Lord Fuller (Con)

My Lords, I also thank the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Hereford for tabling this debate. It is an important subject which is very much at the forefront of many people’s minds. Even the Prime Minister has agreed that the war on the countryside has gone too far. It is not his fault that so many in the countryside choose to end their lives before their time, but the constant and cumulative attacks on the way that people choose to live their lives in the sticks cannot help their mental health. It is not easy when you are underappreciated, misunderstood, isolated and under financial attack from low prices, high costs, discriminatory tax and evermore burdensome regulations. Oftentimes the city dweller looks down on the country mouse who lives in the sticks: “Well, they’re just so provincial, you see”. That attitude is a problem, because nobody should be taken for granted or patronised in this way. It demeans them and the governing party that promotes that notion. I play a leading role in the fertiliser industry. I have a degree in agriculture and am a director of a large farming business. I have grown up among the landowners, farmers, contractors and all those who work among them for as long as I can remember. I know more than most that, if you are an outsider, it is easy to misunderstand how these rural communities function. Close social ties formed over generations make it hard for outsiders to get in. However, out in the countryside the economy is based on small businesses. So many are one-man bands. Unlike in the cities, where larger firms are split into basic commercial functions, directorates or departments, the farmer is simultaneously the sales director, purchasing director, head of finance, health and safety co-ordinator, head of operations, contracts manager, HR executive, regulatory affairs officer and government relations adviser, all by himself or herself. That is bad enough, but there are other weighty risks that do not affect other businesses. There are weather risks. Three bad harvests on the trot, corn prices down and input costs high have left cash tight. A farmer who did everything right this year still found yields down by 30%. We have heard that livestock farmers are already feeding winter grub. These are uncertainties over which none of us, and none of them, have any control. There is a particular issue among tenant farmers on the rent quarter day. I am delighted to see that the noble Baroness, Lady Rock, who produced the Rock report into farm tenancies, is in her place. She knows the pressures too. When the best you can achieve financially is a black zero, and relying on imports to fill the gap is uncertain, what is our Government’s solution to this growing crisis? Well, I am afraid the Government are harming the social life in the countryside, which, more than anything, helps people unburden their thoughts and share the pressures they are under. The country pub has been closed down by new taxes on glass bottles, sky-high electricity bills, national insurance and the need to offer guaranteed hours—and now, new taxes on overnight stays in pubs with rooms are going to add to that burden. The agricultural show societies, which do as much as anything to improve the social glue for those who live outside the M25, are at risk because HMRC is failing to follow its own rules by docking £20 million of VAT, when the matter was clear and determined by the Upper Tribunal. Country sports, which are a big social support and driver of the local economy, are to be banned, curtailed or subject to onerous licensing restrictions imposed by townies who think that milk comes from Tesco, not cows. With BPS financial support a distant memory, so many SFI subsidies and grants are restricted to hobby farmers rather than the ones who really feed us. Of course, I am not so churlish as to say that £65 million for new reservoirs is not welcome, but, frankly, it is not a drop in the bucket. Then we have Natural England’s regulatory ignorance on stocking rates, wilfully misunderstanding the vocation of being an upland farmer. This morning, those villains again at Natural England have perpetuated a nationalisation of nature, with a predatory pricing scheme on nature levies that, at a stroke, destroys the equity in the private nature markets by using a made-up discount rate of 2.05% when the Government are borrowing at nearly 6%. These are the nature schemes that those under pressure have personal solace in creating, but the government agencies chop them off at the knees. We have a Government who have spent two years putting our English farmers at a competitive disadvantage against EU competitors. We are to have new taxes on fertiliser in January, yet in the EU, those taxes are now recycled back to the farmers in a pointless money-go-round that demonstrates they had no place in the first place. Where we have technical advantage in genetic breeding, black-grass chemistry, or even bioethanol, our Government seem content to trade those advantages away in late-night phone calls to the White House or an SPS deal that is sleeping rather than dead. The farmers and the people who work in the countryside have to be concerned—as we should all be—by a land use framework that contemplates fully 20% of the productive farmland in our nation being applied to solar and other non-farming uses. Vibes alone will not feed us when Norfolk’s breadbasket is converted to forestry, as the map in that land use framework contemplates. It is not clear where these productivity gains are going to come from. One thing is for sure, though: we will get that 20% productivity gain only with new investment. When you are down on your luck and feeling sad for yourself, where is the incentive to invest in not just your business but our national food security? Worst of all, as my noble friend Lady Shephard said, is the hammer blow of these taxes that apply only to family businesses that apply generational principles and long-term patient capital but do not apply to pension funds, hedge funds or sovereign wealth. You have to feel for people who do not even have seven years to go, who have been recklessly placed under an intolerable burden, having taken the best advice to hold on to their farmland, and are now feeling that they are a burden to their families because, sad to say, Labour has removed the English farmer’s safety net. Now we get to the crux. When you are on your own, and it seems that everyone hates you and you are facing global headwinds unsupported, no matter how professional you may be, no matter how many qualifications you have attained, no matter how large the financial mountain you have to climb to break even, still less make a profit, you can see why many cannot see a way out. The fact is that instruments of death are all around these people: the shotgun, the veterinary medicines, the rat poison, the chemicals and the loneliness. It is not the fault of Ministers that some individuals have come to take these things, but the Government, having brought us to a place where the cumulative impact of abandoning food security, attacking our cultural ways of life and failing to recognise that farming is in trouble and must be dealt with, have instead pursued a war on the countryside that has gone too far. There is hope that the new Administration in Downing Street, the pie-and-pint successors, will recognise that this war will be reversed, not just for the farmers but for the social life of Britain and the security of our nation. Like my noble friend, I pay tribute to the NFU, the CLA, Your Are Not Alone and any number of other charities and programmes that allow people to lift their eyes from the gutter. They give hope and a sense of value to those who live in the sticks, and where there is hope, salvation will follow. That is the route to healing minds, not terminating them.