Land Use in England Committee Report

Baroness Rock Excerpts

Tuesday 25th July 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Rock (Con)]

My Lords, I too pay tribute to the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Carlisle for his valuable contributions to this House. I declare my interests as a tenant farmer and as chair of the Tenancy Working Group and the Rock Review. I pay particular tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Cameron of Dillington, and the members of the Select Committee for producing such a thorough and extremely important report.

The committee heard that a significant barrier to achieving high take-up of ELMS is uncertainty around the schemes and how they will work in practice. This includes provision of access to those schemes for tenant farmers. Your Lordships have heard me say many times in this House that 64% of England has a tenant farmer as a custodian of the land. It was encouraging to hear the noble Baroness, Lady Mallalieu, talk about land managers as opposed to landowners.

Defra could have a quick win in this area. It could ensure that the design of its Countryside Stewardship Plus scheme, which is due to be rolled out over the coming months, takes on board the measures already employed within the Sustainable Farming Incentive to ensure that tenant farmers are not excluded from participation. This would include not routinely requiring landlords’ consent, providing flexibility on scheme length and avoiding the imposition of penalties where land is lost to tenant farmers. Will the Minister confirm that Countryside Stewardship Plus will be as tenant friendly as SFI?

The Government’s stated policy is that they want to ensure that we maintain the area of land within the let sector of agriculture to help new entrants, promote resilience within the tenanted sector and enhance productivity. It will therefore be key to ensure that there are important safeguards to stop land leaving the sector inappropriately for things such as field-scale solar schemes, rewilding or nutrient neutrality. The committee’s report showed that insufficient provisions are in place to protect tenant farmers from having land taken out of tenancy by landowners looking to turn their land over to solar farms, and the committee heard opposing views about the extent to which solar farms offer the potential for genuinely multifunctional uses. The Rock Review raised that there are ever-increasing examples of land being taken away from a tenant farmer by a landowner for large-scale solar schemes. Can the Minister say what the Government’s position is when the best, most versatile and productive farmland is taken away from a tenant farmer through no fault of their own and often with no recourse?

On livestock farming, we need a better evidence base for assessing the contribution to carbon emissions. Our grasslands maintain a really important store of carbon that is maintained on behalf of the nation by our livestock farmers, who are often vilified in the climate change debate. Rather than replacing meat and dairy in our diets, we should encourage the food chain to access more of its meat and dairy products from sustainable sources domestically rather than from other parts of the globe with a poorer carbon story.

We also need to review the way in which we use designations. The recent designation of the West Penwith Moors and Downs SSSI is a case in point. Drawing a regulatory line on the map will not improve the capacity of landowners, tenants and public bodies to deal with any of the environmental issues identified as being of concern. Better ways of producing collegiate solutions need to be found. Natural England needs to be more of a facilitator than a regulator in that context. The situation in Dartmoor is another case in point. Everybody agrees that many of the SSSIs there are in poor condition, but that is after having followed the mantra of stock reduction followed by Natural England and its predecessor bodies for 25 years. If it has not worked over the past quarter of a century, why is more of the same going to work now? I therefore welcome the review to be carried out by David Fursdon and hope that a more practical, collegiate outcome can be achieved.

To deliver productivity and environmental outcomes from our land, tenant farmers need greater security of tenure over tenanted land. The recent CAAV land occupation survey, which came out last month, records that the average length of term on new farmed tenancies is only 3.66 years. Eighty-five per cent of all new farm business tenancies are let for five years or less. How can a tenant farmer contribute effectively to our nation’s food security and environmental ambitions when they have so little security themselves for the future use of their tenanted land?

I welcomed the Treasury’s consultation as part of the Spring Budget to look at restricting agricultural property relief to those landlords letting for the longest terms: eight years or more, as recommended by the Rock review. I now encourage the Treasury to set out a road map for implementing this change to press forward with more secure tenancies.

As the committee has already said, we have challenging and often conflicting demands on our land. Any approach to a land use framework must be flexible to meet the needs of housing, agriculture, food security and the environment.