Agriculture: Mental Health Pressures
Thursday, 17 September 2026
Contributions
Question for Short Debate
Asked by
The Lord Bishop of Hereford
To ask His Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the impact of economic uncertainty, regulatory change, and environmental pressures on the mental health of those working in agriculture.
The Lord Bishop of Hereford
My Lords, I am grateful for the opportunity to raise this issue in your Lordships’ House. I declare my interest as a patron of the Agricultural Chaplains Association and bishop of the most rural diocese in England. Clergy and agricultural chaplains across my diocese, and indeed the nation, are on the front line of the pastoral response to the mental health crisis among agricultural workers. They are so often the ones who show up in times of crisis and sit with people at their moments of greatest need. They provide comfort to the families of the recently bereaved and take funerals. Although it is imperfect, evidence suggests that British farming communities experience mental health concerns and likely rates of suicide disproportionate to the general population of Britain. The Royal Agriculture Benevolent Institution’s 2021 Big Farming Survey found that almost a fifth of respondents knew someone who had attempted suicide in the last five years. Indeed, 94% of British farmers agreed that poor mental health is the biggest hidden problem facing farmers today, according to the Farm Safety Foundation’s 2025 report. There are multiple reasons for this. Farmers are the worst affected by the recent turbulence brought on by climate change. In only the last 18 months, we have experienced our two hottest summers on record and an extremely wet winter. Farmers are devastated by the loss of their crops due to wildfires, flooding and extreme heat, and the pests and diseases they bring. They have been forced to eat into their winter forage reserves, rework irrigation systems and add flood defences. The threat of extreme weather and climate change is keeping farmers awake at night. They are faced with tackling the worst bluetongue outbreak the nation has faced and bearing the costs of veterinary bills, vaccines and other associated expenses. The financial burden is considerable, but so too is the emotional strain of dealing with disease, uncertainty and livestock losses. I will take a moment to thank the noble Baroness, Lady Mallalieu—I hope she will forgive me if I have pronounced that wrong—for her written support ahead of today’s debate. She drew my attention to the extraordinary pressures being felt across the wider agricultural support network. She told me that kennels collecting fallen stock in her area have at times visited as many as 140 farms in a single day—a stark illustration of the enormous strain that climate-related pressures are placing on the wider industry. Secondly, as farmers consider their approach to the future, they do so against a backdrop of continual policy and regulatory change. The 2023 report from the Defra Select Committee in the other place on rural mental health highlighted the stress caused by changing regulatory frameworks and support schemes. Farmers must necessarily take a long-term view of their business, yet find themselves navigating a constantly shifting landscape of environmental incentives, land management requirements and biodiversity obligations. Farmers are resilient and, even if they disagree with policy, they will make it work if they have consistency. The current challenging environment in food security suggests the need for significant cross-party collaboration for a longer-term stable regulatory and policy framework. Alongside this uncertainty sits intense financial pressure. Rising costs for fertiliser, fuel and machinery have squeezed already tight margins. For many, concerns around their farm’s long-term viability remain a constant source of anxiety. A remarkable farming support charity in my diocese, We Are Farming Minds, reports growing numbers of farmers struggling with money worries, insecure tenancies, family disputes over farm succession, legal issues and the challenge of keeping businesses afloat amid volatile markets—paperwork and administration add a further burden. A fifth of those living rurally report poor mental health due to social isolation. For agricultural workers, this is exacerbated by long hours working alone and the increasing closure of farmers’ markets, which are places of community as well as commerce. Many also express a sense that farming is undervalued by wider society, despite the essential role that farmers play—a point well made by the noble Lord, Lord Deben, in his supplementary question earlier today. At the same time, cultures of resilience within farming communities can create a stigma around discussing mental ill-health, discouraging people from seeking support when they need it most. Of course, in times of mental crisis, many farmers have access to firearms and agricultural chemicals, making timely and preventive support critical. Yet there are also reasons for hope. Across the country, communities, charities and front-line organisations are developing innovative ways to reach those who might never walk through the door of a traditional mental health service. Some organisations choose to bring life-saving community to farmers, such as the monthly butty van—a joint project between the diocese of Hereford and the Methodist Church which offers a breakfast, hot drink and conversation to farmers. Others organise pop-up well-being clinics at livestock markets and agricultural shows, such as health huts, which offer both mental health advice and medical assistance. Still others train the people who farmers already trust. The DPJ Foundation equips industry professionals to spot mental health symptoms and runs a “share the load” counselling service. I am grateful to have met the Minister earlier this week to discuss the well-being of farming communities, and I thank her for her sustained advocacy on behalf of farmers and the careful attention she has given to the many interconnected pressures affecting the sector, from mental health and welfare support through to the practical regulatory challenges that shape everyday life on farms. I warmly welcome the Government’s farmer welfare grant—a timely commitment of £1.5 million over the coming three years. It is heartening that the Minister recognises that behind every harvest and herd are men and women carrying burdens of isolation, anxiety and financial pressure that too often go unseen. Through this funding, projects such as the butty van will be better equipped to continue their vital work. Of course, I recognise the financial constraints under which the Government are operating and the difficult choices Ministers face across public spending. In that context, this funding is a welcome and valuable investment. However, grants are a precision tool: their scope is limited, their budgets finite and their duration temporary. While this funding is due to run until 2029, charities and support organisations need longer-term certainty if they are to recruit and retain skilled staff, build trusted relationships within communities and plan effectively for the future. I hope, therefore, that the Minister will consider how this promising start might be developed into a more sustainable funding settlement. However, as the Minister and I discussed in person, improving mental health in farming is not simply about responding to crisis; it is about creating the conditions in which farmers and farming can thrive. The Minister has rightly been engaging with practical issues such as on-farm reservoirs and water storage, and I welcome efforts to reduce unnecessary regulatory burdens where possible. Prevention and early intervention should be at the heart of the Government’s approach. If awareness of mental health challenges becomes second nature across the sector, we can identify problems sooner, connect people with support earlier and help prevent avoidable tragedies. In doing so, we can build a healthier farming workforce and more resilient rural communities.
Baroness Shephard of Northwold (Con)
My Lords, we are indebted to the right reverend Prelate for so graphically describing the often-ignored problem of mental health in rural communities and the part that uncertainty and unpredictability play in that problem. This issue is a deeply serious matter. Problems of access, transport links and availability of professional help for health problems are all more difficult in sparsely populated rural areas. The prosperity and, above all, the confidence of the farming sector are at the very centre of the whole rural economy, from jobs to sales of seed and fertiliser, machinery, food processing and livestock, veterinary services, and retail and hospitality. If farmers prosper, so do our rural communities. Farmers produce 60% of our food. They care for our environment and are frequently leaders in rural communities, taking part in local government, school management, and our churches and chapels. But isolation, long working hours and financial pressures, often unpredictable, make theirs a lonely job. Farmers have to make their decisions alone, as we all know. As the right reverend Prelate said, they have access to firearms and pesticides. I fear that some noble Lords here today will have had first-hand experience of suicides within their rural communities. I certainly have, and my noble friend Lord Fuller, who comes from the same county, will also have had that experience. The right reverend Prelate has graphically described the situation. A RABI survey found that 47% of the farming community experienced high anxiety rates—much higher than in the rest of our community. Many organisations have been set up across the country over time to help. I recall that when I was at the ministry of agriculture in the early 1990s we worked with RABI and the Royal Show to promote better access to help with mental health for farmers. In 2008, the agricultural community in Norfolk, Suffolk and Essex set up the organisation YANA: You Are Not Alone. It continues to provide a full-time, dedicated and confidential helpline with trained advisers and access to counselling. This statistic speaks for itself: alarmingly, its helpline calls and the durations of those calls have increased by nearly 40% in the last year alone. Climate change, floods, drought, storms, the extraordinary international situation, supply shortages, ever-increasing energy prices and massive uncertainty surrounding future food supplies have combined to create an unprecedentedly difficult time for the whole agricultural sector and, importantly, the very high anxiety rates for those working in it. Uncertainty regarding your livelihood is one of the principal causes of depression. We all understand that uncertainty is built into farming. Farming is all about planning ahead: what to drill, when to harvest, when to invest in irrigation systems, machinery and livestock, and how to find new markets, all in constantly shifting circumstances. Farmers have to plan not just for one year but for several seasons ahead, taking account of the whole farm and those working on it. This is why the Government’s shock inheritance tax announcement—taxing not only our very means of food production but its future—was received with disbelief by the whole rural community. There have been other sudden shock changes in support for agriculture from this Government, frequently at short notice, as was the case with the SFI, smashing to smithereens forward planning within the sector. I accept that the Minister has taken every chance to make improvements for the farming community where it has been possible. However, that kind of uncertainty within your own livelihood can be very difficult to handle in an industry already fraught with uncertainties, especially if it is caused by government, as has regrettably happened during the past couple of years. It is particularly serious—indeed, unacceptable—because, at this time of global uncertainty, a safe, affordable and sustainable food supply is central to our national security. Professor Tim Lang, in his 2025 report for the National Preparedness Commission, stated that strong and resilient productive capacity is essential in facing global climate events, geopolitical disruptions, wars and blockades, and fragile food supply chains. He added that food security should be treated as part of our national infrastructure planning, as it must. The mental health of those who produce our food, their success and productivity and that of those who live in rural communities, is of key importance. They already live with the anxiety and uncertainties that are part of their way of life. The Government should not add to these uncertainties with sudden cuts or policy changes. The Government should instead recognise the vital role that these people play in the very survival of our nation. A Minister in the other place recently advised that, in the light of the current situation geopolitically, we should be stocking up our food cupboards. That we need to make our own food supply secure and healthy before we can follow that Minister’s advice will be obvious to the noble Lords taking part in this debate and, I hope and believe, to the Minister.
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.
Earl Russell (LD)
My Lords, it is a pleasure to speak in this debate. I am grateful to the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Hereford for securing it and for the compassion and clarity with which he opened it. Combined with his rural knowledge, it gave us a very good introduction. I must admit that the butty van sounds like a good way of helping to make things better, as best we can. The first debate I had in this House in my name was on children’s mental health and I have the climate change position in my party, so I come to this debate with those two threads very much in mind. In truth, they are part of the same thing. I thought the noble Baroness, Lady Shephard of Northworld, said it very well: if farmers prosper, so do our rural communities. I do take issue with one point that the noble Lord, Lord Fuller, made in his speech. I would like this debate to concentrate on what we can do to help our farmers with practical solutions to the unique set of problems that they face. To my mind, to frame this as city against country is too easy a dichotomy, and one that I do not feel is particularly helpful in moving this debate forward. There is no doubt that our farmers face a blizzard of competing and unavoidable pressures, and many of them have been named by previous speakers, including climate change, the increasing unpredictability of extreme weather, growing financial strain, social isolation, long working hours, regulatory upheaval and a historic stigma based in self-reliance that keeps too many of them from seeking the help and support that they deserve. Research consistently shows that UK farmers have worse mental health than the general population. I was going to go through some of the statistics from RABI, GHQ-12 and the Farm Safety Foundation, but those figures have been mentioned. What is true is that farmers face greater rates of mental ill-health than other comparable workers. These rates are unacceptable. This is not a new problem. Friends in the other place have raised it. This issue has been raised across parties. I am also struck by the fact that we do not have enough research on the scale of the problem. A lot of this work is being done by charities and a lot of the statistics we have are now a bit historical. My question to the Minister is: what actions might the Government take to try to improve their understanding of the rate and scale of these problems? Will they do more now to widen access and help provide support directly to our farmers? The Question names three pressures. It would be a mistake to treat them as separate. They are all intertwined and compounded, and they interact. I will look at them as separate threads, but I think it is important that we understand that. The first pressure is economic uncertainty. We have had a big change in government policy, and that process has been slow and uneven to say the least. We have had the basic payment scheme and the move to ELMS. This has left farmers with a great deal of uncertainty, and they tell us time and again that that uncertainty creates the greatest stress and pressure points. Will the Government look again at what more they can do to commit to a proper multi-year funding settlement so that farmers can have greater certainty for long-term planning and budget cycles? I strongly believe that solar presents a real opportunity. The noble Lord, Lord Fuller, talked about 20% of solar on farmland. I do not recognise that figure at all. The figure I have is less than 1% by 2050. A quarter of our farmers already use alternative forms of stable income to offset the increasing losses from climate change. There has been an announcement on GB Energy and community energy today, which is welcome, but I ask the Minister what more could be done to help provide renewable energy to farmers as a stable source of income. The second, obviously related pressure is regulatory change. I am not against regulatory change. We need this, but it needs to be better communicated and signposted; and it needs to be done with farmers, not to them as an afterthought. It is uncertainty and rapid change that causes them anxiety and leads to these tragic situations. Better communication and the Government doing much more to use trusted intermediaries to help deliver and communicate those messages is something we heard about in the Environment and Climate Change Committee. The third pressure concerns the environment and climate. We are increasingly moving to a cycle of extreme flooding—if your fields are flooded, you cannot plant your crops—and extreme heat, and heat and sunlight destroy the crops in the field. We have talked about the worst harvest. The Minister is well aware of that, but I will give this figure. The Energy & Climate Intelligence Unit estimates that cumulative harvest losses across 2024-26 amount to £5 billion in real terms for our farmers. Our farmers are very much in the front line of climate change, and we need to do more to support them. Warm thanks have been given for the farming welfare grant, particularly the work the Minister has done on this, and I recognise that as well. But we need to take that further. There is a need for more support. We need more imaginative ways of reaching farmers. It is quite a hard community to get into to have these difficult conversations. I want to put on the record my support and the support of our Benches for the various charities and organisations: the Farming Community Network, the DPJ Foundation, RABI, and the Farm Safety Foundation’s Yellow Wellies campaign, all of which are working extremely hard to support farmers. It is important for all of us to say that if anybody knows farmers who are struggling, it is essential that they get the help and support they rightly deserve. My final message to the Minister is that the changes we make need to be made with farmers, not done to them. For me, that is one of the most important things the Government can do to help improve this situation.
The Earl of Effingham (Con)
My Lords, I thank the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Hereford for highlighting what we know to be an incredibly serious issue for the agricultural sector. I highlight my entry in the register of interests as receiving rental income from an agricultural grain store. It is unclear to many why the Government do not appear to understand the farming industry and those whose livelihoods are connected to agriculture. The president of the National Farmers’ Union summed up the situation: “The human impact of this goes way beyond the economics. It is something that just is not being considered by the Government, and it is so sad”. Self-inflicted UK government borrowing costs at 28-year highs, hurting hard-working people, have been coupled with punitive taxes specifically targeted at those in agriculture. It is a fact that those are choices made by this Government. It should therefore be no surprise to noble Lords that only 15% of rural residents believe that this Government care about the countryside, while nearly half feel that the Government have actively waged war on their communities. The Countryside Alliance has identified 27 harmful policies since 2024 that negatively impact rural communities, the most significant being the Government’s changes to agricultural property relief and business property relief. The actions of the party opposite suggest that they are simply not listening to farmers, who repeatedly explain that most family farms do not have liquid assets to sell. Since the family farms tax was announced, investments in their businesses were either paused or cancelled in order to save for inheritance tax costs. As a direct consequence, as my noble friend Lord Gardiner put so well during a recent Oral Question, that means lower investment in innovation, food production and the very reservoirs that so many people want to see. Almost one in four family farms and businesses has a reduced head count. It is absolutely no surprise that the frightening question being asked in so many quarters is: do this Government care more about social security than national security and food security? The noble Baroness, Lady Batters, former president of the National Farmers’ Union, has warned that our food self-sufficiency is plummeting. It was only yesterday that the noble Lord, Lord Lemos, rightly spoke from the Government Dispatch Box about mental health support for prisoners on licence. His Majesty’s loyal Opposition would say absolutely; of course; yes—but what about mental health support for farmers who have committed no crime but have lost their livelihood due to this Government’s policies? My noble friend Lady Shephard highlighted YANA, the You Are Not Alone helpline. Its calls are up 40%, and this is just one example. So why did the Government close the £10 million mental health support fund for farmers—the farming resilience fund, which came in under a Conservative Government—and what will now replace it? The 2025 McCain Farmdex report found that 90% of farmers felt the UK economy was negatively affecting their farm’s financial position, with 86% feeling pessimistic about the UK’s long-term food security. Some 51% considered leaving farming altogether due to financial constraints. Forty per cent believed they might be forced to exit the industry within the next decade. These are not the actions of a responsible and decisive Government. Do any noble Lords disagree that we need to ensure our long-term food security and, as a result, have a duty of care for both the physical and mental health of our farmers, who work every possible hour of the day? The right reverend Prelate reminded us that behind most pieces of food that we eat is a human being—a farmer. My noble friend Lord Fuller was entirely correct when he said that the farmer is the chief executive, the chief financial officer, the human resources director and the compliance director. These are immense pressures for just one person or one family to navigate. Last month, Members in the other place signed a letter to the new Prime Minister calling on the Government to reverse the farming inheritance tax changes in full. The response was: “We will look again.” The noble Baroness the Minister said: “I will ensure that the new Chancellor is aware of the strength of feeling on this matter ”.—[ Official Report , 7/9/26; col. 441.] Actions speak louder than words, and the entire farming community is waiting. It is not just the family farm tax; it is the increased employer national insurance, the higher energy costs and the accelerated decline of delinked payments—the cumulative wrecking ball of this Government’s policies. As my noble friend Lord Cameron of Chipping Norton put so well at the Campaign for the Countryside launch on Monday, we have “no national security unless you have food security”. It is surely crystal-clear that we should be looking after our farming communities, not destroying them.
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 R eport . 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.
Source: UK Parliament Hansard API. Debate ID: 5409264.