The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Baroness Hayman of Ullock) (Lab)

My Lords, I thank the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Hereford for securing this debate and for coming over to Defra to discuss these issues more broadly earlier this week. I am grateful for this opportunity to discuss what is a really important topic. As the right reverend Prelate and other noble Lords have rightly said, farmers are facing challenges and pressures on multiple fronts—financial, economic, regulatory and environmental. Anyone who lives in a rural community, as I do, cannot fail to be aware of the problems that farming has been facing. In recent years, there has also been a growing awareness of the importance of mental health support in the farming sector. We are fully committed to safeguarding the mental health of people in our agricultural and farming communities. We are working closely with the sector to understand the pressures and to ensure that our farmers are supported as best they can be. The Government recently announced £343 million for up to 159 new NHS mental health centres. They will be opening across England from this autumn, bringing crucial support directly into neighbourhoods. The noble Earl, Lord Russell, asked a really important question about better data and evidence about mental health issues. He may be interested to know that the suicide prevention strategy for England sets out an ambition to commission and conduct research on data linkage projects. That includes how to support Defra to look at agricultural workers to understand the unique challenges and to respond appropriately. We have also been looking at how people across England can benefit from faster and better mental health support. There have been 8,500 additional mental health workers recruited since the end of June 2024—that meets a key government target which we had set—but also, if we focus specifically on agriculture, we are tripling the previous funding that was available for farmer welfare, mental health and well-being support. That comes through the new farmer welfare grant of £1.5 million, which was available over three years and builds on the success of the previous grant, with the funding supporting targeted interventions to strengthen personal and business resilience in the agriculture sector. The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Hereford mentioned the grants, the fact that they are only temporary and that charities need certainty to plan beyond that. As part of the farmer welfare grant, we were particularly interested in receiving applications which could prove longevity. We have been engaging with the sector and understand that some organisations plan to use funding to launch initiatives which can become self-sustaining when the grant period ends. We are interested in looking at how we can do more work on that, because the grant applications closed last week, and we will look at all those outcomes shortly. In addition, we continue to fund the Farming Community Network, which provides bTB-affected farmers and their families with a national free-to-access business and pastoral advice service. In his introduction, the right reverend Prelate talked about the importance of prevention, while the noble Earl, Lord Russell, talked about the need for practical solutions. I think it really important that instead of us talking about “We’re doing this, we’re doing that and we’re doing the other; we are putting a sticking plaster on here”, we really need to understand the root causes of the stress, anxiety and poor mental health that farmers are suffering from so that they do not reach crisis point. We have to focus on that and there are a number of ways we have started to do it. One of them is to make the supply chain fairer so that farmers are protected in contracts with supermarkets. Fair dealing rules, as the noble Earl opposite will know, have already been introduced for dairy and pigs. We are now looking to do the same for eggs, combinable crops and fresh produce sectors because, as we have heard strongly today, farmers need certainty. It is also one of the reasons why we published the farming road map: so that farmers have a clear direction towards a future for farming, underpinned by the four priorities of profitability, productivity, sustainability and resilience. We have to build in resilience because of the changing climate challenges and the global conflicts that farmers are facing through climate change. Supporting British farmers and boosting the nation’s security are key priorities for the Government, because the most resilient farms are profitable precisely because they are able to work with the environment. That is why we are backing this shift towards lower-input and more sustainable farming systems. One thing that came across strongly, though, was the issue around isolation and loneliness. We know that accessibility of mental health services is more challenging in rural communities, and that poorer accessibility can further undermine the well-being of those who need that mental health support, so we have included tackling loneliness and isolation as an objective for the farmer welfare grant. Also, the farming collaboration fund will enable local farmers to come together not just to share costs and reduce risks but, importantly, to socialise and meet their peers. The noble Baroness, Lady Shephard, talked about fallen stock. We have met to discuss fallen stock recently and will be working with the fallen stock sector to understand current pressures and look at how we can support farmers who are struggling with their stock, particularly regarding bluetongue. It is also important to remind noble Lords that we published in June our response to the independent Farming Profitability Review, led by the noble Baroness, Lady Batters—that review was mentioned. We are implementing a number of her recommendations to take proper action to grow profitability. We know how hard this summer has been for farmers: dry conditions have clearly placed huge pressures on farming businesses. We have had reduced grass growth, lower forage availability and lower crop yields. We know that farmers have been feeding what should have been the autumn and even the winter food early; this adds pressure as we go through the year. I was pleased that the Prime Minister announced the £65 million package of support in August to support farmers affected by those conditions and to look at how we can further build resilience. We are also looking to invest £2.4 billion over the next two years to improve flood resilience, and we have a new Floods Resilience Taskforce. We have been concentrating on drought, but we know that we are likely to have a stormy and potentially very wet winter, so we need to look at support ahead of time. There have been real issues for farmers around wildfires, too, which have been much worse this year than last, and can have a devastating impact on farms and farming. This is a national security issue. Defra funding embeds proportionate wildfire risk assessment and mitigation within land management activity, but we are trying to better understand as a Government the impact of this year’s fires. This involves not just what we must do to better support recovery but also building greater resilience for the future. In July, we published the Future of Rural England Report. The report sets out key recommendations for government action to help rural communities unlock their full potential. These recommendations were informed by the work of the Rural Taskforce, which is a group of external rural stakeholders and departments right across Whitehall that have been convened to identify how government can support rural businesses and communities to tackle rural disadvantage, and also to unlock the potential of the rural economy. At Defra we are looking at that report and working out how we can best implement those recommendations, many of which will help to unlock some of the support mechanisms we need for farmers and others living in rural communities. I am about to run out of time, I am afraid, but I want to close by thanking all those who have made a contribution. This is an important issue and we must take it extremely seriously. I thank the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Hereford for bringing us together again, and I thank everyone who has contributed. I hope that we can continue to work together to improve both mental health support and prevention.