Lord Swire (Con)

My Lords, as somebody who lives in Devon, I look forward to a long period of the cream teas of the noble Earl, Lord Devon, for which he will regrettably have more time to produce as a result of the delinking of the hereditary peerage and the legislative process of this country. I listened carefully to the Minister’s statement, and several things strike me. The first is that this assault on the rural community and the farming community is not a perception but a reality. We have seen farm incomes shrinking year on year, rapid increases in costs—not least, as we heard from my noble friend Lord Redwood, the problems we now confront with fertiliser, which are very serious indeed—as well as the tremendous growth in bureaucracy, the chopping and changing of government policies, and the bringing forward of this latest government policy, which creates huge amounts of paperwork for farmers who should be out there farming. The missed opportunity presented by this rethink on farming in this country concerns me. At a time when we should be looking long term at food security and food production, we seem to be thinking in the short term. Can the Minister say what the Government are doing to encourage younger people to come into the industry just at a time when we are seeing it getting older, with more and more people giving up—or wanting to give up—their farms? What hope can she hold out to a younger generation that there is a career and a life in farming for them as well? What more can she do to encourage the land-based colleges up and down the country, which have often suffered from very poor financial support, to get younger people into the industry? Only in that way will we preserve the landscape in the way that she envisages. We can divert every kind of subsidy into all these initiatives—I have no problem with some of those at all—but, at the end of the day, it is a manmade landscape that we enjoy. It is made and preserved by the land managers and the farmers. Without them, it will not continue to exist, and nor will the food on which we have come to depend.