposed on them by a lack of drainage on the part of the Environment Agency. Where there is flooding of productive farmland, it is necessary for the Government to build on the farming recovery fund, which was instigated by the last Conservative Government. That provides up to £25,000 a farm for an uninsured loss event. I welcome the Government’s announcement that they will provide an additional £10 million to that fund, but that is the start, not the end, of what needs to be done, so that farmers who suffer uninsurable loss to their farmland—their productive livelihood—are compensated.