Contribution
I remind the House of my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests.
It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for South West Norfolk (Terry Jermy). I can endorse his asks to the Chancellor and I could probably add a few of my own. Like him, I welcome the Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, the hon. Member for Suffolk Coastal (Jenny Riddell-Carpenter), to her place. She has maybe had a slightly rocky start at some moments, but I know from her time on the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee that she has knowledge about and a concern for the industry. It is in everybody’s interests that the Government should be successful, so we wish her and her colleagues well.
I am not going to say a great deal about the sustainable farming incentive. The Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, the hon. Member for Portsmouth South (Stephen Morgan), is coming to the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee next week and we will doubtless spend some time on it then. It would be worth him and others reflecting on the full extent of the damage and the nature of the damage that has been done by that particular episode, because we are already seeing an unpicking of land that has been managed in a way that was beneficial for nature, sometimes for decades.
Farmers have found themselves overnight with massive holes in their budgets. When they ask, “Well, what is going to happen next?”, it is simply not tenable for any of us to turn around and say, “Well, it is okay—just trust DEFRA. They will come up with something in the next financial year.” I am pretty sure what most farmers would say if we turned around to them and said that.
The real impact is another nail in the coffin of financial investor confidence in the industry, at a time when there is a perfect storm for British farming. We have seen a price spike in input costs from earlier in the year, as a consequence of what happened in the strait of Hormuz, particularly in relation to urea for the production of fertiliser and diesel. The Food and Drink Federation told the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee in May that that would take another 10 months to feed through into price inflation, so we still have the worst of that to come in the new year.
Since then, we have had a long, hot summer, in which many arable farmers have been through the third bad harvest in succession, with yields down. Let us not forget that many of them chose not to plant in the spring in the first place, because it made more economic sense just to sell the fertiliser and not plant the seed. The usual sources of replacements, at the time of a bad harvest in continental Europe, are going through exactly the same things that we are going through. Our livestock farms are already feeding winter forage, because they have not had the grass available for their cattle and sheep. Parenthetically, let me say that that is not the case in Orkney, where the problem we have with our winter forage is getting it off the fields after a long, wet summer.
In the red meat sector, our livestock numbers continue to decline in a way that risks threatening the critical mass of the industry. If that were to fall over, it would have a massive ripple effect through the rural economy—through the marts, hauliers, abattoirs, vets and merchants of all sorts. The chicken and pork sectors are under serious pressure. I had a conversation just last week with Cranswick, one of the biggest operators, which told me that between it and 2 Sisters, something in the region of £1.5 billion of planned investment is held up in the planning system. In many ways, that sums up the frustration of the situation in which we find ourselves.
Despite this perfect storm, there are people in every sector of this brilliant industry who continue to want to farm and invest. We have spoken about all the different agricultural policies that have an impact on the sector, but there are policies across nearly every Department of Government, especially in relation to the planning system, that could free up investment opportunities that would generate growth. The Prime Minister speaks about growth in every postcode, and a lot of postcodes are in farming communities. The rural economy presents a real opportunity to generate the economic growth that we all know we need.
For all the downsides that there are in the industry at the moment, I remain optimistic for one reason only, which has nothing to do with anybody in this Chamber or in government: despite everything that happens to our farmers, they continue to want to produce food to feed our nation, and they are better than almost anybody else in the world at doing that.