Contribution
My Lords, as I see that I now have an extra minute, I might take it to welcome the noble Lord, Lord Nagaraju, to his place. I welcome him to this House, from one technology geek and computer enthusiast to another, and congratulate him on a wonderful maiden speech.
Last month, the Government published the Land Use Framework for England. Seldom has such a long-awaited report been found to be out of date on the day of its publication. With all the intellectual depth of a sixth-form geography project, it fails to recognise that Britain—indeed, any society—is no more than three meals away from anarchy. A Government who forget that deserve everything that is coming to them. This is a debate about clean energy and the rural economy, and I declare an interest as being involved in farming and fertilisers.
I was struck that the framework outsources much of the future land use policy in this nation not to civil servants in Defra—or, for that matter, to any other part of government—but to the Green Finance Institute and the World Wide Fund for Nature, which are namechecked. The Green Finance Institute is recorded by the Electoral Commission as being a substantial donor to the Secretary of State for DESNZ. In an astonishing twist, Companies House shows that the Green Finance Institute and the WWF share co-directors within that same web of institute companies. For the first time, we see that Labour’s donors have written, and will control, rural policy in this nation through the land use framework. The donors have ensured that rural policy has been bent and twisted by those with an axe to grind, tainted by ideology and class hatred, viewed through the lens of wishful thinking and ignorant of the reality of what it takes to feed us.
Today, I sound the alarm in this debate, because there is one table in the framework, driven by net-zero 2030 ideology, that should strike fear into anyone who is concerned for our food security, our rural economy and the resilience of our society. Labour’s lobbyists have managed to insert into the report that fully 1.7 million hectares of productive land will be entirely removed from agriculture, and then there will be additional controls on the hunting and shooting—activities that help our rural country pubs to survive the winter. The Library tells me that Defra estimates that the total area of farmed land in England is 8.9 million hectares, so 1.7 million hectares is just shy of 20% of all the land farmed in England. The report breezily asserts that there is enough land to go round to feed ourselves. That simply cannot be true.
Let us see what it means for the rural economy, with the sort of analysis that the framework should have done but did not. A farmer would hope that his farm would yield, for example, 10 tonnes per hectare of wheat. With increased food-price inflation barrelling down the tracks, that might generate gross sales of £2,000 a hectare, and the 1,000 hectare farm would generate £2 million in sales. Let us hold that number.
Against that income, he might pay a neighbour for seed and a local merchant for fertiliser. There will be some crop protection products. His farm machinery will be serviced by a local dealer. The sheds and grain storage will need repairs, and there are vermin contractors, builders, fitters, fencers, ditch diggers, plant hire suppliers and any number of ancillary businesses such as timber, builders’ merchants and so forth.
In total he will pay £1.8 million to local suppliers, including that boiler repair man who the farmer keeps going to in the summer so he is available for the villagers in the winter. All these people buy meals in the pub or support the local post office stores. That is the rural economy that Labour is destroying.
That is one farmer of 1,000 hectares, but the Government want to remove 1.7 million hectares from production—that is what the land use framework says. The net-zero ideology, by my reckoning, will cost us 15% of our national cereal production: the grains that bake our daily bread, brew our beer and create our cakes.
The Government tell us that in 2022, agriculture’s contribution to the UK economy was £13.9 billion. Based on my simple arithmetic, 1.7 million hectares removed on the altar of net zero is £3.5 billion taken from the rural economy every year. These are round numbers, but it is between 20% and 25% of agriculture’s total GDP. These zealots will not rest until our best land is given up for solar, which generates no rural income at all—so there will be no need whatever for the little doers. Solar enriches only the private equity backers and the sovereign wealth funds.
I thank my noble friend for allowing me to enumerate so clearly the economic effects of Labour’s war on the countryside and the economic damage that is to be visited on our rural communities. Their jobs and our shared social fabric are being destroyed by Labour’s paymasters, who deny the harsh reality of putting food in our belly, without which a nation can neither thrive nor survive.