Chris Hinchliff

That is a very fair intervention—I take the point. Indeed, the right hon. Member made some powerful arguments about the beauty of our countryside, and we should be up front about the fact that those aesthetic values are worth fighting for—perhaps I should have put it like that. I do not think my hon. Friends on the Government Benches should scorn that argument either, as protecting the beauty of Britain’s countryside for all our citizens is a proud part of Labour’s heritage. From creating national parks that steward our best landscapes for future generations to launching national trails that are enjoyed by millions and, yes, even establishing the green belt, the Labour movement has always yearned for bread and roses too. Returning to food security, it has been far too long since we have taken the issue seriously. We have grown complacent in the surety that, as a rich nation, we can import all we want and need. With the worsening climate emergency, however, it would now be entirely unwise to assume that we can continue to rely on those supply chains—when Valencia next floods, we will remember that to our cost—or to step back from trying to achieve net zero. The threat of flooding from climate change to so much of our best agricultural land is too great for that to make any sense, with 95% of grade 1 land in the east of England already at risk of flooding. We must urgently update our agricultural land classification. The system we use to determine potential farmland productivity is desperately out of date. It uses rainfall data from 1941 to 1970 and temperature measurements from 1961 to 1980. The impacts of climate change are already being severely felt on our farmland and intensive farming is degrading soils, with 5.3 million tonnes of organic carbon lost from our soils every year, so the likelihood is that the current agricultural land classification system substantially overestimates land productivity. We must update it. Food security is about not just the amount of land under agricultural use, but what we are producing. Food security must mean nutritional security. To take this seriously, the Government must set a clear and measurable target for a higher proportion of our nation’s nutritional needs, according to a recognised diet such as the NHS “Eatwell Guide”, to be met reliably by domestic production to high environmental standards. Achieving that will require national policy to guide substantial changes in the amount and types of food that we produce domestically. The essential element of genuine food security is establishing a national policy framework that provides certainty and incentives for farmers to invest in practices that prioritise nutritional needs and environmental outcomes, but that will likely see their yields fluctuate in the short term. When we consider energy security, Government contracts for difference ensure a minimum price that gives suppliers the confidence to invest in the production needed to secure national policy objectives. Food security is no less essential than energy security, and farming practices that restore nature are as important as the transition to renewable energy. A Government serious about making genuine food security profitable to produce should establish new contracts for food security based on the contracts for difference mechanism in the energy sector, providing certainty through price floors for the key produce necessary to meet the nation’s nutritional needs. That is how we can achieve genuine food security.