Support for Farmers

Wednesday 21st October 2026 Commons Chamber

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Caroline Nokes)]

I inform the House that Mr Speaker has not selected the amendment.

16:33

[Tim Farron (Westmorland and Lonsdale) (LD)]

I beg to move,

That this House regrets the Government’s chaotic opening of the Sustainable Farming Incentive (SFI) 2026 application window on 22 September 2026; notes that the scheme’s budget was exhausted within hours, leaving many farmers unable to apply after months of preparation; further regrets the previous Government’s decision to design the SFI on a first come, first served basis and its post-Brexit trade deals with Australia and New Zealand, which fundamentally undermined British farmers, their £358 million underspend in agricultural budget, and decisions to effectively cut farmers’ incomes in their approach to phasing out direct payments; further notes that the Government’s decision to accelerate the direct payments phase-out whilst stop-starting new schemes like SFI has left farmers with no universal payment offer for the first time since 1945; also regrets the Government’s changes to Agricultural Property Relief and cuts to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and farming budgets; also notes that the lack of an effective payment scheme for farms has undermined their profitability and the UK’s ability to produce food, recover nature and adapt to climate change; notes that farmers are deeply concerned about surging input costs, the impact of the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism on fertiliser costs, the impact of consecutive bad harvests and the looming crisis in the pig sector; and calls on the Government to guarantee long-term funding for all eligible SFI26 applicants, reverse the family farm tax, and commit to an additional £1 billion a year to properly fund environmental land management schemes.

If there was a thin silver lining to Brexit—and that is an “if”—it was the opportunity to design our own bespoke system to reward and support farmers, to care for our environment and to feed our country, but every farmer, certainly in England, knows that at the heart of this debate is the utter, inexcusable failure of both Conservative and Labour Governments to deliver an effective post-Brexit farm payment scheme. That failure has undermined farm profitability and the UK’s food security. It is two and a half years since the Conservatives left office, yet, as Halloween approaches, that Government still loom as a spectre over our rural communities, haunting us all, because this Labour Government refuse to exorcise that ghost, clinging instead to the ghastly Conservative policies that did so much to damage our farmers in Westmorland and beyond.

I am in no risk at all of overstating when I say that the last Conservative Government did more harm to British farmers and British farming than any other in UK history: trade deals with Australia and New Zealand that threw our farmers under the bus; a botched Brexit deal that ended overnight British farmers’ access to their biggest external market; and the reckless, rushed removal of the basic payment scheme while new schemes were falteringly introduced at a snail’s pace. Those new schemes have mostly placed hundreds of millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money into the hands of huge non-farmer organisations, while family farmers saw their incomes plummet, such that hill farmers in Cumbria now “enjoy” an average income of less than half the minimum wage—and that is if you assume that they work for 40 hours a week, when it is nearer 90.

I do not know if the Conservatives’ attack on our countryside, taking money away from family farms and putting it into the hands of a few large landowners, was deliberate or incompetent, but the results are the same either way—those who we rely on to feed us being treated like dirt. The Liberal Democrats tabled this motion today because I want farmers to know that this House cares about them; that we think that those who get up early each day to feed our country and to protect our planet do the most awesome job in the world; and that they are valued and respected, and that we want a system that reflects that in practice.

This debate follows the debacle of the sustainable farming incentive window in September. That catastrophically short window was a long time coming.

[Dr Roz Savage (South Cotswolds) (LD)]

I left party conference when that SFI window had just opened. I went straight home to speak to my Wiltshire farmers, but by the time I got to the meeting, the window had closed. That is not acceptable, and what happened last year is also not acceptable. Does my hon. Friend agree that the Government need to give our farmers some certainty, so that they can plan accordingly around when that window will be open next year and how much money will be in it?

[Tim Farron]

I very much agree. My view is that we should be seeking to reopen a window this year, given the number of farmers who were carved out.

[Claire Young (Thornbury and Yate) (LD)]

Does my hon. Friend agree with the point, made by Latteridge Green Farm in my constituency, that decisions about how public funding is spent should be made on the merits of an application and the benefits it can bring, rather than an ability to click quickly?

[Tim Farron]

That is an issue I will come to, but what my hon. Friend says is absolutely the case. If we have a first come, first served system, then there is no assessment of the quality of bids. I am sure that pretty much all the applications were of a high quality, but differential merit was not taken into account. Farmers were excluded simply because they were milking or otherwise doing their job before the window closed.

The SFI was—I think the record will prove this—essentially set up to replace the basic payment scheme. It was implemented disastrously because it was designed disastrously. The Conservative Government failed even to spend the SFI budget when they were in power, underspending the allocation by £358 million. That is money that should have gone to support our farmers and to keep the promises made to them during Brexit—promises that have been broken.

Then, in March 2025, with absolutely no notice, this Labour Government closed the SFI programme for the year, leaving hundreds of farmers outside with absolutely nothing. The Minister at the time, the hon. Member for Cambridge (Daniel Zeichner), is not in his place. I must say that, before his removal, he was becoming an increasingly important advocate for farmers within Government. He apologised for the closure of the SFI, explaining that the scheme was a good one, but that because the application process inherited from the Conservatives was first come, first served, funds were being allocated neither wisely nor fairly, as my hon. Friends have already highlighted.

I remain outraged at that closure in 2025, but the former Farming Minister’s point about the Tory’s first come, first served process is well made. A first come, first served process means that Government funding is allocated randomly at best, not achieving best value for the taxpayer. Even worse, it means that funding disproportionately goes to those farms that are big enough to be able to afford land agents, to be able to have a large farm staff, or to be able to spend much time away from farming to fill out forms. Meanwhile, farmers working 90 hours a week up Langdale, up Longsleddale or in the Eden valley, producing our food, caring for our countryside, with low incomes, get systematically shut out by accident or by design; the impact remains horrific either way.

The Government pledged to learn lessons from the 2025 disaster, so along came 22 September this year, when sustainable farming incentive funds ran out and the drawbridge got pulled up after less than six hours. I have spoken to hill farmers, protecting some of the world’s most epic landscapes but struggling with dodgy wi-fi in their valley so they got nothing. I have spoken to dairy farmers who just popped out to tend their cattle and got back to their computer to discover that they had got nothing. I have spoken to land agents, heartbroken and ashamed that the majority of small farms that they bid on behalf of had got nothing. There are farmers who had all their basic payment taken away and had literally nothing else to look forward to apart from the SFI, yet the system closed in less than a day and they got nothing. The Government have learnt nothing from the damage the Conservatives did, so will the Minister return with a scheme this autumn that ensures that farmers who had viable SFI applications are funded and not left out in the cold?

[James Naish (Rushcliffe) (Lab)]

I think the hon. Gentleman missed out SFI window 1 in his description.

[Tim Farron]

There was indeed an SFI window earlier in the year, but the bulk of applicants were aiming for SFI window 2 in 2026, and of course a huge number of them were cut out simply because of the way in which the system was set up.

Liberal Democrats are determined to put this right. With our biggest parliamentary presence in this place in more than a century, we humbly seek to be in government after the next election. Should we be so, we will be determined to lead the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, and we would reform the SFI so that every farmer was allocated a sum via the SFI consistent with the capacity of their farm. That money would be theirs to claim within a long window, so long as they submitted a compliant claim that demonstrated delivery of public goods. There would be no competition as to who could press “send” the quickest.

The failings of our farm payment system go far beyond the SFI disaster. At its foundation, this Tory-designed, Labour-delivered scheme is woefully flawed for one fundamental reason: they have given us a farm payment scheme, the bedrock of our agricultural policy, that—would you believe it?—actively disincentivises the production of food. What utter and complete madness. When Britain’s food security is more at risk than at any time since the last war, we now have a farm payment scheme in England that fails to support farmers to produce food. At a time when every other country in the UK and every country in the European Union does provide that support, England is the odd one out. We are failing our farmers and we are failing our people as we sleepwalk into no longer being able to guarantee that we can feed our country.

Effectively locking small farmers out of the farm payment scheme is socially unjust. It damages our food security, and it also damages our environment. Many farmers I have spoken to in Westmorland and beyond who have been excluded from the SFI and other schemes are so utterly demoralised and angry that they will now just turn their back on environmental schemes altogether. These are people who have been champions of nature-friendly farming, and whose parents and grandparents have spent decades promoting environmental responsibility on their farms. They do not want to turn their back on sustainable farming, but they have got to pay the rent and feed their kids somehow. An SFI delivered well could have brought every single farmer who had received the basic payment in the past into the environmental big tent. Instead, this combination of cruelty and incompetence leaves thousands outside in the cold, and we cannot now blame them if they choose to intensify and undo the good environmental work of generations that preceded them.

Liberal Democrats would reverse the banking tax cuts from the last Parliament and use a portion of that revenue to boost the environmental land management scheme budget by £1 billion. We would allocate an SFI sum to every farm, which would be theirs to claim. We would therefore maximise the number of farms inside environmental schemes, protecting nature, improving water quality, sequestering carbon, protecting urban areas from flooding, and providing access and enjoyment to the millions who visit the lakes, the dales and the rest of Britain’s beautiful countryside. We would revoke the Labour-Conservative consensus by finally making the production of food a public good, funding it as we should and starting the journey back to food security.

To be parochial for just a rare moment, the English Lake District was awarded world heritage site status in 2017. When UNESCO made that award, in its assessment of the beauty of those towering landscapes it gave as much credit to the farmers who shaped them as it did to the glaciers that carved them. For a millennium at least, our land has been curated, tended, moulded, protected and nurtured into producing the food that fuels each one of us. How short sighted is it to put all of that at risk?

To be personal, the loss of a basic payment, and the failure to include thousands of family farms in replacement schemes as funds instead gravitate to the big estates and the huge non-farmer organisations, has left many families back home in Cumbria bereft. I mean not just financially bereft, but deep heartbroken despair. Just think what it might feel like for if someone’s family had farmed their valley for generations, maybe centuries, and yet now it looks like the farm will be lost on their watch because of all this. Imagine the anxiety and the shame, the isolation—in every sense of the word—and the overwhelming desolation that there is nowhere to turn.

Thanks to the Farmer Network, RABI and young farmers’ clubs there are places to turn. But in this House today, we can choose to say to our farmers that we will stand with them too, that we are grateful to them for feeding us and keeping Britain beautiful, and that we will match those words with actions. Maybe there are Members who think, “Well, I haven’t got any farms in my constituency, so this isn’t relevant to me,” but I will tell them this: 100% of our constituents eat food, and so farming matters to them and to all of us—yet this place too rarely acts like it believes that. Today, we give Members the opportunity to affirm that they do.

Seventy per cent of England’s land mass is agricultural. If we are serious about tackling climate change and protecting our environment, we must start there, by motivating and including all of our farmers to be on the frontline for that fight, not locking them out, or demoralising and excluding them. In an increasingly volatile and uncertain world, Britain is less than 60% self-sufficient in food. That is terrifying. And yet we have thousands of farmers out there ready to meet the call, if only we did call. The Liberal Democrats present this motion to the House because British farmers are the best in the world, and the best farmers in the world deserve the best support.

16:27

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Jenny Riddell-Carpenter)]

I thank the Liberal Democrat spokesperson, the hon. Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale (Tim Farron), for his speech. Farming is not simply another industry. Farmers produce the food that sustains us, manage much of our countryside and underpin a wider food and drink economy. Agriculture alone contributes £14.5 billion to the economy, while the wider food and drink sector contributed £153.2 billion in 2023. That does not just matter to the economy; maintaining domestic food production to at least current levels is integral to our national security.

As the Prime Minister said in this House last month, farming and food production are part of this country’s sovereign production and manufacturing capacity, which we will need to strengthen in the years to come. We will need to depend on it, and therefore we need to strengthen it—that is a clear commitment. That is why this Government are committed to backing British farmers and maintaining domestic food production to at least current levels.

[Charlie Dewhirst (Bridlington and The Wolds) (Con)]

On the point about maintaining domestic food production, the Minister will no doubt be aware of the problems facing the pig sector. We have had tens of thousands of pigs backed up on farms, contracts cancelled, and farmers losing up to £50 a pig. What discussions have the Minister and colleagues had with the pig sector, and what plans do the Government have to support our Great British pig farms?

[Jenny Riddell-Carpenter]

I thank the hon. Member for that important question. I can confirm that the Farming Minister and other colleagues have been in active conversation with the National Pig Association and are continuing that dialogue.

Our farming road map sets out a long-term direction for the sector that is more profitable, productive, sustainable and resilient, and better able to withstand climate, market and geopolitical shocks.

I want to acknowledge just how difficult this year has been. The Liberal Democrat spokesperson set out the extraordinary combination of pressures that farmers have faced this year alone: drought and water shortages, reduced grass and forage growth, difficult crop conditions, and higher irrigation and feed costs. At the same time, the conflict in the middle east has put further pressure on fertiliser and fuel prices.

[John Lamont (Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk) (Con)]

The Minister highlights fertiliser costs. Last week, this Government pushed through the fertiliser tax, which will put up the price of fertiliser by between £80 and £90 a tonne, which the Conservatives voted against. The Liberals sat on their hands and did not oppose the tax, which was, frankly, shocking. Does the Minister not recognise the pressures that farmers are facing and the fact that this additional tax that this Government have imposed will do nothing to help?

[Jenny Riddell-Carpenter]

I will remind the hon. Member that the last UK ammonia production facility closed under the Conservatives without any Government intervention.

We recognise that resilience is not evenly distributed and that some farm businesses have significantly less capacity than others to withstand those short-term shocks. The impacts of climate change and drought have been particularly severe, with more than 80% of the country now in drought. The south-east and south-west experienced their driest period from April to September in more than a century, and pressure on water resources continues despite the rain that we are seeing today.

We understand what that means on our farms—less grass, lower forage growth and new crop yields, pressure on irrigation and reservoirs, greater demand for livestock water, and, ultimately, greater uncertainty about the year ahead—so we have acted. In August, we introduced a package of drought support measures including temporary adjustments to environmental land management agreements so that farmers affected by drought could continue receiving payments while taking practical steps to protect their businesses. We also reminded farmers and growers that they can apply to the Environment Agency for temporary abstraction flexibility through local enforcement protections to help them to access water during dry periods where environmental impacts can be appropriately managed.

Liberal Democrat Members ask now what we are doing on water and climate resilience, but the last time they were in government, they cut flood defence spending by a fifth within six months of taking office. We are taking water and weather extremely seriously.

However, responding to one dry summer is not enough; farmers need greater long-term water security. That is why we are making up to £15 million available through a further water management grant to help to build farm reservoirs, which allow water to be stored when it is most readily available and then used to support food production during the drier periods. This will help to reduce reliance on direct abstraction when rivers and groundwater are under greatest pressure. We are also making it easier to build reservoirs by updating planning guidance and working with industry to review whether further planning reforms are needed.

We have also simplified applications for longer-duration abstraction licences, helping farmers to secure finances for on-farm reservoirs by better aligning licence duration with investment and loan repayment periods. We have also brought forward the reservoir refill season from November to October for this year. We are also encouraging farmers to work together through water abstraction groups to strengthen local water resilience, while trialling dynamic abstraction in places like Cambridge, using real-time monitoring and data to help farmers to access water when it is available while also protecting the natural environment.

Drought and climate change are not the only sources of uncertainty, though; the middle east conflict remains a significant source of disruption to fertiliser and red diesel prices. The continued pressures underline something fundamental: our farming system needs to become less exposed to global shocks and expensive imported inputs. That means not simply telling farmers to absorb higher costs, but helping them to become more productive and more efficient, with farming schemes including actions supporting variable-rate nutrient application, companion cropping, legumes and herbal leys, all of which can help to improve nutrient efficiency and reduce reliance on synthetic fertiliser.

[Ian Roome (North Devon) (LD)]

Does the Minister agree that it is simply unacceptable for farmers to be expected to deliver the Government’s environmental ambitions when they have less than six hours to secure the funding to do so? Will she commit to a fairer system for the SFI scheme, with sufficient funding and guaranteed opportunity to apply—for North Devon farmers especially—instead of leaving farmers’ livelihoods subject to a scheme operated on a first come, first served basis?

[Jenny Riddell-Carpenter]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for that contribution. I will tackle the SFI later in my speech. The Farming Minister has been clear on many of the lessons that will be learned, but I will set them out further shortly.

Across the sustainable farming incentive, countryside stewardship and higher level stewardship, 534,000 hectares are already using precision applications of fertiliser and manure. We have also increased fertiliser market monitoring and encouraged greater use of nutrient planning to help farmers optimise fertiliser use, and we are rolling out an online tool to help farmers use fertilisers more efficiently.

Beyond DEFRA, the Treasury reduced the duty on red diesel earlier this year in response to price increases resulting from the middle eastern crisis. We are investing in innovation, because lasting resilience must ultimately come from producing more efficiently. For ’26-27, £123 million has been allocated to the farming innovation programme, with support for technologies and approaches that can raise productivity and strengthen resilience.

[Sir Ashley Fox (Bridgwater) (Con)]

Will the Minister give way?

[Jenny Riddell-Carpenter]

I will make progress, because I am coming on to something important.

I want to address the issue of SFI26 frankly. I really do recognise the disappointment and frustration caused by the closure of the second application window on 22 September. The SFI is a scheme that the Government inherited from the previous Conservative Government. They designed this first come, first served scheme, sent a quarter of the money to 4% of farms and now complain that it was oversubscribed.

When we inherited it, the scheme had no budget control and no proper alignment of SFI actions to environmental and sustainability targets, and it included that first come, first served application process. For 2026, we made improvements to the offer to ensure that more farmers could access funding. We made the offer simpler and more focused, with fewer actions while retaining actions for all farm types. We introduced a £100,000 per annum max agreement value cap to spread the availability of funding more widely.

We also gave priority access to the scheme for small farms and farms without existing ELM revenue agreements. Those two groups had been under-represented in the SFI previously. This priority access through SFI26 window 1 remained open for two months. The SFI26 window 2 was open to all eligible farmers and land managers. It experienced exceptionally high demand and closed after around six hours once available budget had been allocated.

[Josh Fenton-Glynn (Calder Valley) (Lab)]

I have met with a lot of farmers since the deadline closed, and there is an overwhelming feeling of anxiety, but because they are practical the main thing they want to know is that we are going to learn the lessons of this. Could my hon. Friend please let me know what lessons we will learn and how we will move forward on that basis?

[Jenny Riddell-Carpenter]

I thank my hon. Friend for the work he is doing to engage with his local farming community. I will be talking about that more, but work is already under way to make those improvements and scrap the first come, first served element of the scheme.

We anticipated stronger demand and increased the window 2 budget significantly over this summer. An additional £50 million was announced by the Prime Minister in August as part of the response to the dry weather that we saw, and a further £20 million was added before window 2 opened.

[Mr Alistair Carmichael (Orkney and Shetland) (LD)]

rose—

[Jenny Riddell-Carpenter]

I will give way because it is the right hon. Gentleman.

[Mr Carmichael]

I am grateful to my former colleague on the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee—these links are important. Can she tell the House how many applications the Department expected? It was modelled by some that there would be somewhere in the region of 40,000. In fact, there was money available for 12,000. Did it come as a total surprise to the Department that it got as many applications as it did?

[Jenny Riddell-Carpenter]

The right hon. Gentleman is correct that modelling was undertaken. As a result of that modelling, a further £50 million was announced by the Prime Minister and a subsequent £20 million was announced by the Secretary of State.

I recognise that the substantial demand remained unsatisfied when window 2 closed, and I understand how difficult that was for farmers who were ready to apply but did not have the opportunity to secure an agreement. Let me say this clearly: there will be future SFI offers, and we plan to make an SFI27 offer available as soon as possible.

[Sir Ashley Fox]

Will the Minister give way?

[Jenny Riddell-Carpenter]

I am sorry; I am going to make progress.

To that end, we are working with the farming sector on how the scheme can be improved, and the Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, my hon. Friend the Member for Portsmouth South, confirmed that we will scrap the “first come, first served” application.

It is important to stress that the SFI is only one part of our support for farming. Across this Parliament, the Government have allocated a record £11.8 billion to sustainable farming and food production. That includes £788 million this year alone in new funding for farmers to boost farm productivity, develop cutting-edge technologies that will drive future growth, and maintain a healthy natural environment. Capital grants have provided £225 million this year for practical environmental improvements on farms. At least £50 million is available for new countryside stewardship higher-tier agreements. We have also committed £173 million in 2026-27 for productivity, equipment and innovation through the farming equipment and technology fund and the farming innovation programme. That represents an extensive ongoing commitment to farm adaptation and improvement. I hope that the Opposition support those aims.

Our Government support is not only about grants. Farmers need thriving markets and fair returns for the food they produce. That is why we have established the Farming and Food Partnership Board, which brings together leaders from farming, food, retail and finance to focus on productivity, profitability, home-grown produce and national food security. We are taking action on fairness in the supply chain, too. Fair dealing regulations have been introduced for dairy and pigs, with further work covering eggs, fresh produce and crops.

Our farming road map makes our long-term approach clear: we will maintain domestic food production at least at current levels; we will protect productive land for food production; we will support investment in technology and skills; and we will build resilience to the climate and geopolitical shocks that farmers are increasingly having to manage. That is because healthy soil, reliable water supply, efficient use of nutrients and profitable farm businesses are not competing objectives but the foundations of our food security.

[Sir Ashley Fox]

Will the Minister give way?

[Jenny Riddell-Carpenter]

I am going to make progress.

Farmers have endured an exceptionally demanding period. We recognise the pressure that many businesses are under, and I recognise the real frustration for those who have been unable to secure an SFI26 agreement, but our commitment to farming has not changed. We will continue to invest in farmers, support productivity and innovation, improve water resilience, make supply chains fairer and work with the sector to build businesses that can withstand changing weather and an uncertain world. Above all, we will continue to back the people who produce our food, because supporting British farming is not simply about supporting one sector; it is about our food security, our economic security and our national resilience. The Government are determined to secure all three.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Caroline Nokes)]

I call the shadow Minister.

17:02

[Robbie Moore (Keighley and Ilkley) (Con)]

Yesterday, the shadow Secretary of State, my right hon. Friend the Member for Louth and Horncastle (Victoria Atkins), and I were once again out and about in the fields, talking to our hard-working farmers, this this time in Newbury. We spoke to them about the many hardships they face at the hands of this Labour Government. Week after week, from farm to farm, the message is the same: farmers are exhausted; they are worried; and they feel incredibly betrayed by this Labour Government. They do not feel that the Government are on their side or value the work that they are doing. They feel that the Government have turned their back on rural Britain. I welcome the debate, because it gives us an opportunity to say out loud in the House what every farmer in the country already knows: on Labour’s watch, it is our hard-working farming families who are paying the price.

Let me begin by addressing the fiasco that has been the sustainable farming incentive. As I said in this place just last week, I cannot stress enough how badly the SFI has been mishandled under this Labour Government—it has been a complete and utter debacle—and once again our hard-working farming families are the ones suffering. Let there be no doubt: this did not come out of the blue; there were plenty of warnings. The Government, having closed the scheme in March 2025, caused chaos, huge anxiety and additional financial pressure for our farmers.

[James Naish]

Does the hon. Member think it is better to close a scheme because it has overspent, or to underspend the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs’s budget by £358 million?

[Robbie Moore]

What Government Members do not seem to understand is that when a highly sought-after scheme is closed, which is exactly what happened under this Labour Government in March 2025, demand inevitably builds up. That was coupled with the budget being reduced significantly. There was 18 months of this Government sitting on their hands, enabling demand to build. What was the result? When the scheme finally opened, it became a competitive scheme. On this Labour Government’s watch, it was “first come, first served”; those who got in were those who could press “send” the fastest. This Labour Government knew what the consequences would be, as was reported in The Times yesterday, but they carried on regardless. The result: approximately 40,000 farmers tried to get into the scheme, but only 12,200 were successful. The application window was slammed shut after just five and a half hours, all because the money had gone.

Last week, I stood in this Chamber and asked the Farming Minister very simple questions, but there were no answers. I will try again, so that he can address these in his summing up. The expiring agreements were worth more than £520 million, yet the SFI budget was cut to just £310 million. Where has the additional £210 million gone? It is vital that clarity and reassurance be given to our farmers. When will the Minister open SFI27? It is not good enough to say, “As soon as possible”; we need clarity. What will the Minister do for those who have agreements that are expiring, to stop the cliff edge in their cash flow? What budget has the Minister set aside for SFI27?

We must all remember that this situation comes on top of the Government’s disastrous decision to reduce de-linked payments dramatically, far more quickly than was ever agreed, to a measly £600 per farming business. I suspect that it costs the Government more in administrative charges to distribute those payments than it benefits each farming holding. Our farming businesses now feel the pain, financially and emotionally, as they struggle with their cash flow.

SFI is not some isolated incident; it is part of a pattern. Before Labour broke the SFI scheme, it crushed the family farm with its disastrous family farm and family business tax. Before the election, those on the Government Benches looked farmers in the eye and told them that they had no plans to change agricultural property relief and business property relief. In Labour’s very first Budget, which was its first opportunity to show rural communities up and down the country that it cared and understood them, it did not. It brought out the family farm and family business tax—a vindictive tax that strikes family farming businesses at their worst moment.

Each and every Labour MP who voted again last week to keep the family farm and family business tax should be ashamed of themselves. The narrative is, rightly, that there has been a partial U-turn—the threshold at which the tax applies has been raised from £1 million to £2.5 million—but that simply does not go far enough. Now, bizarrely, a person’s marital status can raise the threshold to £5 million. That seems ridiculous. Once the farmland, the farmhouse, the growing crops, the stocks, the machinery, the crops in store and the livestock have been valued, the value of a traditional farming business will be well above the £2.5 million threshold. That exposes any hard-working family farming business to an inheritance tax liability that they simply will not be able to afford. This was completely ill thought through.

That brings me to the Liberal Democrat motion before us, which only states that they regret

“the Government’s changes to Agricultural Property Relief”.

It makes no reference to business property relief. I thought that we were aligned on this issue, but clearly we are not. Many farming businesses rely heavily on business property relief. It covers trading assets not covered by agricultural property relief, including machinery, livestock, harvested crops and any rural diversification projects, including farm shops and holiday lets, so I am incredibly surprised that the Lib Dems do not also regret the Government’s changes to business property relief.

[Tim Farron]

I am sure that the hon. Gentleman is at least as au fait with Liberal Democrat manifesto policies as I am, so he will know that we oppose the family business inheritance tax changes as well. He will also know, having been here a reasonable amount of time, that there is a word limit on these motions; that is why those changes are not mentioned.

[Robbie Moore]

This is a Liberal Democrat Opposition day debate. The Liberal Democrats have had many opportunities to prepare for it, but their motion excludes a crucial issue: business property relief. I take the hon. Member at his word when he says that the Liberal Democrats are also concerned about the impact that business property relief will have on many of our farming businesses, but given the huge impact the issue has, I am very surprised that it is not included in their motion.

Let me be clear: the Conservatives absolutely regret the continued roll-out of both the family farm tax and the family business tax, and we will continue to demand that the Government scrap both and put back in place the 100% relief on APR and BPR. On behalf of our farmers, our growers and our wider agricultural sector, we urge the Government to ensure that the Prime Minister does the right thing next week in the Budget and axes the family farm tax and family business tax.

[Sir Ashley Fox]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for giving way. I am glad that he is brave enough to take an intervention from a Member from Somerset. He is absolutely right to emphasise our commitment to scrapping the family farm and family business tax, but does he agree that the fertiliser tax that this Labour Government will introduce on 1 January, and which the Liberal Democrats are too timid to oppose, will hit farmers and increase the price of food in our country?

[Robbie Moore]

My hon. Friend makes an excellent point. He is completely right to outline the impact of the statutory instrument that was voted on just this week, which all Conservative Members voted against.

I was just about to come on to the point that this does not stop with the family farm and family business tax. As if the dramatic drop in de-linked payments, the SFI debacle and the family farm and family business tax were not enough, from 1 January next year Labour will hit farmers with yet another tax—the fertiliser tax—through the carbon border adjustment mechanism. Industry warns that this new fertiliser tax could pile up a further £75 a tonne, if not more, on current fertiliser prices. This is simply unfeasible. It adds an additional cost to many of our farmers at a time when they are already being pushed to breaking point. The fertiliser tax should not have been introduced, and the Conservatives voted against it last week.

[Mr Carmichael]

The hon. Member will be aware that the carbon border adjustment mechanism was started under the last Government. The consultation was launched in 2023. With the benefit of hindsight, does he think it might have been a good idea at that stage to take fertiliser out of it?

[Robbie Moore]

I pleased that the right hon. Member, for whom I have great respect, has raised this point, but I will gently push back and say that we are two years into this Labour Government. He makes reference to a consultation that was started under the previous Conservative Administration, but we voted on the fertiliser tax this week, and it was predominantly Conservatives who voted against it. I have to say to the Liberal Democrats: where were you when we voted to stop the fertiliser tax? Not one Liberal Democrat MP voted to stop it.

Yet again, the Liberal Democrats are all over the place. The hon. Member for South Cambridgeshire (Pippa Heylings) said in a debate that I attended last week:

“We Liberal Democrats support the carbon border adjustment mechanism.”—[Official Report, Second Delegated Legislation Committee, 12 October 2026; c. 7.]

However, in today’s motion, the Liberal Democrats propose that the House

“notes that farmers are deeply concerned about surging input costs, the impact of the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism on fertiliser costs”,

but they cannot bring themselves to be concerned enough to vote to stop it.

Far from protecting our farmers in this House, the Liberal Democrats simply demonstrate that they are Labour enablers, helping those on the Government Benches bulldoze their plans through while outside this House, I suspect their leaflets will be portraying a very different message to their constituents to try to keep everybody happy, but we see through that.

To conclude, the record of this Labour Government is clear for us all to see. They broke the SFI scheme and cut its budget. They taxed family farms and now are taxing fertilisers and assets. We have a Farming Minister who faints at the sight of meat. We have a countryside Minister who thinks that anyone who has a black Labrador and enjoys a warm pint in one of our rural pubs is far right. What an absolute nonsense. Farmers feed this nation—they deserve a Government on their side. It is clear that farmers can no longer afford another day of this Labour Government.

[Several hon. Members rose—]

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Caroline Nokes)]

Order. Members will be able to see that many of you wish to contribute. With an immediate five-minute time limit, I call Terry Jermy.

17:15

[Terry Jermy (South West Norfolk) (Lab)]

I welcome my hon. Friend the Minister to her place. I am so pleased to see her there, and I know that her rural credentials are strong.

As the Member of Parliament for South West Norfolk, one of the most productive farming constituencies in the country, it has been a privilege to spend a significant amount of my time over the past two years meeting farmers, landowners, growers and rural businesses across the area. Farming is not simply another sector in South West Norfolk; it shapes our landscape, supports our local economy, underpins food production, contributes to environmental stewardship and helps to define the very character of our communities. Since being elected, I have made a conscious effort to get out on to farms and to listen, and I firmly believe that good policy starts with understanding the reality on the ground. That means standing in fields and walking farmyards, and hearing directly from the people who deal with the practical challenges and the opportunities facing farming every single day. I welcome that our Farming Minister has been undertaking that engagement, too, and I know that it has been valued by the industry.

I have now met more than 100 South West Norfolk farmers, and from those meetings I have been struck by their resilience, dedication and innovation. Agriculture today requires farmers to balance a growing range of responsibilities. Alongside producing high-quality food, businesses manage environmental outcomes, adapt to changing weather patterns, embrace new technologies and respond to market pressures. The scale of that challenge demonstrates the professionalism and adaptability of modern farming, and many are doing that while operating on extremely fine margins.

The concerns of a farmer in Weeting will likely differ from those in Nordelph. There is no one-size-fits-all solution for farming, and one clear theme from my visits is how important confidence, clarity and certainty are for farming businesses making long-term decisions.

[Sir Ashley Fox]

In the hon. Gentleman’s discussions with farmers in South West Norfolk, are they content with the Government changes to agricultural property relief, or do they still think the family farm tax should be abolished in its entirety?

[Terry Jermy]

The vast majority of farms in my constituency are small family farms. It was campaigning from constituency MPs like myself and others that got the changes to that policy so that it now works for the vast majority of those impacted.

Over the past decade or so, farmers have been at the sharp end of changing political landscapes, with Brexit and its fundamental change to farming policy being the most profound, because farming is an industry that plans years ahead. Decisions made today on investment, machinery, water infrastructure, environmental delivery and succession have consequences that last decades. Farmers can adapt to change and seize new opportunities when there is a clear direction of travel, but it becomes difficult for businesses to plan with confidence when there is a lack of certainty.

In countless conversations, farmers have told me they are desperate for that clarity, consistency and long-term thinking from Government. I hope that the farming roadmap developed under this Labour Government is the start of that approach. One of the biggest issues raised has been around profitability. The fundamental challenge that remains is in ensuring that farming businesses can generate sustainable returns. While discussions often focus on environmental schemes or regulation—this scheme or that scheme—as is the case with the Lib Dem motion before the House, neither environmental ambition nor long-term investment can be achieved if a farm business itself is not financially viable.

Farming continues to be treated as a political football. Cosplay Reform Members may have a Barbour jacket and a flat cap, but do they actually have a single farming policy? I note their absence from today’s debate. And what of the Tories, desperate as ever to be the face of rural Britain like it is some divine right, while completely ignoring the demise of farming under their watch? It was their withdrawal from the common agricultural policy that left our farmers exposed with no plan in place. It will be some years before many farmers will forgive that level of betrayal by the Conservatives.

Many farmers tell me that despite producing world-class food, margins are often squeezed by factors beyond their control. That limited agency over their destiny feeds into their frustration and the poor mental health of many farmers, which is a real concern.

Looking forward, I remain optimistic about the future of British farming. There are many significant challenges, but there are opportunities too. We have some of the most productive farmland to be found anywhere in the world, we have farmers who are innovative, entrepreneurial and committed to producing high-quality food, and we have growing opportunities around technology, precision agriculture, water management and sustainable food production. However, success is not guaranteed. It will require a recognition that food production and environmental improvements are not competing objectives. Done properly, they can and must go hand in hand.

To conclude, I have three main asks of the Government. First, with the Budget looming, we must raise the annual investment allowance and consider what I have called the green investment allowance, because incentivising investment in rural areas into things like reservoirs and revamping poultry sheds will deliver greater environmental benefits than many SFI schemes.

[Samantha Niblett (South Derbyshire) (Lab)]

Yesterday I had the great delight of meeting with members of Derbyshire National Farmers’ Union. They agreed with my hon. Friend about making it easier for them to access capital, not just to invest in items like tractors, but in buildings and things such as reservoirs, to help them manage the change in climate. Does he agree that meeting regularly with our NFU members is a fantastic use of our time, and that they help to shape the recommendations we make to Government?

[Terry Jermy]

I absolutely agree with my hon. Friend. Government cannot pay for everything, but we can and should create an investment framework that encourages famers.

Secondly, we must significantly improve the availability of on-farm water collection and storage through amending planning laws and providing capital grants. Without that, land currently farmed will become unviable, with increasing drought and water scarcity. Thirdly, we must also focus on supply chain fairness, turbocharging a more co-operative model, such as that in New Zealand, using public procurement powers and tackling imports that have lower environmental and animal welfare standards than those that we permit here in the UK.

I could go on, but if food security really does mean national security, there needs to be tangible action and we need it now.

17:22

[Mr Alistair Carmichael (Orkney and Shetland) (LD)]

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.

17:25

[Ben Goldsborough (South Norfolk) (Lab)]

I refer the House to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests.

To start off, we need to talk about the SFI scheme, which has been a painful subject in conversations I have had with my farming community. There is no way of sugaring this issue. I know that the Minister will diligently look at the process going forward, but I fear that this debate will focus on the symptoms, not the cause. The overapplication that we have seen is because profitability does not exist in the system of farming. We have so few schemes available that ensure that our farmers can get that profitability back, and we need to solve that problem.

I put it to the House that one thing we should consider is removing as many financial and regulatory burdens as we can from our farming community. Let us look at our Australian colleagues, for example. The Labour Government of Australia set themselves a farm gate value of 100 billion Australian dollars by 2030, and they have hit that figure three years in advance, because they have the farming resilience fund, which they have expanded over recent years. That ensures that in good years, farmers can put aside a tax-deductible lump sum. I believe we should be pursuing that on a greater level within the United Kingdom—maybe up to £500,000 a year—but there is something that we should do differently from our Australian cousins. We should ensure that if a farmer draws down on that scheme for reservoirs, new silos and grain stores, or investment in their livestock, for example, that remains tax-deductible. I estimate that would cost the Treasury about £100 million, and it would allow us to show our farming community, in good faith, that we are giving them a leg up, not trying to cut them down.

I also agree with my hon. Friend the Member for South West Norfolk (Terry Jermy) that we need to streamline the planning process, and not just for on-farm reservoirs; we also need to look at how we can support diversification of our farming sector. However, this debate is not just about financial issues—it is bigger. We have the veterinary reform Bill coming up as well, about which I have had quite a few conversations with the hon. Member for Epping Forest (Dr Hudson). It cannot just be about domestic animals; we also need to look at how we support our veterinary practices to ensure that we can get profitability into the farming sector, because if we do not have a secure veterinary sector, the farming sector will fall apart very quickly.

The other aspect that flows from that point is biosecurity. I welcome the investment that the Government have made in our biosecurity systems over the past two years, but I still have concerns, especially about the port of Dover. A 27-mile gap until the inspection of meat and produce takes place is dangerous. When I visited the Agriculture Minister in Australia, I heard about the Australians’ concerns regarding the first flight of bird influenza to their country. They have been able to solve such problems because they take biosecurity so seriously. African swine fever is the real concern for us, and I would like it if the Minister could, in his winding-up remarks, expand on what we will be doing on that.

Beyond that, we also need to look at our trade arrangements, which are addressed in today’s motion. The motion mentions the Australian and New Zealand trade deal secured by the previous Government—which has been disastrous, especially to our upland farmers—but there have been good trade deals secured by this Government, such as the Indian trade deal. To be honest with the House, as a Member representing a huge sugar beet production area of the United Kingdom, I was extremely worried that a free-for-all on Indian sugar would fundamentally undermine our market. However, the Government took the right action and ensured that there was a carve-out. They have also taken the right action with the US trade deal, giving access to the beef market but not flooding our market. I do, though, politely recommend to Government Front Benchers that we ban Brazilian beef within the UK market; that would also be a gesture of good will to our European partners, who have done exactly the same. As we approach the sanitary and phytosanitary trade agreement, which will be vital to expanding our food sector, that sort of action would be extremely helpful to the UK.

[Samantha Niblett]

My hon. Friend is making an incredible speech without any notes, demonstrating his knowledge of this space. It is super impressive.

I met representatives of Derbyshire NFU yesterday. One of the things they talked about, as well as their concerns about Brazilian beef, was how often a consumer can go to the shop and think they are doing the right thing because they are buying something that has the Union Jack on the front—our proud British label—but if they turned over the label, they would find that the product is not from this country. Does my hon. Friend agree with me and my hon. Friend the Member for St Austell and Newquay (Noah Law), who has done a huge amount of work on fair labelling, that we in this country should be doing more to let people know where their food comes from, so that they can make the right decision and buy British?

[Ben Goldsborough]

My hon. Friend makes an impassioned plea against the flag-washing that we see in the United Kingdom. One of my concerns is that we are getting into a very easy situation of exporting our morality when it comes to food production. We cannot continue down this alley of increasing our standards to a certain level while other nations are undermining theirs. All that does is put our farming communities in a situation where they cannot fight against that race to the bottom. I would appreciate it if, when the Minister winds up, he would say what discussions he and his colleagues have had with our European partners, especially on the SPS agreement, to ensure that there will be a level playing field—when, for example, neonicotinoids are used in Hungary. Also, vitally, what are they doing to ensure that there will be a long transition period in the United Kingdom? We have an issue with black-grass, and if we lose our herbicides from our market, our yields will be harmed hugely.

In conclusion, today’s debate looks at the symptoms, not the causes. I urge the Minister to explain in his winding-up remarks what we are going to do to fix the underlying profitability issues.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)]

Order. I call John Lamont, after which the speaking limit will drop to four minutes.

17:34

[John Lamont (Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk) (Con)]

I am pleased to be able to speak in this important debate. For many parts of my constituency in the Scottish Borders, farming is not just part of the local economy; it is the backbone of the community. Across the Scottish Borders, farming families produce the food we eat, look after the countryside and keep our towns going. Today, they are being squeezed from both ends by a Labour Government here at Westminster and an SNP Government in Edinburgh.

Let me be clear from the outset that the sustainable farming incentive applies only to England. Farm support is devolved, and farmers in my constituency could not apply for the SFI, but how a Government treat farmers in one part of the country reveals a great deal about how they regard farmers everywhere. With the two issues that hit every farm in the United Kingdom—the family farm tax and the fertiliser tax—Borders farmers are being hit just as hard as farmers here in England.

On the SFI, the facts speak for themselves. In March 2025, Ministers shut the scheme overnight without warning. Then, after more than a year of uncertainty, the new application window opened at 10 o’clock on 22 September. By 4 o’clock that afternoon, the entire budget—around a quarter of a billion pounds—was gone. Thousands of farmers lost out, including around 12,500 who already had agreements in place. Months of preparation, advisers’ fees and business plans were wasted in just under six hours. Farmers cannot run their businesses around a Government lottery. Decisions on cropping, stocking and investment are taken years in advance, not between 10 in the morning and 4 in the afternoon.

This Labour Government’s record on farming has been appalling. They created one of the biggest threats facing family farms in recent years with the family farm tax. Even after last December’s partial climbdown, which raised the threshold to £2.5 million, farms above that level, including many in my constituency, still face an effective 20% inheritance tax bill. Farmers are asset-rich and cash-poor. The value of their land does not pay a tax bill; selling the land does. Families in my constituency are still asking whether they will be able to hand the family farm on to the next generation. A Conservative Government will restore agricultural property relief and business property relief in full.

Farmers in Scotland are being let down by the SNP, too. Just last week, NFU Scotland warned that the agricultural support budget of around £677 million a year has lost some 20% of its purchasing power since 2014. The union is calling for an increase of around £183 million in the next Scottish budget, and NFU Scotland has also made it clear that a budget being eaten away by inflation is simply not good enough. Farmers in the Borders are sick of consultations and complicated new frameworks being dished out by Holyrood. They need a properly funded scheme that backs food production, encourages investment and lets their businesses make a profit.

That brings me to Labour’s fertiliser tax. From January, the carbon border adjustment mechanism, known as CBAM, will impose a new charge on imported fertiliser. Some have suggested during this debate that the carbon border mechanism was first proposed under a Conservative Government. Its purpose was to stop the British industry being undercut by high carbon imports, but there is no British ammonia industry left to protect.

[John Cooper (Dumfries and Galloway) (Con)]

My hon. Friend and I were in the Committee that discussed the carbon border adjustment mechanism. Does he share my surprise that the Government did not seem to realise that it would affect fertiliser? There was much focus on cement and steel, but it seemed to come as a shock to them that it would put as much as £70 or £80 on a tonne of fertiliser.

[John Lamont]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. The Labour Minister did not seem to understand the impact that the mechanism would have. I was even more shocked that the Liberal Democrats decided not to vote against the proposal, unlike Opposition Members.

As I was saying, the ammonia that our fertiliser depends on is now just about all imported. For farmers, the fertiliser tax is not about protection, but is simply a further tax on growing food. As the NFU has warned, food grown overseas with exactly the same fertiliser will come into this country with no tax being paid. British farmers will be put at a disadvantage in their own market by their own Government. This tax will hit every farm in the United Kingdom, including the farms on the Scottish Borders that the SFI never reached.

As we have heard, the Conservatives tried to stop the fertiliser tax, but where were the Liberal Democrats? They were sitting on the fence. When I challenged the hon. Member for South Cambridgeshire (Pippa Heylings)—she is not in the Chamber, but she was a member of the Committee that was considering this regulation last week—she accepted that there were concerns about the uncertainty and the additional costs; but when it came to the vote, the Liberal Democrats sat on their hands. They refused to oppose the measure imposing this additional tax on our farmers.

[Mr Carmichael]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[John Lamont]

The right hon. Member had his time to have his say, but he refused to deal with this issue. The Liberal Democrats have had their say, but have refused to justify their failure to stand up for the farmers and try to stop this. [Interruption.]

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)]

Order. The hon. Member is obviously not giving way.

[John Lamont]

According to the Liberal Democrat motion, farmers are “deeply concerned” about the impact of CBAM on fertiliser costs. Too right they are, and I welcome the Liberal Democrats’ late conversion, but noting concerns in a motion is no substitute for standing up for farmers when it counts, and that is when we vote. The party that tells farmers it is on their side does not then stand up to stop these extra costs, but just walks away. You cannot champion farmers in this Chamber and then abandon them when the vote comes.

[Madam Deputy Speaker]

Order. I am now introducing a four-minute speaking limit.

17:41

[Josh Newbury (Cannock Chase) (Lab)]

Farmers should be able to make a decent living producing excellent food while being properly rewarded for stewarding the land on which we all depend, and those things should not be in competition with one another.

Farming sits at the heart of our rural economy, our national security and Britain’s identity. Farmers put in incredibly long hours, often with no respite. They carry considerable financial risk and take decisions that can affect their families’ livelihoods for generations. This has been an exceptionally hard year given the drought, and the driving up of fertiliser and fuel costs by the war in Iran has compounded that. The Government have offered some respite through flexibilities in ELMS agreements, £15 million for on-farm reservoirs, a cut in duty on red diesel and an extra £70 million for this year’s sustainable farming incentive. The SFI supports farming in harmony with nature, from enriching soils to one of my loves: supporting our wonderful farmland birds.

I want to share a hopeful, positive story from my constituency. The Oak Tree Farm smallholding, started a few years ago by Sarah and Jay Taylor just outside Slitting Mill near Rugeley, secured funding in the first SFI26 window. They are excited new entrants, and plan to plant fruit trees and establish new hedgerows. I had the chance to visit them recently, and their love of their animals and the brilliant relationships that they have with their loyal customers was so uplifting. We should remember that that first window did succeed in allowing farms like Sarah’s and Jay’s to get in for the first time. There are, however, many lessons to learn. After closing within six hours, the second £233 million SFI26 window demonstrates the sheer level of demand from farmers wanting to participate, but also—let us be frank—desperately needing Government support to tide them over after a series of torrid growing seasons. The window opened at 10 am. For many farmers, that is well into the working day. Many will have been tending livestock or out in the fields, so the timing and the IT system were, in fact, unnecessary barriers.

I welcome the Government’s commitment to reopen the SFI as early as possible in 2027, and to scrap the first come, first served approach. I hope that Ministers will consider assessing applications on clear criteria, including environmental benefits, value for money and fair access. As the chair of the all-party parliamentary group for public sector efficiency, I would be keen to be involved in those discussions—alongside, of course, the sector itself, which needs to be heard first and foremost.

[Jonathan Davies (Mid Derbyshire) (Lab)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that the Government could make the SFI system more accessible to farmers by publishing a timetable of when those windows will open well in advance, and circulating it so that farmers could be ready to apply when the next round arrived?

[Josh Newbury]

I do agree with my hon. Friend. I wonder whether there was a hesitancy about creating too much demand on the pretty inadequate IT system in one go, but that will always be the case, as long as people know the date. I think that we should have much earlier notice and that the system should take account of the realities of farming, which I am afraid this year’s scheme did not.

A farmer should not have to be the quickest with a keyboard and mouse to secure vital cash for margins or pastures. Let us not throw the baby out with the bathwater when it comes to the SFI, but we also must not shy away from asking fundamental questions about its structure and communication.

[Calum Miller (Bicester and Woodstock) (LD)]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Josh Newbury]

In the interests of time, I am afraid I will not, because I know that many Liberal Democrat colleagues want to get in.

I also want to raise the wider contribution that farmers make to rural communities. During severe weather, they are often the first to spring into action. I admire the example set by the last Welsh Labour Government in financially recognising what farmers do for our communities, particularly during heavy snow, fires or other emergencies. As we set out to improve the SFI, I hope we will place greater emphasis on measures that promote resilience to extreme weather, and perhaps even flag those to farmers in badly affected parts of the country. The Government could also take measures to support farms of all shapes and sizes ahead of SFI27, such as the Treasury-backed loans that the National Farmers Union is calling for in next week’s Budget. I hope that the DEFRA team are making the case for rapid, flexible assistance, given the myriad pressures that have come this year.

I am optimistic about the future of British farming because of the ingenuity, determination and passion of the people who work in it, whom I will continue to listen to and champion. We will have our differences in this place, but I believe there is a consensus in the House on much of what needs to happen to support our brilliant British farmers. I hope we can bear that in mind in the months ahead, because they are getting on with their job and it is time for us to find common ground so that we can get on with ours.

17:45

[Rachel Gilmour (Tiverton and Minehead) (LD)]

I am pleased to be able to speak in my party’s Opposition day debate; I am less pleased about the context in which it takes place. Both Conservative and Labour Governments have failed to deliver an effective post-Brexit farm payment system. The consequences have been severe, not only for the viability of British farms but, ultimately, for our nation’s food security. The most recent example is the farce of the SFI window 2. After almost a year without access to the sustainable farming incentive, farmers were given little warning of its return, only for the scheme to slam shut in under six hours. A budget of just £233 million was never going to touch the sides.

What is most damning is that this outcome was entirely foreseeable. A first come, first served application process, combined with inadequate funding, was always going to create a scramble. In that scramble, those with greater resources, more sophisticated systems and stronger connectivity enjoyed a clear advantage.

[Dr Danny Chambers (Winchester) (LD)]

I heard from many farmers in Winchester and Hampshire who desperately wanted to apply for the SFI, but most of them had to work during the day and it had closed by the time they got back. One of them compared it with trying to get Oasis tickets. As my hon. Friend says, the process clearly favours very large businesses that have full-time managers and admin staff. It puts family farms at a disadvantage, because individual farmers have to work outside.

[Rachel Gilmour]

I was about to comment on the fact that my farmers on Exmoor were immediately put at a disadvantage, because they have limited broadband and limited connectivity. I was contacted by a farming family from West Bagborough who were in complete despair. They made the self-evident point that farmers cannot simply abandon the working day at a moment’s notice and spend hours online desperately trying to secure support before the window closes.

Farmers have endured a perfect storm: inheritance tax, soaring energy costs, bluetongue, drought and now this latest SFI debacle. Farmers’ trust in the Government was already on the floor, and this recent episode has undermined whatever scintilla of trust remained. Once again, farmers have been left with the impression that Whitehall neither understands nor appreciates the realities of farming. What remains particularly frustrating is the ongoing lack of certainty. Farmers still do not know the shape of SFI27: what it will contain, when it will begin and what level of support it will provide. The farmers of Tiverton and Minehead are not interested in hearing about jam tomorrow; they need to know what support is available today.

[Adrian Ramsay (Waveney Valley) (Green)]

I thank the hon. Lady for her speech, and I agree that it is absolutely crucial for farmers to have confidence in long-term policy support. My farmers in Waveney Valley tell me they want to invest in measures that support natural flood management, restore nature, such as new hedgerows, and improve soil health, which are critical for food security. Does she agree that the window 2 debacle shows the level of interest there is, and that far more funding is needed in the SFI funding pot?

[Rachel Gilmour]

I wholeheartedly agree. In fact, we discussed it at the Public Accounts Committee just last week.

Farmers cannot operate in the dark; they need certainty. Farming is not a short-term enterprise. Decisions taken today affect planting, stocking, investment and land management years into the future. On the Public Accounts Committee last week, we examined the resilience of the UK’s food supply chain to disruption, and the session reinforced what many of us have long argued, which is that food security is national security. As co-chair of the APPG on farming, I heard the same message in our meeting with representatives from across the sector on Monday. That is why it should never be lost on us that farmers are on the frontline of climate change. They see changing weather patterns, degraded soils and seasonal disruption before anyone else. The woodlands, wetlands and grasslands they manage are essential to our biodiversity and natural environment.

Farmers are famously stoic and resilient, yet even the strongest shoulders can carry only so much. The financial pressures, the uncertainty, the long days, the drought, the extreme heat, bluetongue and now the recent SFI disappointment have combined into an overwhelming burden for many. For some, that burden has led them to take their own lives. I conclude with a simple message to the farmers of Tiverton and Minehead: “I am with you.” What my farmers and I want to know is whether this Labour Government are with them.

17:51

[Markus Campbell-Savours (Penrith and Solway) (Lab)]

To be honest, I am not a big fan of Opposition day debates in Parliament. I made my discomfort clear in a debate on farming in 2024, when I put the Government on notice of my intention to vote against the APR Budget measure. That evening, as the news that I had voted against the official Opposition’s motion was circulated on social media—a motion that quite rightly called for the Government to halt their planned changes to APR, but also appeared to claim that the last Conservative Government were the greatest gift to farming since Jethro Tull’s seed drill—I noted the way my vote was being reported by Conservative Members. One said I had “misled the chamber” and had “voted to impose the family farm tax”. As all Members know, Opposition day motions do not enact change. They are expressions of opinion, not instruments that alter policy or law, or as “Erskine May” says, they do not bind the Government.

It was the same last week. In a debate in which the Conservatives tried out their new theory that sticking the word “family” in front of a tax makes it unpalatable and ripe for scrapping, I objected to the idea that a £175 million penthouse flat could be exempt from tax. For this, I was accused by Conservatives on social media of “nit picking”, being spineless and of “toadying” to get my Whip back—which I have had back, by the way. The post was accompanied by a meme that made reference only to family farms. I would like to be explicit: I want to see the end of the family farm tax, and I urge the Chancellor to do so in the Budget, but I do not believe the plight of my farmers should be conflated and used by politicians who want to give tax breaks to the mega-rich.

Let me now turn my attention to today’s word salad. I like tomatoes, and I agree that the APR changes should be scrapped. I like olives, and I agree that the SFI has been a disaster. Lots of Members like olives, even those on the Labour Benches. The end of universal payments seems like a missed opportunity. Farmers are perfectly candid about how many in the industry who received the basic payment were doing very little for it, but I am increasingly of the view that a universal offer linked to delivering key public goods as a baseline, with a top up ELMs-style offer, would be preferable. It would give all farms a chance, and provide a buffer that they may rely on when times are hard. The farmers I have engaged with since my election have described how they take risks with every investment decision. Bad weather or market conditions can change and do change. A universal payment could not only provide a cushion, but help reassure those considering an investment that they are safe to do so.

Last week I read an article in the Financial Times, which described issues faced by some farmers in accessing SFI. It quoted one Cambridge farmer as saying:

“I will literally take a plough to everything… We will have to go back to farming more intensively than the 1950s.”

It worries me that we may see farmers reaching the end of existing schemes simply plough up the good work they have done and look for what is commercially best for them. I believe a universal offer could, if implemented properly, prevent that from happening.

I do not object to everything in this salad and I am quite pleased it has been served, but everyone has something they do not want in a salad—fennel, just in case you were wondering, Madam Deputy Speaker—and in the case of this motion it is the Liberal Democrats’ inclusion of a commitment to

“an additional £1 billion a year to properly fund environmental land management schemes.”

It sounds tasty, but having sat through a large number of debates in the House, I know that at the heart of their Budget plans is their claim that re-entering Europe would pay for everything. That is as silly as claiming that we could pay using lithium mined on Mars; its presence does not preclude the fact that there is one hell of journey before we get there. These motions are a con: a word salad full of things that Members across the House love, but ultimately containing an ingredient which makes them edible only to the author.

[Several hon. Members rose—]

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)]

Order. Mr Gareth Snell, changing your seat in the Chamber does not mean I cannot hear or see you.

17:55

[Wendy Chamberlain (North East Fife) (LD)]

Agriculture accounts for around 15% of economic activity in my constituency, from the Howe, the bread basket of Fife, to the coastal farms of the East Neuk and down towards Leven, as well as the banks of the Tay. Despite its relative proximity to the central belt of Scotland, it is very much a rural constituency. It hosts both single family farms and larger producers such as Kettle Produce, specialists in prepared vegetables for major retailers, and Quaker Oats in Cupar, which is supplied by arable farmers across the area.

I regularly visit and engage with people across the sector in North East Fife and I want to take a minute to remember the Earl of Lindsay, lately of the other place, who passed away earlier this month and who was a constituent of mine. A Fife farmer, landscape gardener, conservationist and a Scotland Office Minister under John Major for the three Fs—farming, fishing and forestry—he was a dedicated person in the industry post 1997. My thoughts are with his widow Diana and family at this time.

I commend the local mid-Scotland and Fife NFUS for organising regular sessions with both MPs and MSPs to keep us up to date. Just last week, I was at Balbirnie Home Farms learning about their low-input farming approach. Before our recent recess, I visited South Straiton Farm in Balmullo, meeting Duncan Pickard. He was very keen that I say in this Chamber that I had met a happy farmer, and now I have, but the reality is that farming is in many respects a precarious endeavour and for some, it is increasingly hard to make the numbers work.

Back in 2024, I secured a Westminster Hall debate on the barriers farmers face in accessing universal credit. It should concern us all that the very people who put the food on our tables are often forced to rely on a welfare system that seems stacked against them. I look forward to the Timms report with interest, having engaged with the Minister for Social Security and Disability, the right hon. Member for East Ham (Sir Stephen Timms). If anything, the challenges facing farmers have become more acute. I say to the shadow Minister that we both stood outside Parliament during farmer protests with signs saying “Family farm tax” and I think we all knew what we meant: both the changes to inheritance tax and to business property relief. There is no doubt that those things have left families worrying about the future of their businesses.

I also want to highlight the recruitment of seasonal workers, which is badly needed to harvest the excellent produce grown in North East Fife. I would like assurances from the Minister that the seasonal agricultural workers scheme will extend beyond 2029. Farmers cannot invest in the future if they do not have the certainty that they will have the workforce they need to get food out of the fields now.

In Scotland, we have the future farming investment scheme, which is intended to provide certainty for farmers through to 2030, but Scottish Ministers need to set out how the proposed four-tier system will deliver fair, accessible and adequately funded assistance. Yes, it should reward positive action on nature restoration and climate resilience—that matters, of course—but it is vital that it sustains food production, rural livelihoods and smaller or remote farming businesses.

Farmers across my constituency continue to face significant financial pressures and it is clear that both the UK and Scottish Governments need to do more. Sometimes, frankly, that means getting out of the way, and encouraging innovation and expertise to develop organically. I have not met a farmer yet who does not care about the land and the animals they rear, or who is unaware of their role in mitigating against climate changes. On that note, I would like to invite everybody in the Chamber, at the conclusion of the debate, to attend the 25th anniversary of the Voluntary Initiative, which meets in the Churchill Room this evening.

17:59

[James Naish (Rushcliffe) (Lab)]

I refer colleagues to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests.

When the Labour Rural Research Group polled rural voters in the summer of 2025, 75% of them told us that their communities had been neglected over the past 15 years. Over half, 51.3%, said that agriculture and the rural economy should get more Government spending—a higher share than for any priority except the NHS. People really do care about this agenda, and it is important that we on these Benches remember that.

There is no doubt that there was exceptional demand for SFI26; that demonstrates farmers’ desire to invest in their soil, hedgerows, crops and wildlife. That was partly anticipated, which is why the Government allocated an additional £20 million in window 2, on top of the £50 million announced by the Prime Minister in August. I am pleased that, through this scheme, we have nearly £1 billion of investment in nature-friendly farming, as part of the £11.8 billion in funding for sustainable farming in this Parliament.

The good news is that SFI26 was allocated; the Tories did not manage that. But farmers had been preparing for months, and some were left part of the way through applications that could not be completed. The Government have acknowledged that too many farmers who hoped for an agreement have been left disappointed. I welcome that acknowledgement, but acknowledging a problem is where fixing it must begin, and we need to see the co-design of a new system very quickly. We need the IT systems at the Rural Payments Agency reformed, and we need a much clearer and more transparent road map for future application timelines.

I agree with the part of the motion that covers some of the failings of the previous Government. The motion

“regrets the previous Government’s decision to design the SFI on a first come, first served basis”.

It also regrets the trade deals with Australia and New Zealand, and it is true that the Conservatives left a transition that was half built and half funded. On trade, the former Secretary of State, Michael Gove, has admitted that the Conservatives negotiated poorly with Australia and New Zealand.

There are therefore serious questions that need answering ahead of next year’s scheme. First, the National Farmers’ Union has said that any decrease in income jeopardises future business planning, so when will the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs commit to a date for SFI27? Secondly, there is potentially the gap mentioned earlier today: £520 million of agreements are due to expire. In the Minister’s view, is that accurate? If so, what are the Government doing about it? Thirdly, I seek clarity on the timing for those whose applications failed because of the system’s technical problems. Fourthly, on horticulture and smaller farms, SFI must work for market gardens and smaller growers; the 3 hectare minimum for SFI26 shut some of them out altogether. Can that be reconsidered?

[Mr Carmichael]

I agree with everything the hon. Gentleman is saying, but we neglect at our peril the sheer extra cost of administration for SFI, as compared with the basic payment scheme. Baroness Batters has remarkable figures on that in her report. Does he agree, to pick up the point made by the hon. Member for Penrith and Solway (Markus Campbell-Savours), that one of the advantages of a more universal system is that it would be hardwired in for food production, and would be much cheaper to administer?

[James Naish]

The right hon. Gentleman speaks from a position of expertise. He is right that the more complicated we make a system, the more expensive it is to administer. I know that Ministers are looking into how a system that is not “first come, first served” might work; there are risks with that, and we should acknowledge that in this place. It is not a silver bullet by any stretch of the imagination.

I notice that the Liberal Democrat spokesman, the hon. Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale (Tim Farron), did not mention the word “profitability” in his contribution. However, that is an essential point in any debate on farming. Baroness Batters’ “Farming Profitability Review” notes that the farming budget in England has hovered around that £2.4 billion figure since 2007, but the input costs are forecast to be 30% higher this year than in 2020. We need to be clear about the essential mission for farming. The aim is a countryside where farms are less dependent on subsidy and scheme windows, and more independent, resilient and sustainable—for people, profit and our planet. That is the thread that ran through the Batters review, and it is also the thread that ran through the Labour Rural Research Group’s report on the rural economy.

[Samantha Niblett]

My hon. Friend is talking about recommendations for the SFI going forward. When I met Derbyshire NFU yesterday, there was some concern about a proportion of SFI that was not accounted for—I am sorry, I do not have my notes to confirm the figure. Derbyshire NFU said that one of the key challenges was that when we were part of the EU, there had to be clarity about what money was spent where, whereas now it finds it much harder to get transparency on money that has been invested. Does my hon. Friend agree that this might also be a recommendation to Government?

[James Naish]

Absolutely. There is a lot of muttering from the Lib Dem Benches, but I am sure that the Minister heard that point.

I will conclude, because plenty of people want to speak. We should be clear that we need to fix the SFI system, and I am pleased that the Government have given indications of how they plan to do that. We must end “first come, first served”, so that the system works more fairly, but we must also collectively recognise that we must do better on the issue of profitability. I welcome the work that the Government have done to date, but we must accelerate the implementation of the Batters profitability review. I hope that we can work across this House to put those points into practice.

18:06

[Sarah Gibson (Chippenham) (LD)]

In Wiltshire, farming is at the heart of our rural economy, our landscape and our community. Farmers do not just produce the food on our tables, but support local jobs and businesses, and play a crucial role in protecting and restoring the natural environment. Farmers in Wiltshire are not asking for special treatment; they are merely asking for the certainty that every business needs. I recently spoke to Anna, a livestock vet in my constituency who works with farmers across Wiltshire, and she put the problem very simply: farming businesses plan years ahead, not months ahead. When support schemes change without warning, farmers cannot make decisions about environmental improvements because they simply do not know what resources they will have available. Wiltshire’s mixed agricultural landscape, which combines arable farming and dairy and livestock businesses, is exactly the sort of environment where sustainable farming practices thrive. However, if a farm does not know what support will be available, it cannot confidently plan for the future.

In Wiltshire, we have already seen what can be achieved when farmers are supported to work alongside nature. The Bremhill Vales Farmers Group brings together 50 farms covering 5,000 hectares between Chippenham, Calne and Lyneham. It works with the Environment Agency and Wiltshire Wildlife Trust to improve water quality and reduce flood risk through natural management. Those farmers know that being productive can sit alongside environmental stewardship, but only with the right tailored support.

As well as the SFI debacle, I will raise a couple of other things that are affecting my farmers. One is the rigidity around the machinery grant; the Government application windows are so tight. Another issue is how complex and difficult the guidance can be—even veterinary professionals, who deal with those programmes regularly, struggle to navigate the guidance and the application process. I looked through the welfare pathway website recently with a local vet. I found the forms difficult to locate and the timelines unclear, and minor administrative errors meant that access to support was lost entirely. If the experts struggle to navigate the system, Ministers should ask themselves how easy and accessible the system is to a busy family farm. Wiltshire’s farmers are ready to play their part; they deserve a Government who are ready to play theirs.

I have two questions for the Minister. What assurance can he give farmers in my constituency that when they commit to long-term environmental improvements, this Government are willing to provide the long-term funding certainty needed to support that work? Will the Minister commit to publishing a clear, single-page timeline that sets out the application windows, the eligibility criteria and the payment timeline for the farming scheme well in advance, so that farmers can make the long-term business decisions that modern agriculture requires?

18:09

[Sarah Bool (South Northamptonshire) (Con)]

This is an important debate about support for our farmers. A few weeks ago, I was absolutely delighted to speak to the Towcester Young Farmers Club, in a room full of our best and brightest—our custodians for the future. We talk about supporting them, and I want to do that; however, I also want to recognise the support that they are giving back to us already, at their young age. Whether it is Rosie Burt, who ran a gruelling 50k ultramarathon in aid of Macmillan Cancer Support, or the young farmers organising their charity Halloween tractor run on 1 November to raise money for the Cynthia Spencer hospice, they give so much back to our community already, and I think it is very important that we recognise that.

That is why I am so hurt and saddened that in the face of such optimism from this younger generation, we are having to fight so hard against the Government to make them realise the impact of the choices that they have made. We have already rehearsed the family farm tax, the family business tax, the issues with SFI, the increase in national insurance contributions and the fertiliser tax. Rather than speaking about rejoining the EU and the options on the table, or about electoral reform, as the Prime Minister is doing, why not prioritise these decisions that can make a massive difference to our farmers here and now? I urge the Minister to take the message back to the Prime Minister that this is what we should be focused on. As we have said, farming is a vocation, and it needs long-term planning and certainty for the future. At Prime Minister’s questions today, the PM talked about the EU summit bringing a better deal for farmers, but the proof ultimately will be in the pudding.

We have had zero details about the upcoming sanitary and phytosanitary agreement. We have asked the relevant Minister numerous times to come before the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee to answer questions, but we have been refused on numerous occasions. The SPS agreement is very important, because we will potentially be moving to a system of dynamic alignment, and that will have a massive impact. We are well ahead in this country on matters such as precision breeding and on our animal welfare standards. We all want to understand exactly what this deal will mean, and I do not think it is right that we are not being given a chance for full scrutiny before it comes around.

The market is talking about the importance of implementation periods. Our farmers need to know what is happening and when. Again, I urge the Minister to give us more transparency on the future SPS agreement. Forgive me if I am slightly concerned about these matters, given that the Government have sold us out on our fishing rights and we could not even agree Security Action for Europe funding.

I want to finish on a more positive note. While many farmers are struggling as a result of the Government’s decisions, they are none the less very industrious, and want to come up with measures to support themselves. One great measure that I think we could all support is that of Ben Aveling, of Radmore farm in my constituency, who is trying to encourage support for farmers by bringing back the Sunday roast. The idea is that we can all sit together and chat as a family while also buying British products. I think we should support that wholeheartedly. Can we please recognise that?

18:13

[Olly Glover (Didcot and Wantage) (LD)]

Food and good land stewardship for nature, environment protection and, indeed, our enjoyment are not luxuries, but essentials. Agriculture has enormous economic potential: the industry supports 334,000 jobs in the agriculture labour force alone and sits at the centre of the wider agrifood industry, which is worth more than £153 billion. Agriculture also supports many other industries, such as feed, energy, fertiliser, chemicals, logistics and professional services, with £20.9 billion of intermediate inputs, yet the sector seems to be treated as a luxury, rather than as something totally essential to everything that we need in our country to succeed, and farmers do not get the attention and consistent and coherent support from Government that they deserve.

Even before the latest sustainable farming incentive farce, farmers in my Oxfordshire constituency already faced so many challenges and headwinds. Given their role in causing many of those problems, it is rather concerning that the Conservatives seem to be suffering from more amnesia than was portrayed in Christopher Nolan’s “Memento”.

The challenges faced by farmers include: the current Labour Government’s agricultural and business property tax relief changes; the uncertainty and impact of Brexit; trade deals based on proving the so-called benefits of Brexit, no matter the impact on our farmers; constantly changing Government incentive and payment regimes; the impact of recent worldwide inflation on fertiliser prices and equipment costs, now made even worse as a result of Trump’s idiotic middle east war; labour shortages also as a result of Brexit; pressures from the supply chain driving down prices for produce; and the worsening impact of climate change, which we have seen particularly gravely this year.

[Ben Maguire (North Cornwall) (LD)]

I would like to add one more thing to that list of Conservative disasters. The underspending of the farming budget by more than £350 million has led to this disgraceful situation where the SFI has seen a huge demand because our farmers are scared that that will happen again. Will my hon. Friend join me in urging the Minister to commit that the budget will not be underspent by this Government?

[Olly Glover]

I do join my hon. Friend in calling for that. It was a shame that that, too, was missing from the shadow Minister’s speech.

When designing the sustainable farming initiative and the system for allocating it, it would appear that the Ministers and officials concerned may have spent too much time here in Parliament, where Members wanting to get slots for some types of Bill have to become proficient in efficient use of Microsoft Outlook. That is similar to the bidding contest for SFI, which becomes as much about mastering process, IT savviness and a race against the clock as about the substance. This is a particular problem for smaller farms, where farmers will often have to be out on their land and not sat at their computer at a time convenient for DEFRA.

[Calum Miller]

My hon. Friend is making a good case about the shortcomings of the SFI system. One of my farmers told me this week that he is facing a choice between seeking SFI for direct drilling and seeking SFI for preserving waterways by having a grass verge before we get to the waterway. Does he agree that pitting carbon sequestration against the protection of our waterways from nitrate is not a good way to proceed and that we should instead be supporting both these environmental objectives through the allocation of the SFI funds in future rounds?

[Olly Glover]

My hon. Friend has clearly been listening carefully to farmers in his constituency and makes some strong points.

The Government have said that SFI will be offered again in 2027 and that it will work with farming organisations on potential changes to the scheme. However, a timetable, budget and detailed arrangements for SFI 2027 have yet to be announced. As well as ending the bidding war process for SFI, they need to move beyond an annual settlement. Investment in farms and agriculture is not an annual exercise. It is a multi-year and often multi-decade labour of love that requires hard work, forward planning and long-term thinking. That is why the Government should look at some good practice that they have implemented elsewhere, such as moving to multi-year local government funding settlements, and embrace the same approach for SFI.

The Government have an opportunity to in part make amends in the forthcoming Budget, and I hope that it is one that they will seize. There are many requests from the sector for the Budget, and I will talk about three briefly. One is to increase the annual investment allowance to at least £5 million and extend its scope to include assets qualifying for the structures and buildings allowance. This would support longer-term investments in efficiency and productivity improvements, including with regard to energy and water usage. The annual investment allowance allows businesses to reduce their tax bill by deducting the full cost of qualifying purchases—plant and machinery—from their profits. Currently, such buildings and fixed structures do not qualify for AIA and instead generally qualify for the structures and buildings allowance, which provides relief at 3% per annum on qualifying expenditure. This does not incentivise investment in farm buildings when other forms of investment are relieved at a much faster rate. Similar reliefs are offered in competitor countries. For example, in Ireland such farm buildings can be written off over a period of seven years, and in the USA 100% relief is currently available for five-year periods.

Our second ask of the Government relates to what we have already said about the approach to the carbon border adjustment mechanism introduction. The National Farmers’ Union estimates that fertiliser inclusion in UK CBAM will add up to £70 per metric tonne in extra costs.

Finally, the Government could provide or underwrite the capital required for a temporary programme of interest-free farm crisis loans. That would really help the sector as it is suffering from current crises to do with inflation. It could be delivered through accredited commercial lenders and targeted at viable agricultural businesses that are suffering temporary cash flow pressure because of the current situation. I hope that the Government will listen to those requests and use the Budget to help our farmers and get SFI in a much better state for 2027.

18:19

[Mr Lee Dillon (Newbury) (LD)]

Since my election, I have stood up for my farmers. We have been in fields together, we have marched together and we have lobbied together. Today, they stand with me. I am proud that my party has used this Opposition day debate to hold the Government to account for the latest shambles, which follow on from last year’s shambles. It really does seem that lessons have not been learned.

My farmers cannot speak in the Chamber, but I can, and I want to make their voices heard. Their verdict is blunt. Tim Hayward, who has managed a 3,000 acre farm in South Fawley for over a decade, described the SFI as “flawed” and “not fit for purpose”, popular only because the sector is in such a dire circumstance that many farms have to embrace it to survive. His countryside stewardship agreement expires at the end of the year and, despite trying to secure a new SFI agreement, he has received no support. He faces the prospect of putting precious pockets of land—habitats that have taken years to establish—back into production.

James, another experienced West Berkshire farmer, had an expiring SFI agreement and costed alternative business plans. As he put it,

“I now regard the government as an unreliable trading partner.”

George Brown, a farmer who farms Priors farm and is the chairman of the British Farming Union, told me that the six-hour window was simply impossible for a family farm to prepare for, let alone submit the precise land mapping, rotational forecasting and multi-layered action planning that an application needs.

With the introduction of the family farm tax and the sudden closure of the SFI in 2025, farmers feel that the rural communities they represent are not understood. Farmers play a crucial role in rural life. From environmental stewardship to hosting community events that reduce isolation, clearing roads of snow in the dark winter months or lifting a villager’s car from a country ditch, they are the backbone of rural communities. If we do not back our farmers, we are not backing rural life.

The farming road map rightly attempts to provide clarity, but, after September’s mess, distrust is as strong as ever. Nor can we look to the Conservative party for inspiration—Conservative Members may turn up in my seat for photo ops with farmers, but they have never apologised to them.

I recognise that the Government inherited serious problems, but chaotic windows and abrupt closures have compounded those. I welcome the Minister’s commitment to work with the NFU and move away from a first come, first served basis.

To conclude, may I ask the Minister three things? First, will he publish a clear timescale? As George Brown put it:

“The Government created a funding race that left us all wondering when the starting gun would actually fire.”

If the next window is to be different, the Department should open SFI27 early, with a phased arrangement starting on 1 April so that those who diligently prepared but were shut out get a fair second chance.

Secondly, will the Minister ensure that the budget matches the number of agreements that are ending? More than 21,000 farm businesses have environmental agreements ending by March and only about 8,800 applied for SFI26. What transitional support will the Government provide to close that gap? Thirdly, the Government should use next week’s Budget for a clear injection of support and back the Liberal Democrats’ call for an extra £1 billion a year for farming.

The Government have said that they are determined to rebuild trust across rural communities. If they take those steps, that could mark a turning point and give the custodians of our countryside the confidence and clarity they desperately need.

18:23

[Steff Aquarone (North Norfolk) (LD)]

I am pleased that the Liberal Democrats are leading from the front for our rural communities by having this debate. Norfolk is a rural county and a farming county. It is also a county right at the forefront of the climate and nature emergency. Right along our coastline, which is the fastest eroding in north-west Europe, we see residents facing the loss of their homes and villages facing the loss of their identity as rising sea levels increase the speed of erosion in villages such as Happisburgh and Trimingham. Our precious natural environment with rare chalk streams and species found nowhere else in the country is at risk of collapse without action on the emergency facing them.

One of our strongest allies in tackling the climate emergency is farming, and that is why the SFI is so important. Farmers are custodians of the natural environment; they care for it, they look after it and they will pass it on to generations after them. They want our natural environment to be protected and our climate to remain stable, not just for the greater good but because it is vital to keep their farms viable.

The importance of the scheme cannot be overstated. It is a crucial part of keeping our rural environments healthy and protected, and of enabling farmers to do so too. How on earth, then, can it be right that the process for securing the funding was such a catastrophe? A mad rush, online queuing and effectively a sell-out event in a matter of hours. I know the Prime Minister is keen on Manchesterism for the whole country, but I do not think my farmers knew that meant making SFI applications follow the same system as getting Oasis tickets.

That farce speaks to a much deeper issue. I strongly believe that there is a lack of understanding of the workings of rural life and rural communities because they do not fit neatly into Whitehall’s prescribed models or spreadsheets. Securing funding for sustainable land management might make the difference between a farm being able to employ someone to work the land and not. If that person is not employed, they will not bring their family to the local village to live. That means that perhaps their children do not attend the village school, which then cannot make the numbers work within the funding formula. Those young people would not be able to stay and start a family themselves even if we were to tackle the cost of living crisis, which is significantly sharper the further from a city someone is. When working-age people cannot afford to live and thrive in rural and coastal areas, everybody loses.

As things stand, our communities are as vulnerable to erosion as our coastline, and we need powerful representation at the heart of Government to stand up for them. Just like in our natural environment, our rural communities are deeply interconnected. We are an ecosystem: we rely on symbiotic relationships, on food chains and on a stable environment. When the science of rural life is disregarded and the knock-on effects are ignored, we end up with calamitous decisions such as this.

So much of this situation is down to how Whitehall works, or does not. Food security, climate change, coastal erosion, flooding, farming policy, environmental protection, rural communities—in North Norfolk all our affairs are rural. Yet real change on these issues cannot be handled by DEFRA alone. Those are the things that matter to people, to the lives we lead, and they cut across the silos of Government. I firmly believe that if we had a better understanding of rural life across Whitehall, disasters such as the one we saw with the SFI scheme would just not be allowed to happen. An urgent, fundamental reassessment of how the state is supposed to work for rural communities is needed, because at the moment it simply does not.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)]

I call John Cooper, after whom we will drop the time limit to three minutes.

18:27

[John Cooper (Dumfries and Galloway) (Con)]

Food security is national security, as the mantra from the Government Benches goes. Yet the reality, I am afraid, is that it is much spun and little done. The family farm tax sent a chill through my rural Dumfries and Galloway constituency and underscored yet again the disconnect between this urban-centric Government and rural Britain.

Now we have the fertiliser tax coming along and again, like the family farm tax, it is deeply flawed. In fact, we had an admission that the family farm tax was deeply flawed from a former Government Minister who pressed its case in this House—incredible! On the price of fuel, there has been much back slapping about the cuts to duty for red diesel. That is certainly helpful, but the reality is that red diesel is up by as much as 60%, and that is an enormous input cost for farmers. It is a big difficulty as well for the fishing sector. I have asked the Fisheries Minister if he will convene a meeting with the fishermen, because British boats are afraid to put to sea when French boats are able to access finance from the French Government to fish in British waters.

Funding in Scotland, as we heard from my hon. Friend the Member for Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk (John Lamont), is devolved for farming and agriculture. However, we have also seen in Scotland the SNP Government exercising sleight of hand with the agricultural budget. Money that was intended for farming— supposedly ringfenced—magically disappeared, only to reappear. That is not good enough. Devolve and forget is the order of the day with this Government. We must have more accuracy about what is going on in Scotland. The block grant and the Barnett consequentials go north. This place should have some say in what goes on there.

The hon. Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale (Tim Farron) opened this debate with his usual paean to the EU. The EU funding settlement is changing and the envelope under the common agricultural policy is shrinking, such that farmers in Ireland are protesting about it. I can assure the House that the farmers in Dumfries and Galloway are in no hurry at all to return to the EU and the idea of a shrinking common agricultural policy.

18:29

[Helen Morgan (North Shropshire) (LD)]

Three minutes is not a long time to represent over 1,000 North Shropshire farmers, many of whom have been in touch with me in the wake of the shambles of the second window of SFI 2026. John, who farms in Whitchurch, was distraught when he contacted me after he was unable to get on to the latest iteration of the scheme. He could not apply first thing in the morning because the window was not open, and when he returned later after doing some farming, he found that applications were already closed. Now he is afraid that he will have to remove acres of herbal ley as he no longer has the funds to manage them, and he tells me it would be cheaper to rip up the hedgerows that he preserves around his farm and put fences in instead. That is not what we are trying to achieve here. Another family farming in Weston Lullingfields watched the website repeatedly crash as the funding was scooped up, leaving them with nothing.

What is most frustrating to farmers is that everybody could see this disaster coming from a good country mile away. A budget of £233 million for farmers across England was insultingly short of the public funding needed to recognise the hard work and stewardship that our farmers undertake. One farmer said to me:

“Why bother going through the pretence? The chaos of the first-come, first-served funding allocations, disadvantaged small businesses and family farms. Hardworking farmers cannot afford to take huge chunks of time out of the day to sit and watch a computer screen that won’t load.”

This total disregard for, and failure to understand, agricultural life and business did not start with this Government. This year’s SFI failure is a direct consequence of the Conservative Government’s weak attempt to patch up the abrupt removal of the basic payment scheme following their botched Brexit deal. They added insult to injury by signing the UK-Australia free trade agreement in 2023, which undercut British farmers and threatened to flood our markets with low-cost imports but offered no protections to ensure that there was a level playing field for our world-leading UK animal welfare standards. It set a dangerous precedent for future deals, as we have seen with the comprehensive and progressive agreement for trans-Pacific partnership. Farmers have felt increasingly under threat.

Every meeting I have had with local farmers centres on how difficult farming has become, including regular meetings with farmers and NFU members from across North Shropshire and indeed the whole of Shropshire. At my most recent meeting, held in Ruyton-XI-Towns in my constituency, their frustration at the SFI system failure was obvious, but they also raised concerns about upcoming changes to water abstraction licensing. After this summer’s devastating drought, which left crops in North Shropshire shrivelled and livestock farmers in a desperate situation with their winter feed, the link between food security and water security is stark. They raised concerns that the hierarchy of water abstraction will propose prioritising water for data centres over water for food production. In what sort of world is that sensible? Will the Minister confirm that will not be the case this year? Will he also confirm that we will not see a repeat next year of the shambles of the bluetongue issue and the SFI? Will he actually take British farming concerns seriously for once?

18:32

[Charlotte Cane (Ely and East Cambridgeshire) (LD)]

The farmers of Ely and East Cambridgeshire fill the breadbaskets of England. They also provide really good, tasty, healthy vegetables. You would think, therefore, that we would treat them with respect and try to support them, but one of my farmers told me that the mapping system did not agree with his maps. He had been trying to sort that out for some time before the SFI window opened, but having failed, he was unable to put in for the SFI. Will the Minister undertake to sort out the mapping system so that it works for farmers, and they do not find themselves in the situation that that farmer found himself in?

Another farmer told me that he and his agent were sitting at the screen trying to get his application in, but eventually the window closed before they had managed to do it. He is asking the Minister to have a proper long-term plan that not only says when the various windows will open but is also clear and up front about how much money will be in the various windows. If we keep opening the schemes with not even enough money to cover those people who already have environmental schemes, this is not going to work. There are going to be many, many farmers who fail to get the money that they need. These are people who are feeding the nation and managing our environment. In my area, that is a really fragile and beautiful environment and we should be helping them to continue to preserve it.

I do not think the Conservatives have anything to boast about. They promised that farmers would get the same amount of money after Brexit as they had done before Brexit, but what did they do? They came up with a scheme to take away the basic payments, and they stuck to it rigidly—that was one plan they could manage. What they did not do was bring in the promised environmental schemes and, as we have heard, they actually underspent by £350 million. That is utterly disgraceful.

My farmers hoped that with a change of Government, they were going to get a change of attitude and more support. Instead, they have seen the farce of the SFI scheme and the family farm tax. The changes the Government have introduced to that are welcome to some degree, but with land prices in Cambridgeshire, it will still affect an awful lot of family farms in my constituency. This Government need to put themselves behind our farmers.

18:35

[Seamus Logan (Aberdeenshire North and Moray East) (SNP)]

May I first apologise to you, Madam Deputy Speaker, and the House for missing the very start of the debate? I am sorry that I missed the speech of the hon. Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale (Tim Farron). The bit I did hear was excellent, and I am sure that he will agree with many of the points I am about to make.

I rise not in support of the motion, as much of the text concerns matters that are devolved to the Scottish Government. However, there are a number of points that are relevant to Scotland but reserved to Westminster. I will briefly set these out in the form of questions directly to the Minister.

First, no one has yet been able to properly explain to me why the Treasury cannot identify the difference between family farms being handed from generation to generation, and tax-dodging individuals and companies. If that could be explained, surely some tweaks could be made to the Budget that is coming next week. Secondly, why cannot the Treasury extend the annual investment allowance and capital allowances for things like sheds and buildings so that they are fully incentivised? That would surely increase investment and, ultimately, food production. Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly for our farmers in Scotland—they lobbied me last week and this was the point they wanted to make—will the Government consider pausing and reviewing the carbon border adjustment mechanism due to come in next year, so that it does not become an additional tax on UK food production through higher fertiliser costs? My final ask of the Minister is that the Government maintain the reduced fuel duty rates for red diesel. This is the kind of measure that will support farmers, secure lower food production costs, reduce food inflation and enhance our national security. It surely is a no-brainer.

On 9 July, I asked the Minister to address problems in the pig industry by referring suspected matters to the agricultural supply chain adjudicator or the Competition and Markets Authority. He said from the Dispatch Box that he would follow up on those issues. As far as I am aware, he has not done so yet. Furthermore, a much-anticipated roundtable with the pig farming industry in Scotland has not yet happened. Perhaps I have got that wrong, but I am sure the Minister will correct me. I ask him to respond to the matters raised here tonight.

18:37

[John Milne (Horsham) (LD)]

As has been brought home to us in the most powerful terms since world war two, food security is once again a matter of national security, and the Prime Minister has said as much. Just like our defence capability, farming requires long-term funding and a lasting framework to operate in. The last SFI window opened at 10 o’clock on Tuesday 22 September and closed at 3.48 later that afternoon. If you popped out to the shops, you would have missed it. DEFRA has made the excuse that demand was unprecedented compared with previous ELMS, but setting a benchmark based on a previous flawed Tory scheme that nobody really wanted is not exactly a great metric. The Minister argues that the £100,000 cap makes the scheme fairer because a quarter of the funding used to go to 4% of claimants. Yes, that is true, but a fairer way of rationing a budget that is too small is still a budget that is too small.

For decades, farmers did what Governments asked of them. After the war, food production rightly came first, but the cost was paid in soil, hedgerows, wildlife and our rivers, with policymakers recommending the use of harmful chemicals. The SFI exists because that was not sustainable in the long term. We can see this as a repair bill now come due for the policy that farmers were told to follow for many years. Farmers are now weighing up whether to step back from wildflower meadows, field margins and buffer strips. Peter Hatley, who farms in Cambridgeshire, was quoted in the Financial Times yesterday as saying:

“I will literally take a plough to everything…We will have to go back to farming more intensively than the 1950s.”

Proper farm funding has other benefits too. Ministers told the House of Lords in April that SFI actions that keep soil covered and build organic matter improve its ability to hold water, and that 35 of the 71 actions in this year’s SFI would target flood and drought resilience, including through the use of cover crops. Those 35 recommendations on flood and drought resilience are welcome, but £200 million less in the budget is not.

There are practical changes with very modest price tags that would help now. Farmers want to store their own water, but the Country Land and Business Association says that only 34 on-farm reservoirs have been built in the last five years. When we realise that it costs an average of £45,000 just to achieve planning permission, we can understand why there are so few. I hope that the review of permitted development rights will report swiftly.

I am sadly out of time. If food security is national security, fund it like it is. Give farmers the certainty to plan and let them get on with feeding the country.

18:38

[Edward Morello (West Dorset) (LD)]

I had hoped to share some of the many, many stories about my farmers’ experience with the SFI, as they have written to me in the days and weeks following the closure of the window. However, in the interests of time, I shall try to be constructive and just talk to the action that is vitally needed.

Many farmers raised concerns about technical problems within the application system itself. One farmer, who has experience in software as well as farming, reported that some options appeared without the base options needed to support them. They raised concerns about the process for measuring hedgerows, arguing that the time and cost involved could outweigh the value of the payment. If DEFRA already holds land parcel information and uses satellite imagery to monitor land, it should explain why relevant information cannot be provided to farmers in advance, where appropriate.

The Government have said that the overall SFI26 budget has increased by £290 million, but that does not answer the question of whether enough money is available to meet demand. We need a clear account of how the funding has been allocated, including by farm type, farm size and region. There are also concerns that the options and payments available do not adequately reflect the needs of livestock farmers compared with arable farmers. The Government should publish the evidence and assess the impact on food production. Farmers whose existing agreements are expiring need to know when they can apply for replacement agreements and what support will be available in the meantime. Without clarity, environmental work already under way risks being stopped, not because farmers do not want to continue to do it, but because they cannot afford to do it.

My asks to the Government are as follows. First, they must publish a full account of the technical problems experienced during the application window and explain what remedial action will be taken. Secondly, they must make additional funding available for eligible farmers who were locked out when the budget was exhausted, rather than leaving them to absorb the financial consequences of a process that failed them. Thirdly, they must review the first come, first served system, and consider alternatives, including allocating funding more fairly when they know that demand exceeds the available budget. Finally, the Government must properly fund the roll-out of the environmental land management schemes, including the SFI, with an additional £1 billion a year that we believe is needed to give farmers the sustainable and stable basis for planning and investment.

My farmers in West Dorset are not asking for special treatment. They are asking for a system that works, funding they can rely on and a fair opportunity to apply. I hope that Ministers will listen to farmers today before they are staring at empty plates tomorrow.

18:38

[Gideon Amos (Taunton and Wellington) (LD)]

Farmers in Taunton and Wellington have been hit incredibly hard by this debacle. For residents, farmers and visitors to my part of Somerset alike, the hedges, field margins and wildflower meadows funded by the sustainable farming incentive are the very fabric of the countryside that we know and love, from the Quantocks to the Blackdown hills and across my constituency. Yet all of that has been put under threat simply because of a badly mismanaged system that this Government could and should fix.

I met local farmers out on the levels in my constituency the week before last. I want to thank them for the work that they do 365 days a year, putting food on our tables, caring for our countryside and bringing employment to our rural areas. Let me relate just two of the cases that they raised.

The first case is that of James Hebditch of Lillesdon Court. He is not a last-minute farmer—his fields have been registered with the Rural Payments Agency for years—yet on 22 September, a glitch on the Government portal suddenly rejected one of his fields. He was faced with an impossible choice: apply without it or try to amend and resubmit his application. By the time that he could navigate the error that the portal had made, the whole thing had closed and his entire application was lost. He was caught out by the Government’s own system on land that the RPA already had on its books. When farmers are fighting a failing portal, they do not have time to sit on hold for hours. The consequences of that failure are devastating. The hedges and habitats that James maintained for years under previous schemes will likely have to be ripped up just for his farm to remain viable and profitable.

Tom Pope of Staple Farm said:

“With no replacement scheme we will be forced to consider ploughing up some of our environmental areas…to return them to arable production. Some of these areas have a huge variety of wild flowers and provide a brilliant habitat for insects and birds. It will break our hearts”.

Somerset is one of the hardest hit areas for bluetongue, with 156 confirmed cases. Add to that the fact that direct payments are capped at just £600 this year, diesel has topped £2 per litre, the heavy burden of the family farm tax, a 32% spike in ammonium nitrate costs and the Conservative-designed upcoming carbon border charge on fertiliser from January, and the result is that farmers have been pushed to the very brink of viability and much else. To make matters worse, the Government ran all this scheme on a first come, first served basis. That is not a serious way to run a £930 million public programme. At least if people do not get Glastonbury tickets, they are not required to plough up a wild flower meadow afterwards.

Finally, I call on the Government to take four key actions. There should be no cliff edge. They must extend agreements to SFI27, provide a second chance and certainty on the SFI, and protect farmers from substandard imports. Our farmers protect our countryside—

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)]

Order.

18:45

[Anna Sabine (Frome and East Somerset) (LD)]

Madam Deputy Speaker, I hope you will permit me to quickly put on record my thanks to the broadcasting unit in Parliament, which has been so helpful in providing me with additional support while I have been trying to speak in the Chamber while struggling with vocal cord paralysis. [Hon. Members: “Hear, hear.”]

I am privileged to represent nearly 200 farmers in Frome and East Somerset. They are critical not only to the rural economy of Somerset, generating hundreds of jobs in the wider economy, but to providing the UK with much of the dairy and other food products that it relies on. Every time I meet farmers in my constituency, I hear the same thing: that this Government do not understand rural communities and do not see that penalising farmers undermines their own goals of growth and stability.

In order to survive, many of my farmers are running a range of side hustles, from cafés to ice cream companies and farm-stay accommodation. They are stretching themselves to extremes to try to keep their farms going. The SFI is one of the few forms of funding available to those farmers but, as we know, after spending precious time preparing long and detailed applications, in September farmers in my constituency were not even able to load up the application form, because the money had already gone. Money was not awarded to the best farms with the best plans to feed the nation and restore nature; it was awarded to whoever clicked the fastest. Surely, regardless of attempts at political point scoring, we can all agree that despite any improvements that the Government have made to the SFI, that is not a fair or smart way to spend public money.

As a result, for the first time since 1945, many UK farmers now have no universal payment offer. At the same time, the Government are chopping and changing the agricultural property relief and making cuts to DEFRA’s farming budgets.

[Victoria Collins (Harpenden and Berkhamsted) (LD)]

You are summing up what so many of my farmers are facing. I have one farmer in Sandridge who says that he is closing his doors because he feels that the Government are not listening. There is also an impact on the environment. For Guy and Susannah in Great Gaddesden, the shortfall because of the extreme weather means that there are 6.6 million fewer bowls of porridge from one farm. Does my hon. Friend agree not only that that is important, but that this is a crisis moment? The Government have to listen, because this is about not only farmers, but our food security.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)]

Order. Ms Collins, I was not summing up, because I was not speaking. “You” and “yours” do not count.

[Anna Sabine]

I absolutely agree with my hon. Friend.

Funding decisions such as those really matter for farmers in rural communities, but they also matter for the environment. Today the Government have announced that Jackdaw is going ahead—a stark reminder of the UK’s continuing dependency on gas and how far we must still go to reach net zero. If we are serious about getting there, farmers are part of the solution. The SFI rewards the kind of sustainable choices that we want farmers to make more of, yet many of the farmers who want to protect nature are being locked out of the very funding that makes it possible.

British farmers are the foundation of rural communities such as mine, and they are key allies in tackling climate change in this country. The Prime Minister promises growth in every postcode, but he cannot even ensure that farmers in my postcode receive funding to help to feed our country. Will the Government finally support farmers and guarantee long-term funding for all eligible SFI26 applicants?

18:49

[Adam Dance (Yeovil) (LD)]

The absolute shambles that was window 2 of the SFI is just another example of farmers being let down by Government after Government. I have already mentioned this in the Chamber, but Tim, who farms near Yeovil, was locked out of the SFI window 2 on the same day that he was given the water quality farmer of the year award. You could not make it up, Madam Deputy Speaker.

Tim, and many farmers like him in Yeovil, are now left in a financial hole. He said that the buffer strips around fields would now have to be cultivated in the hope of making some money, as long as the weather, markets and business costs all play ball. It is clear that he is gambling with terrible odds, but as Tim told me, what other choice does he have? That sums up the terrible situation that so many farmers in Yeovil and across the country are facing—extreme weather from heatwaves and flooding, the spiralling costs of fertiliser, fuel and equipment, and growing biosecurity threats from bluetongue and tuberculosis. When we throw in terrible Government policy, that is a perfect storm waiting to happen.

In the time I have, I will touch on a few issues that have been raised a lot at my farming forum. First, on sustainable farming, while DEFRA is saying that it has learned lessons for next time, farmers including Tim, Chris, John and Ollie and many more want to know whether they are going to get recognised for implementing sustainable farming practices now.

[Richard Foord (Honiton and Sidmouth) (LD)]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Adam Dance]

Quickly, yes.

[Richard Foord]

My hon. Friend talks about DEFRA learning lessons for next time. My constituent from Butterleigh in Devon wrote to me about the sudden withdrawal of the SFI. That was not this year—it was last year. Does my hon. Friend agree that the Government, and DEFRA in particular, cannot seem to learn to get this right?

[Adam Dance]

I totally agree with my hon. Friend—they cannot seem to get it right, and they are failing our farmers across the country. Lots of farmers are saying that their only option now is intensive farming. That is really worrying for us in south Somerset as winter comes around and it begins to flood, because our farmers are the frontline when it comes to preventing ever-worsening flooding. More broadly, as we have already heard, farmers need more clarity about how the SFI and other schemes are going to develop in the future, so that they can plan ahead.

Secondly, farmers hit by bluetongue and TB want to know what more Government are doing to improve our readiness and communication systems for future outbreaks. I hope the Minister can set out when the Government will bring in the new TB strategy. Finally, farmers from Yeovil are really worried about the future of farming more broadly. We have an ageing workforce and a recruitment crisis, so what steps are the Government taking to promote pathways into farming for young people and reduce the financial and admin burdens that are currently stopping farmers being able to take on young people? If this new Government really are committed to problem solving, I can think of no better place to start than farming. We all know the problems; it is time to finally get on with the actual work and support our farmers.

18:52

[Freddie van Mierlo (Henley and Thame) (LD)]

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale (Tim Farron) for opening this debate. In introducing the motion, he was right to speak about the chaotic handling of SFI by this Labour Government, and also to outline the catastrophic mismanagement by the Conservatives post Brexit. They bear responsibility for the system we have today.

In 2016, prominent Tories—including the now Father of the House, the right hon. Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh)—said that

“if we leave the EU the level of subsidy to the farming community will remain exactly”—[Official Report, 26 February 2016; Vol. 606, c. 617.]

the same. Tell that to my farmers now. Vote Leave told the Treasury Committee that farmers would get paid “at least as much as they get now” and the former Tory Prime Minister Boris Johnson, a former holder of my seat in Henley, said that he could “100% guarantee” that farmers’ subsidies would continue or increase after Brexit. I think I have just shown why the good people of Henley and Thame no longer wish the likes of Johnson and the Conservatives to represent their interests. Betrayed by the Tories, they said, “Enough is enough.”

However, farmers in my constituency have told me how disappointed they now are with Labour, and with a Government who just do not get farming. APR and BPR were the prime examples of that, but there are more, and the SFI is the latest. One of my local farmers put it best: applications should not be like a scramble for Oasis tickets. He told me that it is an

“appalling way to treat farmers and how they can care for the farmed environment.”

Another, Jack Burchmore, who leads the Henley young farmers group, said that they did not even know what time the window was going to open, so they sat there waiting for it. This is not a serious way to treat people, is it?

Another of my wonderful local farmers has described to me how lucky they were to apply for SFI26 in the short window that it was open. They received the agreement, but now describe a feeling of guilt when so many others are in even more dire financial situations. I would like to put their ideas directly to the Government. First, there should be an early application window for SFI27, with applications open in February, ready to start as soon as we hit the new financial year. Secondly, there should be priority for those farmers whose existing SFI or mid-tier agreements are ending. Failure to do so quickly will mean farmers ripping up their environmental areas in the spring and planting crops instead. Thirdly, there should be a better application process than fastest finger first. Fourthly, there should above all be a larger budget for the SFI. Farmers face a perilous time, and further extreme weather could push many more farms out of business. With such global uncertainty, is it not time to back British farmers?

18:58

[Manuela Perteghella (Stratford-on-Avon) (LD)]

Farmers in my constituency and across the country have been left totally bewildered and deeply anxious by this Government’s handling of the SFI. The scheme, although flawed, was meant to reward good farming and environmental stewardship. Instead, farmers who had spent time preparing applications logged on, ready to apply, only to discover that the available budget had been exhausted almost immediately. This is no way to treat the people who produce our food and who are doing what they can to care for our countryside. The Government’s approach has reduced what should be a strategic, long-term partnership with farmers into a lottery. Farmers need certainty and the confidence to invest. They need to know that when the Government ask them to change how they farm, the support will be there.

One of my constituent farmers summed up the mood when they contacted me, writing:

“Morale is rock bottom within the industry. Many farm businesses are on the brink… We need a sensible payment system to give us confidence”.

We should also not ignore what this prolonged uncertainty means for farmers’ mental wellbeing. When we know that mental health challenges are widespread within the farming community, Ministers should be doing everything possible to provide stability and reassurance, rather than creating uncertainty. To wait until 2027 is deeply unfair to farming and to nature. Will Ministers make additional funding available for eligible farmers who were excluded through no fault of their own, including my constituents?

How will farmers continue to deliver the environmental outcomes that the Government expect if access to the very schemes designed to support the work can disappear in a matter of hours? These failures come on top of cuts to DEFRA’s budget and ongoing uncertainty over the future of environmental land management schemes. Farmers are being asked to do more with less, while receiving fewer guarantees about the support available to them. Instead, farmers should be rewarded properly for delivering food security, restoring nature, capturing carbon and tackling climate change, but they need support. They need a Government who have got their back. Ministers must work with the sector, learn from this shambles and ensure that never again are farmers forced into a first come, first served scramble for support. Our farmers deserve a Government who see them as partners and treat them with the respect they deserve.

[Several hon. Members rose—]

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)]

Order. We seem to have gained some time, so Charlie Maynard has five minutes. [Hon. Members: “Oh!”]

18:58

[Charlie Maynard (Witney) (LD)]

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. [Laughter.] The latest round of the sustainable farming incentive was a disaster for small farmers, including many in my constituency. They were counting on this money as a lifeline after another impossibly difficult year. As one local farmer wrote to me:

“It is madness to set a deadline and then require a field-by-field online application process with a limited budget and first come first accepted”.

No public money should be allocated this way, let alone money that farmers were relying on to stay afloat. I welcome the Minister’s commitment to scrap first come, first served for 2027.

What is most disappointing is that this chaos was entirely predictable. The Government abandoned the rolling scheme. The sector warned loudly that the Prime Minister’s extra £50 million would barely touch the sides, and the scheme ran out within six hours. Of course, the Conservatives laid the groundwork for this. They began phasing out the basic payments scheme the support farmers had relied on for years, long before its replacement was ready. They cut farmers’ income first and asked questions later, while hundreds of millions in the farming budget went unspent. Labour has inherited that mess, but it certainly has not fixed it.

Farmers now face a perfect storm. The summer’s heat and drought are projected to cause the worst harvest on record. That follows a drought-hit 2025 harvest, and a 2024 harvest that was washed out. Farmers expect to balance bad years against good years, but three awful harvests in a row is unsustainable, and as the climate crisis deepens, there is no reason to think that next year will be better. Meanwhile, farming costs are rising at about twice the rate of inflation, with fertiliser up by about 35% in a year. The Government list food as one of the 13 critical national infrastructure sectors, yet the farmers who are at the start of the chain receive support that is wholly inadequate.

Farmers need a payment system that rewards both growing food and restoring nature. They also need help to invest in resilience measures, such as better irrigation and on-farm reservoirs. Will the Government not only review the process and budget for next year’s scheme, but say what additional funding they will provide, to help farmers adapt and future-proof their businesses?

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)]

I call the Liberal Democrat spokesperson.

19:00

[Sarah Dyke (Glastonbury and Somerton) (LD)]

It is an honour to close the debate on behalf of the Liberal Democrats. We chose to use our Opposition day to discuss support for farmers because farmers are the backbone of rural communities across the country, and today’s debate has shown just how deeply that is felt.

My hon. Friend the Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale (Tim Farron) opened the debate by explaining that the Liberal Democrats would reform the SFI so that it allocated every farmer a sum that was consistent with the capacity of their farm. That sum would be theirs to claim within a long window. My right hon. Friend the Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr Carmichael), the Chair of the Select Committee, reminded us that we, and farmers, are in the middle of a perfect storm. We have heard from Members in all parts of the House about farmers who prepared SFI applications for months on end, only to be shut out in an afternoon. In Glastonbury and Somerton, this is not an abstract issue. It is about whether family farms can plan not just for next year, but for the years and generations ahead.

On 22 September, the second window opened, with £233 million in the fund. By 3.48 pm, it had shut. Farmers deserve better than a Glastonbury ticket scramble. At least festival-goers know when the fallow years are coming; farmers who missed out have been handed one with no warning at all. One farmer from Curry Rivel wrote to me describing the process simply as a “disaster”. The money has been shared out badly, not just too thinly. Window 1 left £3 million unallocated, but window 2 was oversubscribed within hours, and it was not an even scramble. A recent survey conducted by the Select Committee found that 60% of respondents could not submit before the window closed. Only 31% of those running farm businesses were successful, compared with 68% of land agents. That is a two-tier system. Those who can afford an adviser are waved through the farm gate, while those who cannot are left out in the field. Until it was privatised in 1997, ADAS gave farmers free independent advice, provided by the state. Today, those who cannot afford an agent are on their own.

That was not just bad luck. DEFRA’s own forecasts, made in April and May, modelled the window’s closing on its very first day; it predicted 12,200 applications. On the day, 12,204 were submitted, just four more than were forecast. DEFRA saw it coming, and nearly 2,900 farmers started applications that they were never able to submit. Others were let down by DEFRA’s IT systems. Tom Kimber, who farms at Higher Stavordale farm in Charlton Musgrove, had an SFI agreement that was coming to an end. He applied in window 2, and missed out because of technical problems. He was assured that farmers like him would be given a route back in, but he has heard nothing since. Tom wants to deliver for the environment, and demand for the SFI proves that thousands of other farmers want to, too, but their commitment is not matched by a Government who understand the scheme.

Last week, the Minister told the House that “first come, first served” will end. I welcome that, but one cannot feed a whole farm herd from a trough that is simply too small. The expiring agreements are worth over £520 million, but the budget across both windows is just £310 million; as the NFU has asked, where has the missing funding gone? Around 8,800 of this autumn’s applicants have agreements ending in February. Clare, who farms near Puckington, is one of them. For years, she has protected the river margins on her land, thereby slowing run-off, filtering pollution and giving wildlife space to thrive. SFI was meant to be her way forward, but now those margins have no funding.

Before I move on to the Conservatives’ utter failure to support British farmers, I remind the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Keighley and Ilkley (Robbie Moore), that the Liberal Democrats were the first party to oppose the family farm tax, which includes BPR and APR. The Conservatives cannot escape their share of the blame for the chaos that farmers face today. They designed SFI on a “first come, first served” basis, botched the transition from basic payment schemes, let farming budgets fall behind inflation, and signed trade agreements with Australia and New Zealand that undercut British farmers. However, this Government cannot keep hiding behind their predecessors. They chose to accelerate the phase-out of direct payments while stop-starting SFI, so farmers have no universal payment offer at all for the first time since 1945. The Government imposed the family farm tax, and cut the DEFRA and farming budgets.

The Liberal Democrats warned that this would happen. I wrote to the former Secretary of State in July, before the first window closed, to ask how the Department would stop window 2 meeting this exact fate. All of this is happening as our farmers face one of their worst years in memory. Mark Humphrey, who farms at Isle Brewers and chairs NFU Somerset, has described a torrid 18 months. Milk is down at 32p per litre, selling for 8p less than it costs to produce, and maize yields are down by 10% to 15%. Our farmers must be profitable.

However, Somerset shows what is possible with long-term certainty. Last week, I met Damon Bridge of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and the Greater Sedgemoor landscape recovery team on North Moor, near Langport, where farmers and conservation groups are working together across 4,000 hectares. This involves 20-year agreements, not a window that slams shut in an afternoon, but only a handful of landscape recovery projects have reached delivery. Farmers need to know that they will actually happen, because food security is national security.

All this comes back to one question: can this country feed itself? We produce only about 60% of the food we eat. Between 2019 and 2024, the farming budget was frozen at £2.4 million, while input costs rose by 44%. With war in Ukraine and conflict in the middle east, food security is national security, yet the Government still do not treat it as a priority.

[James Naish]

Will the hon. Lady give way?

[Sarah Dyke]

I will not, given the time.

I brought forward my Food Bill, which is now Liberal Democrat policy, to tackle this issue. It has binding targets for domestic food production, would ensure that an annual food security audit was reported to the House, and would take action to drive down food waste. We have long called for an extra £1 billion a year for environmental land management schemes, so that every eligible farmer who applies in good faith gets an agreement, there is a proper bridge for the 8,800 farmers whose agreements are ending, and we invest in the training and technology that cut farmers’ costs in the long term—not fairer rationing, but a bigger pot. The Chancellor has the perfect opportunity to deliver that money in next week’s Budget.

I have four simple questions for the Minister. First, what will be different next year to ensure that a family farm without an agent has the same chance as an estate with one, and will he look at restoring free independent advice services for smaller farms? Secondly, will he guarantee that farmers like Tom, who missed out because of DEFRA’s IT failures, will not lose out again? Has any money from window 2 been left unallocated, and if so, how much? Thirdly, will the Minister open SFI27 early in the new year, or even before that, and publish its budget now, so that no farmer with an expiring agreement faces a gap from April next year? Fourthly, will he press the Chancellor to use next week’s Budget to properly fund the schemes on which our farmers depend, and can he confirm that the DEFRA budget will not be cut? 

Our farmers have kept their side of the deal. They have adapted to the end of the basic payment scheme, prepared for scheme after scheme, and kept growing our food despite soaring costs, extreme weather, disease outbreaks and attacks that threaten their livelihoods. What they have not had is a Government, Conservative or Labour, who keep their side of the deal. This motion offers a way forward, with long-term funding for every eligible SFI applicant, a reversal of the farm family farm tax, a comprehensive national food strategy and an extra £1 billion a year for the schemes our farmers depend on, because a nation that cannot feed itself cannot protect itself.

19:10

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Stephen Morgan)]

I thank hon. Members on both sides of the House for their contributions throughout the debate, and for sharing issues raised by farmers and rural communities across our country. I also thank the Liberal Democrat spokesperson, the hon. Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale (Tim Farron), for raising these important matters.

Let me reiterate the words of my excellent fellow Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Suffolk Coastal (Jenny Riddell-Carpenter), in her first speech at the Dispatch Box: we know how hard this year has been for farmers. Behind every statistic about drought, input prices or farm income is a family making difficult decisions about crops, livestock bills and their future. We set out our farming road map because farmers have repeatedly asked for clarity and certainty, and we are delivering that. The road map sets out this Government’s strategic vision for farming. We want profitable, productive farms that are better able to withstand volatile weather and markets, and geopolitical shocks. The road map also sets out that domestic food production will be maintained at least at current levels, while nature recovery, economic growth and the responsible use of land and resources are supported. That is supported by the strong financial settlement that DEFRA secured in the 2025 spending review.

Across this Parliament, the Government have allocated a record £11.8 billion to sustainable farming and food production, including £788 million this year alone in new funding for farmers to boost farm productivity, develop cutting-edge technologies to drive future growth, and maintain a healthy natural environment. Where this year has exposed vulnerabilities, this Government have responded. We have made drought flexibilities available, supported investment in farm reservoirs and added funding to the SFI26.

I thank the Chair of the Select Committee, the right hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr Carmichael) —he is back in his place—for his interventions. I think he is right to recognise the optimism and resilience of our nation’s farmers. I wholeheartedly support that view, as do so many Members in this House. I very much agree with what he said about the value of providing greater certainty to the sector; we are very much doing that through our farming road map. It sets out the Government’s vision for driving more a profitable, productive, sustainable and resilient farming sector, and we are doing that in partnership with the sector, via our partnership board and the sector growth plans.

Members spoke about the SFI, this year’s two windows and the learning for future years, and I thank all Members who have offered practical ideas for its delivery in future. We also recognise where things have not worked as farmers would have wished. The speed with which the SFI26 window closed last month caused real disappointment, and I do not dismiss that frustration. I recognise the concerns raised by Members across the House, and the specific examples that they have given. Demand substantially exceeded the funding available, and we must learn from that experience as we work with the sector in partnership on SFI27. Working through the options, following my confirmation that we have scrapped the “first come, first served” approach, is absolutely a priority of mine.

[Tim Farron]

In March 2025, the last time the drawbridge was pulled up with no notice, the hon. Member for Cambridge (Daniel Zeichner) said that we must not do first come, first served again. We have just done that, so what guarantees can the Minister give us that next time around it will not be first come, first served? All the same, can he ensure that the window will come very, very soon?

[Stephen Morgan]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for that intervention. He will know that we made a number of changes to improve the scheme this year. He briefly mentioned those in his opening remarks, but I have been very clear that we need to learn lessons from this year’s scheme and that means a commitment on scrapping the first come, first served approach and bringing forward SFI27 as early as possible.

A number of Members also expressed concerns about the impact on farmers of trade deals done by the previous Conservative Government. Let me be clear: this Government will always act in the national interest to protect Britain’s farmers and secure our food security. We will never lower food standards and we will uphold the high animal welfare standards that our country expects. In the last year alone, we have reached agreement on new trade deals with India, the Republic of Korea, the Gulf Cooperation Council and Switzerland. All those deals strike a balance: they open new opportunities for UK businesses and help diversify supply chains, while also protecting the UK’s most sensitive sectors.

A number of Members have been interested in the SPS agreement with the European Union. I want to thank the hon. Member for South Northamptonshire (Sarah Bool) who is not in her place currently—[Interruption.]—there she is—for the issues she raised. The EU remains the UK’s biggest and closest export market, offering major opportunities for British food and drink businesses to reach millions of consumers. Yesterday, I was at the SIAL trade show in Paris, meeting businesses from every corner of the UK who want to increase their exports to Europe. The SPS agreement will reduce costs and delays for both UK and EU exporters and importers at the border, supporting the UK’s food supply chains and security. It will make agrifood trade with our biggest market cheaper and easier, cutting costs and red tape for British producers.

[Ben Goldsborough]

Does my hon. Friend agree that one of the huge things we must protect in the SPS agreement is precision breeding—not just the research and development aspect but how we get it to market? From other conversations we have had, I know that he has been working hard with our European colleagues. Can he explain what action he is taking to ensure we can keep precision breeding as that benefit to the UK?

[Stephen Morgan]

I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention. It was a real pleasure to spend time with him at the Royal Norfolk Show earlier this year, where I heard very clearly the value of our innovation and world-leading technology in this space. I take this opportunity to reflect on the points he made earlier on the importance of working with our international partners and showcasing the best of British around the world, and thank him for that. He will appreciate that I cannot provide details on the ongoing SPS negotiations. The Prime Minister set out that the Government will be completing those negotiations before the next EU-UK summit on 20 November.

A number of Members expressed concern about the impacts of the reforms to agricultural property relief on inheritance tax, which came into force earlier this year. I recognise that when the Government initially announced the reforms in 2024, there was significant concern in the industry about their impact. The Government listened to those concerns carefully, considered the feedback, and the previous Chancellor acted. That is why last year the Government went further to protect more farms and businesses, while maintaining the core principle that the most valuable agricultural and business assets should not receive unlimited relief. This is a fair and balanced approach that protects the family farm while also fixing the public services that we all rely on.

[Mr Dillon]

Can the Minister explain how a farm in my constituency will still have a potential inheritance tax bill of £650,000, yet only generates £18,000 a year of profit?

[Stephen Morgan]

On these matters the Government’s view is now settled. I recognise that the previous Chancellor made the changes as a result of the engagement that she and others had with the farming community up and down the country, but the hon. Gentleman would have been keen to place his views on the record and he has successfully done that.

My hon. Friend the Member for South West Norfolk (Terry Jermy) raised a number of constructive points as a result of his continued engagement with the farmers across his constituency. I understand he has now visited 100 farms in his patch, and I know that he is hosting a very important event in his constituency later this week on the future of farming, and I wish him well with that. My hon. Friend the Member for South Norfolk (Ben Goldsborough) spoke about the importance of profitability and the value of learning from international partners, and I thank him again for his insights. My hon. Friend the Member for Rushcliffe (James Naish) gave a very eloquent speech about the importance of co-designing the future of SFI. I can assure him that directly, and through officials, I and the Department are already working with the sector on exploring options and trade-offs as we consider what SFI ’27 will look like.

To conclude, farmers deserve security, fairness and confidence to invest in the next generation and they have a Government who listen when times are hard and work in partnership with the sector to deliver on the commitments set out in our farming road map. That is our commitment: to back British farming; to maintain domestic food production; and to ensure that those who produce our food have a resilient and profitable future.

Question put.

19:20

Division 104

Question accordingly negatived.

Ayes: 57

Noes: 279